Italy he may have heard or read of romantic and crafty plots; and may
long have dreamed (as Robert Oliphant's reported allegation declared) of
some such scheme as that in which he failed. We must remember, too, that
James's own account at least suggests a plan quite feasible. To bring
James to Gowrie House, early in the day, when the townsmen were at kirk,
to bring him with only three or four attendants, then to isolate him and
carry him off, was far from impossible; they might hurry him, disguised,
to Dirleton, a castle garrisoned and provisioned, according to Carey, who
reports the version of Gowrie's friends. A Scottish judge, Gibson (the
ancestor of Sir Thomas Gibson-Carmichael), was later carried from Leith
Sands across the Border, with perfect success. A fault of the plan was
that, once undertaken, it could not be dropped, even though James came
late and well attended. Ruthven could not tell the King that his story
about a captive and a pot of gold was false. To do that would have
subjected him to a charge of treason. He could have only one motive for
thus deceiving his Majesty. Thus the plot _had_ to go on, even under
circumstances very unfavourable. There was no place for repentance.
Thus considered, the conspiracy looks like the plot of a romance, not
without meritorious points, but painfully amateurish.
As proof of Gowrie's guilt, the evidence, I think, distinctly proves that
he intentionally concealed from those about him the ride of his brother,
Henderson, and Andrew Ruthven to Perth; that he concealed his knowledge,
derived from Henderson, of the King's approach; and that Ruthven
concealed from Craigengelt, on his return, his long ride to Falkland,
saying that he had been on 'an errand not far off.' Moncrieff swore that
Henderson gave him a similar answer. Asked by Moncrieff where he had
been, he said 'he had been two or three miles above the town.' Henderson
corroborated Moncrieff's evidence on this point. There can have been no
innocent motive for all this secrecy. It would have been natural for
Gowrie to order luncheon for the King to be prepared, as soon as
Henderson arrived.
Finally, the Earl's assertions that James had ridden away, assertions
repeated after he had gone upstairs to inquire and make sure, are
absolutely incompatible with innocence. They could have only one motive,
to induce the courtiers to ride off and leave the King in his hands.
What was to happen next? Who can guess at the plot of such a plotter?
It is perhaps least improbable that the King was to be conveyed secretly,
by sea or across Fife, to Dirleton in the first place. Gowrie may have
had an understanding with Guevara at Berwick. James himself told
Nicholson that a large English ship had hovered off the coast, refusing
communication with the shore. Bothwell, again, now desperate, may have
lately been nearer home than was known; finally, Fastcastle, the isolated
eyrie on its perpendicular rock above the Northern Sea, may have been at
Gowrie's disposal. I am disinclined to conjecture, being only certain
that a young man with Gowrie's past--'Italianate,' and of dubious
religion--was more apt to form a wild and daring plot than was his canny
senior, the King of Scots. But that a plot of some kind Gowrie had laid,
I am convinced by his secrecy, and by his falsehoods as to the King's
departure. Among the traps for the King contrived by Bothwell and
Colville, and reported by Colville to his English paymasters, were
schemes quite as wild as that which Gowrie probably entertained. The
King once in the pious hands of so godly a man as Gowrie, the party of
the Kirk, or the party of the Church, would have come in and made
themselves useful. {147}
XII. LOGAN OF RESTALRIG
We now arrive at an extraordinary sequel of the Gowrie mystery: a sequel
in which some critics have seen final and documentary proof of the guilt
of the Ruthvens. Others have remarked only a squalid intrigue, whereby
James's ministers threw additional disgrace on their master. That they
succeeded in disgracing themselves, we shall make only too apparent, but
if the evidence which they handled proves nothing against the Ruthvens,
it does not on that account invalidate the inferences which we have drawn
as to their conspiracy. We come to the story of the Laird and the
country writer.
That we may know the Laird better, a brief description of his home may be
introduced. Within a mile and a half of the east end of Princes Street,
Edinburgh, lies, on the left of the railway to the south, a squalid
suburb. You drive or walk on a dirty road, north-eastwards, through
unambitious shops, factories, tall chimneys, flaming advertisements, and
houses for artisans. The road climbs a hill, and you begin to find, on
each side of you, walls of ancient construction, and traces of great old
doorways, now condemned. On the left are ploughed fields, and even
clumps of trees with blackened trunks. Grimy are the stacks of corn in
the farmyard to the left, at the crest of the hill. On the right, a
gateway gives on a short avenue which leads to a substantial modern
house. Having reached this point in my pilgrimage, I met a gentleman who
occupies the house, and asked if I might be permitted to view the site.
