Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/105

 had galloped over in the night, and saw that it was broken.

Such might have been the reflections of many a man who survived to die quietly in his bed after having come in contact even in the slighest [sic] degree with that court. But it is to be borne in mind that Clarendon, though he could not always repress his natural feelings, wrote his History, in the character of counsel at the bar of the world for the family on which the royal power in England had been settled for far the greater part of the seventeenth century. When we read therefore Clarendon's characters of the Stuarts, we must bear in mind that we are reading the discourse, however able, adroit, and even subtle in its analysis of human character, of the avowed advocate of the Stuarts before the tribunal of posterity.

I am willing to take one case on which to try this question; and that one case shall be the tragedy of Gowrie House, Perth, which King James called the Gowrie Conspiracy. If the champions of King James can prove the truth of the royal version of that strange story they will have achieved a feat of no slight difficulty.