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

Preface. vii
that the very strangeness and ambiguity of the facts have de-
terred people from their scrupulous examination, and driven
them to a judgment upon grounds which are really entirely
beside the real question. The eloquent English historian who
is now rapidly approaching the period of this mysterious in-
cident, will, doubtless, apply his peculiar powers of histo-
rical investigation to the solution of the question upon other
principles.
In the papers now reprinted I have not treated directly of
the conspiracy itself. In the first of them, I sought to find a
cause for the presumed conduct of the Ruthvens on the fatal
5th August, 1600, the day on which the conspiracy exploded,
in the circumstances under which their father was put to death
in 1584. In the second, I pursued the fortunes of some of the
ruined family after the event of 1600, and treated especially of
incidents in the life of that particular member of it from whom
Colonel Stepney traces his descent, — Patrick, the fifth son of
the Earl executed in 1584. Standing thus, on each side of
the momentous transaction which could alone give these pa-
pers any importance, and yet not dealing with that transac-
tion itself, — the papers when brought together in the follow-
ing pages have an air of incompleteness, which they had not
when originally printed in two separate volumes of the ' Archseo-
logia ;' but it must be borne in mind that they were not in-
tended to deal with the whole subject, nor to have any other
connection, than that which necessarily results from their re-
lation to different parts of this melancholy history.
Another kind of incompletness in these papers is that which
belongs to all minute historical inquiries, and more especially
to those founded upon documentary evidence. In one sense,
such papers can never be made complete. The wrecks which
Time has left us are so numerous, and are scattered about in so
many different places, that it is almost impossible for any