Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/174

234 Gowrie acted, and the sort of assistance upon which he really relied. The conduct of the clergymen admits of an easy explanation. James, whose perception was nearly as acute as his character was weak, was fully sensible of the ridicule to which he had exposed himself, by allowing his desire of money to lead him into so shallow a device as Ruthven's. In addition to this, he wished, upon all occasions, to appear as much of the hero as possible. The consequence was, that his edition of the story was so dressed up, as to render it inconsistent; first, with his well-known character; secondly, with the most distant possibility of his having been deceived with the master's pretences; and, thirdly, with the depositions of the witnesses. Inconsistencies so startling were sufficient to justify some preliminary scepticism; and if ever there was an occasion, where it was allowable openly to call a king's word in question, it was when James demanded, not merely that his party should hypocritically profess a belief which they did not entertain, but that they should, daringly and blasphemously, mix up this falsehood in the solemn services of devotion. A short time, however, was sufficient to convince the most incredulous of the truth of the conspiracy, stripped of the adventitious circumstances which the king linked with it; and the obstinate recusancy of Bruce the clergyman is sufficiently accounted for, by James's insisting upon prescribing the manner in which he was to treat the matter, and by that individual's overstrained notions of the guilt incurred by a minister, who allowed any one to dictate to him concerning the mode in which he was to conduct public worship.

But Gowrie relied upon the support of no faction, religious or political. His sole motive seems to have been a fantastic idea of the duty incumbent upon him to revenge his father's death. He is reported, on one occasion, when some one directed his attention to a person who had been employed as an agent against his father, to have said, of Aquila non captat muscas." Ruthven also expressly declared to the king, when he held him prisoner in the closet, that his only object was to obtain revenge for the death of his father. The letters of Logan (except in one solitary instance, where a scheme of aggrandisement is darkly hinted at, and that as something quite irrelevant to the purpose they had on hand) harp on this string alone, proving that Gowrie and his friends seek only "for the revange of that cawse." The only members of the conspiracy who are known to us, are men likely enough to engage in such a cause, but most unlikely to be either leaders or followers in a union, where the parties were bound together by an attachment to certain political principles. The three conspirators are, the earl and his brother, such as we have already described them, and Logan of Restalrig, a broken man a retainer and partisan of Both- well a maintainer of thieves and sorners a man who expressly objects to communicating their project to one who he fears "vill disswade us fra owr purpose yt ressounes of religion, quhilk I can never abyd." And if anymore evidence were required to show how little Gowrie relied upon the presbyterians, we might allude to his anxiety that Logan should sound his brother, lord Home a catholic.

In short, every thing leads us to the opinion we have already announced, that the Ruthvens were instigated to their enterprise by feelings of private revenge alone, and that they did not seek to make any political party subservient to their purposes. It is to this isolated nature of their undertaking its utter want of connexion with the political movements of the period that we attribute the circumstance of its history having so long remained unknown, and are satisfied that much of that history must ever remain a riddle. It is with it, as with the adventures of the Iron Mask, and that whole class of events which seem political, merely because they befall persons who rank high in the state. They