James VI and the Gowrie Mystery

The guess, that Sprot knew of Logan’s treason, but forged the proof of it, for purposes of blackmailing him, was not made by historians. The guess was getting ‘warm,’ as children say in their game, was very near the truth, but it was not put forward by criticism. Historians, in fact, knew that Logan would not have stood an attempt at extortion. He was not that kind of man. In 1594, he made a contract with Napier of Merchistoun, the inventor of Logarithms. Tradition declared that there was a hoard of gold in ‘the place of Fastcastle.’ Napier was to discover it (probably by the Divining Rod), and Logan was to give him a third of the profits. But Napier, knowing his man, inserted a clause in the deed, to the effect that, after finding the gold, he was to be allowed a free exit from Fastcastle. Whether he found the hoard or not, we do not know. But, two years later, in letting a portion of his property, Napier introduced the condition that his tenant should never sublet it to any person of the name of Logan! If he found the gold he probably was not allowed to carry off his third share. Logan being a resolute character of this kind, Sprot, a cowering creature, would not forge letters to blackmail him. He would have been invited to dine at Fastcastle. The cliffs are steep, the sea is deep, and tells no tales.

Thus where was Sprot’s motive for forging letters in Logan’s hand, and incriminating the Laird of Restalrig, and for carrying them about in his pocket in 1608? But where was his motive for confessing when taken and examined that he did forge the letters, if his confession was untrue, while swearing, to his certain destruction, that he had a guilty foreknowledge of the Gowrie conspiracy? He might conciliate Government and get pardoned as King’s evidence, by producing what he called genuine Logan letters, and thus proving the conspiracy, and clearing the King’s character; but this he did not do. He swore to the last that Logan and he were both guilty (so Calderwood’s authority rightly reported), but that the plot letters were forged by himself, to what end Calderwood did not say. All this appeared midsummer madness. Calderwood, it was argued, must be in error.

A theory was suggested that Sprot really knew nothing of the Gowrie mystery; that he had bragged falsely of his knowledge, in his cups; that the Government pounced on him, made him forge the letters of Logan to clear the King’s character by proving a conspiracy, and then hanged him, still confessing his guilt. But Mr. Mark Napier, a learned antiquary, replied (in a long Appendix to the third volume of the History by the contemporary Spottiswoode) to this not very probable conjecture by showing that, when they tried Sprot, Government produced no letters at all, only an alleged account by Sprot of two letters unproduced. Therefore, in August 1608, Mr. Napier argued, Government had no letters; if they had possessed them, they would infallibly have produced them. That seemed sound reasoning. In 1608 Government had no plot letters; therefore, the five produced in the trial of the dead Logan were forged for the Government, by somebody, between August 1608 and June 1609. Mr. Napier refused to accept Calderwood’s wild tale that Sprot, while confessing Logan’s guilt and his own, also confessed to having forged Logan’s letters.

Yet Calderwood’s version (or rather that of his anonymous authority in MS.) was literally accurate. Sprot, in private examinations (July 5, August 11, 1608), confessed to having forged all the letters but one, the important one, Letter IV, Logan to Gowrie. This confession the Government burked.

The actual circumstances have remained unknown and are only to be found in the official, but suppressed, reports of Sprot’s private examinations, now in the muniment room of the Earl of Haddington. These papers enable us partly to unravel a coil which, without them, no ingenuity could disentangle. Sir Thomas Hamilton, the King’s Advocate, popularly styled ‘Tam o’ the Cowgate,’ from his house in that old ‘street of palaces,’ was the ancestor of Lord Haddington, who inherits his papers. Sir Thomas was an eminent financier, lawyer, statesman, and historical collector and inquirer, who later became Lord Binning, and finally Earl of Haddington. As King’s Advocate he held, and preserved, the depositions, letters, and other documents, used in the private examinations of Sprot, on and after July 5, 1608. The records of Sprot’s examinations between April 19 and July 5, 1600, are not known to be extant.

Sir Thomas’s collection consists of summonses, or drafts of summonses, for treason, against the dead Logan (1609). There is also a holograph letter of confession (July 5, 1608) from Sprot to the Earl of Dunbar. There are the records of the private examinations of Sprot (July 5-August 11, 1600) and of other persons whom he more or less implicated. There are copies by Sprot, in his ‘course,’ that is, current, handwriting, of two of the five letters in Logan’s hand (or in an imitation of it). These are letters I and IV, produced at the posthumous trial of Logan in June 1609. Finally, there are letters in Logan’s hand (or in an imitation of it), addressed to James Bower and to one Ninian Chirnside, with allusions to the plot, and there is a long memorandum of matters of business, also containing hints about the conspiracy, in Logan’s hand, or in an imitation thereof, addressed to John Bell, and James Bower.