The other, with much courtesy, took me up to the house, of which only the
portion in view from the road was modern. Facing the west all was of the
old Scottish chateau style, with gables, narrow windows, and a strange
bulky chimney on the north, bulging out of the wall. The west side of
the house stood on the very brink of a steep precipice, beneath which lay
what is now but a large deep waterhole, but, at the period of the Gowrie
conspiracy, was a loch fringed with water weeds, and a haunt of wild
fowl. By this loch, Restalrig Loch, the witch more than three centuries
ago met the ghost of Tam Reid, who fell in Pinkie fight, and by the ghost
was initiated into the magic which brought her to the stake.
I scrambled over a low wall with a deep drop, and descended the cliff so
as to get a view of the ancient chateau that faces the setting sun.
Beyond the loch was a muddy field, then rows on rows of ugly
advertisements, then lines of 'smoky dwarf houses,' and, above these,
clear against a sky of March was the leonine profile of Arthur's Seat.
Steam rose and trailed from the shrieking southward trains between the
loch and the mountain, old and new were oddly met, for the chateau was
the home of an ancient race, the Logans of Restalrig, ancestors of that
last Laird with whom our story has to do. Their rich lands stretched far
and wide; their huge dovecot stands, sturdy as a little pyramid, in a
field to the north, towards the firth. They had privileges over Leith
Harbour which must have been very valuable: they were of Royal descent,
through a marriage of a Logan with a daughter of Robert II. But their
glory was in their ancestor, Sir Robert Logan, who fell where the good
Lord James of Douglas died, charging the Saracens on a field of Spain,
and following the heart of Bruce. So Barbour sings, and to be named by
Barbour, for a deed and a death so chivalrous, is honour enough.
[Picture: Restalrig House]
[Picture: Restalrig Village]
The Logans flourished in their eyrie above the Loch of Restalrig, and
intermarried with the best houses, Sinclairs, Ogilvys, Homes, and Ramsays
of Dalhousie. It may be that some of them sleep under the muddy floor of
St. Triduana's Chapel, in the village of Restalrig, at the foot of the
hill on the eastern side of their old chateau. This village, surrounded
by factories, is apparently just what it used to be in the days of James
VI. The low thick-walled houses with fore-stairs, retain their ancient,
high-pitched, red-tiled roofs, with dormer windows, and turn their tall
narrow gables to the irregular street. 'A mile frae Embro town,' you
find yourself going back three hundred years in time. On the right hand
of the road, walking eastward, what looks like a huge green mound is
visible above a high ancient wall. This is all that is left of St.
Triduana's Chapel, and she was a saint who came from Achaia with St.
Regulus, the mythical founder of St. Andrews. She died at Restalrig on
October 8, 510, and may have converted the Celts, who then dwelt in a
crannog in the loch; at all events we hear that, in a very dry summer,
the timbers of a crannog were found in the sandy deposit of the lake
margin. The chapel (or chapter-house?), very dirty and disgracefully
neglected, has probably a crypt under it, and certainly possesses a
beautiful groined roof, springing from a single short pillar in the
centre. The windows are blocked up with stones, the exterior is a mere
mound of grass like a sepulchral tumulus. On the floor lies, broken, the
gravestone of a Lady Restalrig who died in 1526. Outside is a patched-up
church; the General Assembly of 1560 decreed that the church should be
destroyed as 'a monument of idolatry' (it was a collegiate church, with a
dean, and prebendaries), and in 1571 the wrought stones were used to
build a new gate inside the Netherbow Port. The whole edifice was not
destroyed, but was patched up, in 1836, into a Presbyterian place of
worship. This old village and kirk made up 'Restalrig Town,' a place
occupied by the English during the siege of Leith in 1560. So much of
history may be found in this odd corner, where the sexton of the kirk
speaks to the visitor about 'the Great Logan,' meaning that Laird who now
comes into the sequel of the Gowrie mystery.
For some thirty years before the date of which we are speaking, a Robert
Logan had been laird of Restalrig, and of the estate of Flemington, in
Berwickshire, where his residence was the house of Gunnisgreen, near
Eyemouth, on the Berwickshire coast. He must have been a young boy when,
in 1560, the English forces besieging Leith (then held by the French for
Mary of Guise) pitched their camp at Restalrig.
