mystery was not a conspiracy by King James himself. Mr. Hume Brown
appears rather to lean to this opinion, in the second volume of his
'History of Scotland,' and Dr. Masson, in his valuable edition of the
'Register of the Privy Council,' is also dubious. Mr. Louis Barbe, in
his 'Tragedy of Gowrie House,' holds a brief against the King. Thus I
have been tempted to study this 'auld misterie' afresh, and have
convinced myself that such historians as Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Frazer
Tytler, and Mr. Hill Burton were not wrong; the plot was not the King's
conspiracy, but the desperate venture of two very young men. The precise
object remains obscure in detail, but the purpose was probably to see how
a deeply discontented Kirk and country 'would take it.'

In working at this fascinatingly mysterious puzzle, I have made use of
manuscript materials hitherto uncited. The most curious of these, the
examinations and documents of the 'country writer,' Sprot, had been
briefly summarised in Sir William Fraser's 'Memorials of the Earls of
Haddington.' My attention was drawn to this source by the Rev. John
Anderson, of the General Register House, who aided Sir William Fraser in
the compilation of his book. The Earl of Haddington generously permitted
me to have copies made of the documents, which Lady Cecily
Baillie-Hamilton was kind enough to search for and rediscover in an
enormous mass of documents bequeathed by the learned first Earl.

On reading the Calendars of the Hatfield MSS. I had observed that several
letters by the possible conspirator, Logan of Restalrig, were in the
possession of the Marquis of Salisbury, who was good enough to permit
photographs of some specimens to be taken. These were compared, by Mr.
Anderson, with the alleged plot-letters of Logan at Edinburgh; while
photographs of the plot-letters were compared with Logan's authentic
letters at Hatfield, by Mr. Gunton, to whose acuteness and energy I owe
the greatest gratitude. The results of the comparison settle the riddle
of three centuries.

The other hitherto unused manuscripts are in no more recondite place than
the Record Office in London, and I do not know how they managed to escape
the notice of previous writers on the subject. To Dr. Masson's 'Register
of the Privy Council' I am indebted for the sequel of the curious
adventure of Mr. Robert Oliphant, whose part in the mystery, hitherto
overlooked, is decisive, if we accept the evidence--a point on whi