A curious conference it was. Bower asked Sprot to read to him the other of Logan’s two letters, directed to himself. It ran, ‘Laird Bower,—I wot not what I should say or think of this world! It is very hard to trust in any man, for apparently there is no constancy or faithfulness. For since I cam
here they whom I thought to have been my most entire friends have uttered to me most injurie, and have given me the defiance, and say I am not worthy to live, “and if the King heard what has moved you to put away all your lands, and debosch yourself, you would not make such merryness, and play the companion in London, as you do so near his Majestie.”’
Logan went on to express his fear that Bower’s rash speeches had roused these suspicions of ‘the auld misterie ye ken of.’ ‘God forgive you, but I have had no rest since these speeches were upcast to me.’ Bower was to take great care of this letter, ‘for it is within three letters enclosed,’ and is confided to Matthew Logan (who travelled by sea) as a trusty man.
Bower was much moved by this melancholy letter, and denied that he had been gossiping. He had twice, before Logan rode south, advised him to be very careful never even to mention the name of Gowrie.
Sprot said that he, too, was uneasy, for, if anything came out, he himself was in evil case. Logan visited France, as well as London, at this time; he returned home in the spring of 1606, but Bower expressed the belief that he would go on to Spain, ‘to meet Bothwell and Father Andrew Clerk, and if he come home it will be rather to die in his own country than for any pleasure he has to live.’ Bothwell and Father Andrew, of course, were both Catholic intriguers, among whom Bothwell reckoned Logan and Gowrie.
Now the letter to Bower here attributed to Logan, telling of the new ‘knell at his heart’ when he is rebuked and insulted as he plays the merry companion in London, and near the Court; his touching complaint of the falseness of the world (he himself being certainly the blackest of traitors), with the distress of Bower, do make up a very natural description. The ghost of his guilt haunts Logan, he cannot drown it in a red sea of burgundy: life has lost its flavour; if he returns, it will be with the true Scottish desire to die in his own country, though of his ancient family’s lands he has not kept an acre. Pleasant rich Restalrig, strong Fastcastle, jolly Gunnisgreen of the ‘great Yules,’ all are gone. Nothing is left.
Surely, if Sprot invented all this, he was a novelist born out of due time. Either he told truth, or, in fiction, he rivalled De Foe.
Matthew Logan, being called, contradicted Sprot, as we have already said. He himself had seen Bower when he brought him Logan’s letter from London, take his son, Valentine, apart, and knew that Valentine read a letter to him. ‘It was a meikle letter,’ Matthew said, and, if Sprot tell truth, it contained three enclosures. Bower may have stopped his son from reading the melancholy and compromising epistle, and kept it to be read by Sprot. Logan’s folly in writing at all was the madness that has ruined so many men and women.
Matthew could not remember having ridden to
Edinburgh with Logan in July 1600, just before the Gowrie affair, as Sprot had declared that he did. We could scarcely expect him to remember that. He could remember nothing at all that was compromising, nothing of Logan’s rash speeches. As to the Yule feast at Gunnisgreen, he averred that Lady Restalrig only said, ‘The Devil delight in such a feast that makes discord, and makes the house ado’—that is, gives trouble. Asked if wine and beer were stored in Fastcastle, in 1600, he said, as has already been stated, that a hogshead of wine was therein. He himself, he said, had been ‘in the west,’ at the time of the Gowrie tragedy, and first heard of it at Falkirk.