If readers accept these conclusions, there was a Gowrie conspiracy, and Logan was in it. ‘I trow your Lordship has a proof of my constancy already ere now,’ he says in Letter IV, and Gowrie may have had a proof, in his early conspiracies of 1593–1594, or in a testimonial to Logan from Bothwell, Gowrie’s old ally.
But, if readers do not accept our conclusions, they may still rest, perhaps, on the arguments adduced in the earlier chapters of this essay, to demonstrate that neither accident nor the machinations of the King, but an enterprise of their own, caused the Slaughter of the Ruthvens. The infamous conduct of the Privy Council in 1608–1609 does not prove that, in 1600, the King carried out a conspiracy in itself impossible.
I have found nothing tending to show that King James was ever made aware of Sprot’s confessions of forgery. It is true that Sir William Hart, the Lord Justice, went to Court after Sprot’s death, and, in
September, the Scottish Privy Council asked James to send him home again. [239] But Hart need not have told all the truth to James.
There is a kind of rejoicing naïveté in all of James’s references to the Gowrie affair, which seems to me hardly consistent with his disbelief in his own prowess on that occasion. If one may conjecture, one would guess that the Privy Council and the four preachers managed to persuade themselves, Sprot being the liar whom we know, that he lied when he called his Logan papers forgeries. The real facts may have been concealed from the King. Mr. Gunton, the Librarian at Hatfield, informs me that, had he not seen Letter IV (which he is sure was written by Sprot), he does not think he should have suspected the genuineness of Letters II and III, after comparing them with the undoubted letters of Logan in the Cecil manuscripts. The Government and the four preachers, with such documents in their hands, documents still apt to delude, may easily have brought themselves to disbelieve Sprot’s assertion that they were all forgeries. Let us hope that they did!
XVII. INFERENCES AS TO THE CASKET LETTERS
The affair of Sprot has an obvious bearing on that other mystery, the authenticity of the Casket Letters attributed to Queen Mary. As we know, she, though accused, was never allowed to see the letters alleged to be hers. We know that, in December 1568, these documents were laid before an assembly of English nobles at Hampton Court. They were compared, for orthography and handwriting, with genuine letters written by the Queen to Elizabeth, and Cecil tells us that ‘no difference was found.’ It was a rapid examination, by many persons, on a brief winter day, partly occupied by other business. If experts existed, we are not informed that they were present. The Casket Letters have disappeared since the death of the elder Gowrie, in 1584. From him, Elizabeth had vainly sought to purchase them. They were indispensable, said Bowes, her ambassador, to ‘the secrecy of the cause.’ Gowrie would not be tempted, and it is not improbable that he carried so valuable a treasure with him, when, in April 1584, he retired to Dundee, to escape by sea if the Angus conspiracy failed.
At Dundee he was captured, after defending the house in which he was residing. That house was pulled down recently; nothing was discovered. But fable runs that, at the destruction of another ancient house in Dundee, ‘Lady Wark’s Stairs,’ a packet of old letters in French was found in a hiding hole contrived within a chimney. The letters were not examined by any competent person, and nobody knows what became of them. Romance relates that they were the Casket Letters, entrusted by Gowrie to a friend. It is equally probable that he yielded them to the King, when he procured his remission for the Raid of Ruthven. In any case, they are lost.
Consequently we cannot compare the Casket Letters with genuine letters by Mary. On the other hand, as I chanced to notice that genuine letters of Logan’s exist at Hatfield, I was enabled, by the kindness of the Marquis of Salisbury, and of Sir Stair Agnew, to have both the Hatfield Logan letters, and the alleged Logan letters produced in 1609, photographed and compared, at Hatfield and at the General Register House in Edinburgh. By good fortune, the Earl of Haddington also possesses (what we could not expect to find in the case of the Casket Letters) documents in the ordinary handwriting of George Sprot, the confessed forger of the plot-letters attributed to Logan. The result of comparison has been to convince Mr. Gunton at Hatfield, Mr. Anderson in Edinburgh, Professor Hume Brown, and other gentlemen of experience, that Sprot forged all the
plot-letters. Their reasons for holding this opinion entirely satisfy me, and have been drawn up by Mr. Anderson, in a convincing report. To put the matter briefly, the forged letters present the marked peculiarities of Logan’s orthography, noted by the witnesses in 1609. But they also contain many peculiarities of spelling which are not Logan’s, but are Sprot’s. The very dotting of the ‘i’s’ is Sprot’s, not Logan’s. The long ‘s’ of Logan is heavily and clumsily imitated. There is a distinct set of peculiarities never found in Logan’s undisputed letters: in Sprot’s own letters always found. The hand is more rapid and flowing than that of Logan. Not being myself familiar with the Scottish handwriting of the period, my own opinion is of no weight, but I conceive that the general effect of Logan’s hand, in 1586, is not precisely like that of the plot-letters.