Of these compromising papers, one, a letter to Chirnside, was found by the Rev. Mr. Anderson (in 1902) torn into thirteen pieces (whereof one is missing), wrapped up in a sheet of foolscap of the period. Mr. Anderson has placed the pieces together, and copied the letter. Of all these documents, only five letters (those published by Mr. Pitcairn) were ‘libelled,’ or founded on, and produced by the Government in the posthumous trial of Logan (1609). Not one was produced before the jury who tried Sprot on August 12, 1608. He was condemned, we said, merely on his own confession. In his ‘dittay,’ or impeachment, and in the official account of the affair, published in 1608, were cited fragments of two letters quoted from memory by Sprot under private examination. These quotations from memory differ, we saw, in many places from any of the five letters produced in the trial of 1609, a fact which has aroused natural suspicions. This is the true explanation of the discrepancies between the plot letter cited in Sprot’s impeachment, and in the Government pamphlet on his case; and the similar, though not identical, letter produced in 1609. The indictment and the tract published by Government contain merely Sprot’s recollections of the epistle from Logan to Gowrie. The letter (IV) produced in 1609 is the genuine letter of Logan, or so Sprot seems, falsely, to swear. This document did not come into the hands of Government till after the Indictment, containing Sprot’s quotation of the letter from memory, was written, or, if it did, was kept back.

All this has presently to be proved in detail.

As the Government (a fact unknown to our historians) possessed all the alleged Logan letters and papers before Sprot was hanged, and as, at his trial, they concealed this circumstance even from Archbishop Spottiswoode (who was present at Sprot’s public trial by jury), a great deal of perplexity has been caused, and many ingenious but erroneous conjectures have been invented. The Indictment or ‘dittay’ against Sprot, on August 12, 1608, is a public document, but not an honest one. It contains the following among other averments. We are told that Sprot, in July 1600, at Fastcastle, saw and read the beginning of a letter from Logan to Gowrie (Letter IV). Logan therein expresses delight at receiving a letter of Gowrie’s: he is anxious to avenge ‘the Macchiavelian massacre of our dearest friends’ (the Earl decapitated in 1584). He advises Gowrie to be circumspect, ‘and be earnest with your brother, that he be not rash in any speeches touching the purpose of Padua.’

This letter, as thus cited, is not among the five later produced in 1609; it is a blurred reminiscence of parts of two of them. The reason of these discrepancies is that the letter is quoted in the Indictment, not from the document itself (which apparently reach the prosecution after the Indictment was framed), but from a version given from memory by Sprot, in one of his private examinations. Next, Sprot is told in his Indictment that, some time later, Logan asked Bower to find this letter, which Gowrie, for the sake of secrecy, had returned to Bower to be delivered to Logan. We know that this was the practice of intriguers. After the December riot at Edinburgh in 1596, the Rev. Robert Bruce, writing to ask Lord Hamilton to head the party of the Kirk, is said to request him to return his own letter by the bearer. Gowrie and Logan practised the same method. The indictment goes on to say that Bower, being unable to read, asked Sprot to search for Logan’s letter to Gowrie, among his papers, that Sprot found it, ‘abstracted’ it (stole it), retained it, and ‘read it divers times,’ a false quotation of the MS. confession. Sprot really said that he kept the stolen letter (IV) ‘till’ he had framed on it, as a model, three forged letters. It contained a long passage of which the ‘substance’ is quoted. This passage as printed in Sprot’s Indictment is not to be found textually, in any of the five letters later produced. It is, we repeat, merely the version given from memory, by Sprot, at one of his last private examinations, before the letter itself came into the hands of Government. In either form, the letter meant high treason.

Such is the evidence of the Indictment against Sprot, of August 12, 1608. In the light of Sprot’s real confessions, hitherto lying in the Haddington muniment room, we know the Indictment to be a false and garbled document. Next, on the part of Government, we have always had a published statement by Sir William Hart, the King’s Justice, with an introduction by Dr. George Abbot, later Archbishop of Canterbury, who was in Edinburgh, and present when Sprot was hanged. This tract was published by Bradewood, London, in 1608, and is reprinted by Pitcairn.

After a verbose, pious, and pedantic diatribe, Abbot comes to the point. Sprot was arrested in April 1608, first on the strength ‘of some words that fell from himself,’ and, next, ‘of some papers found upon him.’ What papers? They are never mentioned in the Indictment of Sprot. They are never alluded to in the sequel of Abbot’s pamphlet, containing the official account, by Sir William Hart, of Sprot’s Trial and Examinations. In mentioning ‘some papers found upon’ Sprot, Dr. Abbot ‘let the cat out of the bag,’ but writers like Mr. Napier, and other sceptics of his way of thinking, deny that any of the compromising letters were found at all.

