, 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 _naivete_ 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 th