In 1573, Kirkcaldy of Grange and Maitland of Lethington gallantly held
the last strength of the captive Mary Stuart, the Castle of Edinburgh.
The fortress was to fall under the guns of the English allies of that
Earl of Gowrie (then Lord Ruthven), who was the father of the Gowrie of
our mystery.
On April 17, 1573, a compact was made between Lord Ruthven and Drury, the
English general. One provision was (the rest do not here concern us)
that Alexander, Lord Home; Lethington; and Robert Logan of Restalrig, if
captured, 'shall be reserved to be justified by the laws of Scotland,'
which means, hanged by the neck. But neither on that nor on any other
occasion was our Logan hanged. {152} He somehow escaped death and
forfeiture, when Kirkcaldy was gibbeted after the fall of the castle. In
1577, we find him, with Lord Lindsay and Mowbray of Barnbogle (now
Dalmeny) surety for Queen Mary's half-brother, the Lord Robert Stewart,
who vainly warned Darnley to escape from Kirk o' Field. Lord Robert was
then confined by the Regent Morton in Linlithgow, and Logan with the rest
was surety in 10,000_l._ that he would not attempt to escape. Later,
Logan was again surety that Lord Robert would return after visiting his
dominions, the Orkney Islands. {153}
Logan, though something of a pirate, was clearly a man of substance and
of a good house, which he strengthened by alliances. One of his wives,
Elizabeth Macgill, was the daughter of the Laird of Cranstoun Riddell,
and one of her family was a member of the Privy Council. From Elizabeth
Logan was divorced; she was, apparently, the mother of his eldest son,
Robert. By the marriage of an ancestor of Logan's with an heiress of the
family of Hume, he acquired the fortress and lands of Fastcastle, near
St. Abbs, on the Berwickshire coast. The castle, now in ruins, is the
model of Wolfscrag in 'The Bride of Lammermoor.' Standing on the actual
verge of a perpendicular cliff above the sea, whence it is said to have
been approached by a staircase cut in the living rock, it was all but
inaccessible, and was strongly fortified. Though commanded by the still
higher cliff to the south, under which it nestled on its narrow plateau
of rock, Fastcastle was then practically impregnable, and twenty men
could have held it against all Scotland. Around it was, and is, a
roadless waste of bent and dune, from which it was severed by a narrow
rib of rock jutting seawards, the ridge being cut by a cavity which was
spanned by a drawbridge. Master of this inaccessible eyrie, Logan was
most serviceable to the plotters of these troubled times.
His religion was doubtful, his phraseology could glide into Presbyterian
cant, but we know that he indifferently lent the shelter of his fastness
to the Protestant firebrand, wild Frank Stewart, Earl of Bothwell (who,
like Carey writing from Berwick to Cecil, reckons Logan among Catholics),
or to George Ker, the Catholic intriguer with Spain. Logan loved a plot
for its own sake, as well as for chances of booty and promotion. He was
a hard drinker, and associate of rough yeomen and lairds like Ninian
Chirnside of Whitsumlaws (Bothwell's emissary to the wizard, Richard
Graham), yet a man of ancient family and high connections. He seems to
have been intimate with the family of Sir John Cranstoun of Cranstoun.
On one occasion he informs Archibald Douglas, the detested and infamous
murderer and deeply dyed traitor, that 'John of Cranstoun is the one man
now that bears you best good will.' (January 1587?)
