The answer can only be conjectural. Some might guess thus: till
Letter IV was confessed to and found, Government had not received from Sprot one scrap of documentary evidence that could be used against Logan’s heirs. Scoundrel as he was, Sprot could not guess that the Privy Council would use papers which were confessed forgeries to save Dunbar and Balmerino from paying some 33,000 marks to Logan’s executors. The wretched Sprot had robbed the orphans on a small scale, but he would not, by producing the genuine Logan letter, enable the Lords to ruin them utterly. Bad as he was, the Laird had been kind to Sprot. Therefore he kept back, and by many a lie concealed, his real pieces of evidence, Letter IV, and I, if I is genuine. So far he acted on a remnant of natural conscience.
But Sprot, alas, had a religious conscience. He had a soul to be saved. The preachers had prayed with him. When death was but forty-eight hours distant, he feared to die with a lie in his mouth. So now, at last, he spoke of Letter IV as his real model. Perhaps he hoped that it would not be found, and probably it was in some secret drawer or false bottom of his kist. It was found, and was used, along with the confessed forgeries (which even Sprot could not have anticipated), to destroy the inheritance of the children, at Logan’s posthumous trial in 1609.
But the obvious reply to this hypothesis is, that Letter IV, by the evidence of modern experts (evidence unanimous and irresistible), is just as much forged as all the rest, is just as certainly in Sprot’s imitation of Logan’s handwriting. This being so, why did Sprot keep it back so long, and why, having kept it back, did he, almost in his last hour, produce it, and say (if he did) that it was genuine, and his model, as it certainly was? This is the last enigma of Sprot. His motives defy my poor efforts to decipher them. Even if the substance of IV is genuine, what were Sprot’s motives? I do not feel assured that Sprot really maintained the genuineness of the handwriting of Letter IV. His remark that he kept Logan’s letter only till he forged others on it, as a model, certainly implies that he did not keep it after he had done his forgeries, and therefore that our Letter IV is, confessedly, not Logan’s original. Certainly it is not.
XVI. WHAT IS LETTER IV?
The crucial question now arises, What is Letter IV? If it be genuine (in substance), then, whatever the details of the Gowrie Conspiracy may have been, a conspiracy there was. This can only be denied by ignorance. If the enterprise fails, says the author of Letter IV, the plotters will lose their lives, their lands and houses will be ‘wrecked,’ their very names will be extirpated; and, in fact, James did threaten to extirpate the name of Ruthven. The letter deliberately means High Treason. The objection of Calderwood, and of all the Ruthven apologists, that Sprot confessed to having forged all the letters, we have shown to rest on lack of information. He said, at last, that he had forged many papers (some did not appear in Court in 1609), and that he forged three letters on the model of Letter IV. These three letters may either be I, III, and V; or III, V, and the torn letter. The case of Letter I is peculiar. Though it contains much that is in Letter IV, and might have been taken from it, the repetitions need not imply copying from Letter IV. Byron and others would say the same things, on the same day, to two
or three correspondents. Letter IV is subsequent, as dated, to Letter I, and Logan might say to the Unknown, on July 18, what, after the announced interval of ten days, he said to Gowrie. Letter I contains this remark on the nature of the plot: ‘It is not far by’ (not unlike) ‘that form, with the like stratagem, whereof we had conference in Cap. h,’ which may be Capheaton, on the English side of the Border. Probably Logan often discussed ingenious ways of catching the King: new plots were hatched about once a month, as Cecil’s and the other correspondence of the age abundantly proves. The plot (the letter says) is like that in a Paduan story of a nobleman. The rest of the letter is identical with the matter of III, IV, and V. We cannot be sure whether Letter I is one of the three forged on IV or not.
One thing is certain, Letters III and V, to the Unknown, are modelled on IV, as is the torn letter. Sprot said this was the case, and every reader of III, V, and the torn letter (given above) must see that he tells the truth. These letters contain no invention at all, they merely repeat Letter IV. Any man who could invent IV had genius enough to alter his tunes in III, V. and the torn letter. But Sprot never deserts his model. This is an argument for the authenticity in substance of Letter IV. The other three contain nothing that is not in Letter IV, and everything that is in it, except what is personal to Gowrie, and would be inappropriate if addressed to the Unknown (I, III, V), or to Chirnside (torn letter).
There is (1) the mention of a Paduan adventure, the basis of the plot, a thing that Sprot is very unlikely to have invented. With all my admiration for Sprot, I do think that the Paduan touch is beyond him. This occurs in Letter IV, ‘the good sport that M.A., your lordship’s brother, told me of a nobleman in Padua. It is a parasteur’ (? à propos) ‘to this purpose we have in hand.’ This appears in Letter I, ‘reckless toys of Padua,’ and in Letter V, ‘bid M. A. remember on the sport he told me of Padua.’
2. The constant applause of Bower. This is in Letter IV, and in I, III, V, and the torn letter.