d woods, remote
from his retinue, had been recently planned, and had failed. To kidnap
the King was the commonest move in politics; but as James thought, or
said, that the idea at Gowrie House was to _murder_ him, his tale, even
if true, could not be easily credible.

The first narrative was drawn up at Falkland in the night of August 5.
Early on August 6 the letter reached the Chancellor in Edinburgh, and the
contents of the letter were repeated orally by the Secretary of State
(Elphinstone, later Lord Balmerino) to Nicholson, the English resident at
the Court of Holyrood. Nicholson on the same day reported what he
remembered of what the Secretary remembered of the Falkland letter, to
Cecil. Yet though at third hand Nicholson's written account of the
Falkland letter of August 5 {38} contains the same version as James later
published, with variations so few and so unessential that it is needless
to dwell upon them, they may safely be attributed to the modifications
which a story must suffer in passing through the memories of two persons.
Whatever the amount of truth in his narrative, the King had it ready at
once in the form to which he adhered, and on which he voluntarily
underwent severe cross-examination, on oath, by Mr. Robert Bruce, one of
the Edinburgh ministers; a point to which we return.

James declares in a later narrative printed and published about the end
of August 1600, that the Master, when he first met him at Falkland, made
a very low bow, which was not his habit. The Master then said (their
conference, we saw, occupied a quarter of an hour) that, while walking
alone on the previous evening, he had met a cloaked man carrying a great
pot, full of gold in large coined pieces. Ruthven took the fellow
secretly to Gowrie House, 'locked him _in a privy derned house_, and,
after locking many doors on him, left him there and his pot with him.'

It might be argued that, as the man was said to be locked in a _house_,
and as James was not taken out of Gowrie House to see him, James must
have known that, when he went upstairs with the Master, he was not going
to see the prisoner. The error here is that, in the language of the
period, a _house_ often means a _room_, or chamber. It is so used by
James elsewhere in this very narrative, and endless examples occur in the
letters and books of the period.

Ruthven went on to explain, what greatly needed explanation, that he had
left Perth so early in the morning