[Picture: Fastcastle (circ. 1820)]
In January 1600, the year of the Gowrie plot, we find Sir John Cranstoun
in trouble for harbouring an outlawed Mr. Thomas Cranstoun, who was, with
Douglas, the Laird of Spot, one of Bothwell's allies in all his most
desperate raids on the person of King James. In 1592, Mr. Thomas
Cranstoun was forfeited, he was informed against for 'new conspiracies
against his Majesty's life and estate,' and, in January 1600, Sir John
Cranstoun was sheltering this dangerous and desperate Bothwellian outlaw,
as was his son-in law, Mr. William Cranstoun. {155a}
Now the Mr. Thomas Cranstoun who was hanged for his part in the Gowrie
affair, was brother of Sir John Cranstoun of Cranstoun, the ally of that
other Mr. Thomas Cranstoun who was so deep in Bothwell's wild raids on
the King's person. In the spring of 1600 (as we have said, but must here
repeat) there were reports that Bothwell had secretly returned to
Scotland, and, on April 20, 1600, just before the date of Gowrie's
arrival in Edinburgh from London, Nicholson reports suspected plots of
Archibald Douglas, of John Colville, a ruined Bothwellian, and a spy, and
of the Laird of Spot. {155b} This Colville had recently hinted to Essex
that he could do a serviceable enterprise. 'As for the service I mean to
do, if matters go to the worst, it shall be such, God willing--if I lose
not my life in doing thereof--as no other can do with a million of gold,
and yet I shall not exceed the bonds of humanity,' that is, he will not
_murder_ the King. 'But for conscience sake and worldly honesty, I must
first be absolved of my natural allegiance.' (April 27, 1598; again,
October 20, 1598.) {156}
The point for us to mark is that all these conspirators and violent men,
Bothwell (in exile or secretly in Scotland), Colville (in 1600 an exile
in Paris), the Laird of Spot, the Cranstouns, the infamous Archibald
Douglas, with Richard Douglas his nephew, and Logan of Restalrig, were
united, if not by real friendship, at least, as Thucydides says, by
'partnership in desperate enterprises' and by 1600 were active in a
subterranean way. If it is fair to say, _noscitur a sociis_, 'a man is
known by the company he keeps,' Logan of Restalrig bears the mark of the
secret conspirator. He had relations with persons more distinguished
than his Chirnsides and Whittingham Douglases, though they were of near
kin to the Earl of Morton. His mother, a daughter of Lord Gray, married
Lord Home, after the death of Logan's father. The Laird of Restalrig was
thus a half-brother of the new Lord Home, a Warden of the Border, and
also was first cousin of the beautiful, accomplished, and infamous Master
of Gray, the double spy of England and of Rome.
Logan, too, like the Master, had diplomatic ambitions. In 1586 (July 29)
we find him corresponding with the infamous Archibald Douglas, one of
Darnley's murderers, whom James had sent, in the crisis of his mother's
fate, as his ambassador to Elizabeth. In 1586, Logan, with two other
Logans, was on the packed jury which acquitted Douglas of Darnley's
murder. Logan was a retainer of Bothwell, that meteor-like adventurer
and king-catcher, and he asks Douglas to try to procure him employment
(of course as a spy) from Walsingham, the English statesman. {157}
In October of the same year, we find the Master of Gray writing to
Douglas, thus: 'Of late I was forced, at Restalrig's suit, to pawn some
of my plate, and the best jewel I had, to get him money for his
marriage'--his second marriage, apparently. By December 1586 we find
Logan riding to London, as part of the suite of the Master of Gray, who
was to plead with Elizabeth for Mary's life. He was the Master's most
intimate confidant, and, as such, in February-March 1587, proposed to
sell all his secrets to Walsingham! Nevertheless, when Gray was driven
into exile, later in 1587, Logan was one of his 'cautioners,' or
sureties. He had been of the party of Gowrie's father, during that
nobleman's brief tenure of power in 1582, 1583, and, when Gowrie fell,
Logan was ordered to hand his eyrie of Fastcastle over, at six hours'
notice, to the officers of the King. Through the stormy years of
Bothwell's repeated raids on James (1592-1594) Logan had been his
partisan, and had been denounced a rebel. Later he appears in trouble
for highway robbery committed by his retainers. Among the diversions of
this country gentleman was flat burglary. In December 1593, 'when nichts
are lang and mirk,' the Laird helped himself to the plate-chest of
William Nesbit of Newton. 'Under silence of night he took spuilzie of
certain gold and silver to the value of three thousand merks Scots.' The
executors of Nesbit did not bring their action till after Logan died, in
July 1606, 'in respect the said clandestine deed and fact came not to our
knowledge, nor light as to who had committed the same,' till just before
the action was brought.
In 1599, when conspiracies were in the air, Logan was bound over not to
put Fastcastle in the hands of his Majesty's enemies and rebels. {158}
This brief sketch of a turbulent life is derived from Logan's own letters
to Archibald Douglas, now among the Cecil Papers at Hatfield; from the
'Papers relating to the Master of Gray,' in which we find Logan, under a
cypher name, betraying the Master, his cousin and ally, and from the
Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, in which all that dead world,
from the King to the crofter, may be traced, often in circumstances
peculiarly private.