No letters, we say, are mentioned by Sir William Hart, in Abbot’s tract (1608), as having been produced. Archbishop Spottiswoode, who was present at Sprot’s public trial (August 12, 1608), thought the man one of those insane self-accusers who are common enough, and observes that he did not ‘show the letter’ – that of Logan to Gowrie (IV). This remark of Spottiswoode, an Archbishop, a converted Presbyterian, a courtier, and an advocate for the King, has been a source of joy to all Ruthven apologists. ‘Spottiswoode saw though the farce,’ they say; ‘there was no letter at all, and, courtier and recreant as he was, Spottiswoode had the honesty to say so in his History.’

To this there used to be no reply. But now we know the actual and discreditable truth. The Government was, in fact, engaged in a shameful scheme to which Archbishops were better not admitted. They meant to use this letter (IV) on a later occasion, but they also meant to use some of the other letters which Sprot (unknown to Spottiswoode) had confessed to be forgeries. The archiepiscopal conscience might revolt at such an infamy, Spottiswoode might tell the King, so the Scottish Government did not then allow the Archbishop, or the public, to know that they had any Logan letters. No letter at all came into open and public Court in 1608. Hart cites a short one, from Gowrie to Logan. Gowrie hopes to see Logan, or, at least, to send a trusty messenger, ‘anent the purpose you know. But rather would I wish yourself to come, not only for that errand, but for some other thing that I have to advise with you.’ There is no date of place or day. This letter, harmless enough, was never produced in Court, and Mr. Barbé supposes that it was a concoction of Hart’s. This is an unlucky conjecture. The Haddington MSS. prove that Sprot really recited Gowrie’s letter, or professed to do so, from memory, in one of his private examinations. The prosecution never pretended to possess or produce Gowrie’s letter.

Next, Hart cites, as Logan’s answer to Gowrie’s first letter (which it was not), the passages already quoted by the prosecution in Sprot’s Indictment, passages out of a letter of Logan’s given by Sprot from memory only. Hart goes on to describe, as if on Sprot’s testimony, certain movements of the Laird’s after he received Gowrie’s reply to his own answer to Gowrie. Logan’s letter (as given in 1609) is dated July 29, and it is argued that his movements, after receiving Gowrie’s reply, are inconsistent with any share in the plot which failed on August 5. Even if it were so, the fact is unimportant, for Sprot was really speaking of movements at a date much earlier than July 29; he later gave a separate account of what Logan was doing at the time of the outbreak of the plot, an account not quoted by Hart, who fraudulently or accidentally confused the dates. And next we find it as good as explicitly stated, by Hart, that this letter of Logan’s to Gowrie was never produced in open Court. ‘Being demanded where this above written letter, written by Restalrig to the Earl of Gowrie, which was returned again by James Bower, is now? Deponeth.. that he (Sprot) left the above written letter in his chest, among his writings, when he was taken and brought away, and that it is closed and folded within a piece of paper,’ so Hart declares in Abbot’s tract. He falsified the real facts. He could not give the question as originally put to Sprot, for that involved the publication of the fact that all the letters but one were forged. The question in the authentic private report ran thus: ‘Demanded where is that letter which Restalrig wrote to the Earl of Gowrie, whereupon the said George Sprot wrote and forged the missives produced?’ (August 10).

The real letter of Logan to Gowrie, the only genuine letter (if in any sense genuine), had not on August 10 been produced. The others were in the hands of the Government. Hart, in his tract, veils these circumstances. The Government meant to put the letters to their own uses, on a later occasion, at the trial of the dead Logan.

Meanwhile we must keep one fact steadily in mind. When Sprot confessed to having forged treasonable letters in Logan’s handwriting (as Calderwood correctly reports that he did confess), he did not include among them Letter IV (Logan to Gowrie July 29, 1600). That letter was never heard of by Sprot’s examiners till August 10, and never came into the hands of his examiners till late on August 11, or early on August 12, the day when Sprot was hanged. Spottiswoode was never made aware that the letter had been produced. Why Sprot reserved this piece of evidence so long, why, under the shadow of the gibbet, he at last produced it, we shall later attempt to explain, though with but little confidence in any explanation.

Meanwhile, at Sprot’s public trial in 1608, the Government were the conspirators. They burked the fact that they possessed plot-letters alleged to be by Logan. They burked the fact that Sprot confessed all these, with one or, perhaps, two exceptions, to be forgeries by himself. What they quoted, as letters of Logan and Gowrie, were merely descriptions of such letters given by Sprot from memory of their contents.