Papers relating to William, first Earl of Gowrie, and Patrick Ruthven, his fifth and last surviving son

vi Preface.
probability that a man of James's timid nature, if he had
wished to get rid of the Ruthvens, would have adopted a
course which must necessarily expose himself to a very great
amount of personal danger.
If we add to such considerations, the discrepancies which
are to be found in the accounts of the several actors, discre-
pancies which might easily be the result of hurry and confu-
sion, but which are thought by many persons to be conclusive
marks of fraud, — it may be seen how naturally inquirers, in
despair of finding the truth by an examination of the facts,
might seek to deduce it from their own impressions of the
characters of the persons concerned. But neither in this way
has anything like certainty or unanimity been arrived at.
Some persons, full of strong prejudices against the weak and
poor-spirited monarch, find crime in almost everything he did.
To such investigators nothing is too odious or too wicked
for King James to have been guilty of, and the Gowrie con-
spiracy w r as simply one of his many abominable misdeeds.
Others, again, misled by the gross flattery of which this parti-
cular sovereign was the especial subject, repel the supposition
that a man who possessed an intellectual acumen which has
been the theme of such exalted praise, and who under certain
circumstances exhibited much open-hearted kindliness of dis-
position, could have been guilty of the egregious folly and
wickedness of having deliberately planned the murder of the
Ruthvens.
This mode of judging from character has prevailed in re-
ference to the Gowrie conspiracy from the very first. The
good opinion entertained of the young Earl of Gowrie swayed
the belief of a large party of his contemporaries in his favour.
They doubted the accuracy of the King's story, because it told
against the Earl ; and could not bring themselves to admit the
possibility of the guilt of one whom they looked up to as the
rising hope of the Protestant party in Scotland. Thus it is