At that time, civil processes of 'horning,' 'putting to the horn,' or
outlawry, were the common resort of creditors against procrastinating
debtors. Many of the most respectable persons, gentlemen and ladies,
appear in these suits; Robert Abercromby sues a lady of rank for 150_l._
Scots. He is the burgess of Edinburgh, the King's saddler, who, as the
Master of Ruthven told Craigengelt, had brought the King from Falkland to
Perth, 'to take order for his debt.' Now the singular thing is that we
never find Logan of Restalrig recorded as under 'horning' for debt,
whereas, considering his character, we might expect him never to be free
from 'the horn.' On the other hand, we know him to have been a lender,
not a borrower. He was _sui profusus_. On January 1, 1599, Cecil had
been making inquiries as to Logan, from Lord Willoughby commanding at
Berwick. Cecil always had his eyes on Border Scots, likely to be useful
in troubling King James. Willoughby replies, 'There is sutch a laird of
Lesterigge as you write of, a vain lose man, a greate favourer of thefes
reputed, yet a man of a good clan, as they here tearme it, and a gud
felow.' {159}
Such was Logan of Restalrig, 'Old Rugged and Dangerous.' In 1601, May
30, we find him appearing as surety for Philip Mowbray, one of the
Mowbrays of Barnbogle, whose sister stood by Queen Mary at the scaffold,
and whose brother Francis was with the bold Buccleuch, when he swam 'that
wan water' of Esk, and rescued Kinmont Willie from Carlisle Castle. This
Francis Mowbray and his brother Philip were (1601-1603) mixed up with
Cecil in some inscrutable spy-work, and intrigues for the murder of King
James. The Mowbrays were old friends of Logan: they had been engaged in
privateering enterprises together, but could produce no letters of
marque! In 1603, Francis Mowbray, abandoned and extradited by Cecil, was
killed in an attempt to escape from Edinburgh Castle. He had been
accused, by an Italian fencing-master, of a conspiracy to kill James.
Cecil had, of course, by this time made peace and alliance with James,
who was on the point of ascending the English throne, and he gave up
Francis. Mowbray challenged the Italian fencing-master to judicial
combat; the Italian came down to fight him, the lists were actually
pitched at Holyrood, when (January 31, 1603) Francis preferred to try the
chance of flight; the rope of knotted sheet to which he trusted broke,
and he was dashed to pieces on the Castle rocks. {160a}
Since 1592, Mowbray had been corresponding with Logan's friend, Archibald
Douglas, and offering his services to Cecil. To Cecil, in September
1600, he was again applying, regarding Elizabeth as his debtor. In 1600,
he was in touch with Henry Locke, who had been Cecil's go-between in his
darkest intrigues against James, and his agent with Bothwell, Atholl, and
the Gowrie slain on August 5, 1600. But, in the autumn of 1602, Cecil
had become the secret ally of James, and gave up poor Francis, a broken
tool of his and of Elizabeth's. {160b}
We have now learned a good deal about Logan's habitual associates, and we
have merely glanced at a few of the numberless plots against James which
were encouraged by the English Government. If James was nervously
apprehensive of treason, he had good cause. But of Logan at the moment
of the Gowrie Plot, we know nothing from public documents. We do know,
however, on evidence which has previously been in part unpublished, in
part unobserved, that from August 1600 onwards, Logan was oddly excited
and restless. Though not in debt--or at least though no record of his
'horning' exists--he took to selling his lands, Restalrig, Flemington,
Gunnisgreen, Fastcastle. {161} After 1600 he sold them all; he wallowed
in drink; he made his wife wretched; with his eldest son he was on ill
terms; he wandered to London, and to France in 1605, and he returned to
die (of plague, it seems) in the Canongate, a landless but a monied man,
in July 1606.
Why did Logan sell all his lands, investing in shipping property? The
natural inference, at the time, was that he had been engaged in 'some ill
turn,' some mysterious conspiracy, and people probably (certainly, if we
believe the evidence to follow) thought that he had been an accomplice in
the Gowrie affair.
He died, and his children by his first wives dissociated themselves from
his executorship. The bulk of it was the unpaid part of the purchase
money for his lands, sold by him to Balmerino, and Dunbar, James's
trusted ministers, who owed some 33,000 marks to the estate.
Logan had a 'doer,' or law agent, a country writer, or notary, named
Sprot, who dwelt at Eyemouth, a hungry creature, who did not even own a
horse. When Logan rode to Edinburgh, Sprot walked thither to join him.
Yet the two were boon companions; Sprot was always loitering and watching
at Gunnisgreen, always a guest at the great Christmas festivals, given by
the Laird to his rough neighbours. The death of Logan was a disaster to
Sprot, and to all the parasites of the Laird.