Family records of the Bruces and the Cumyns

360 MR ROBERT BRUCE— THE GOWRIE CONSPIRACY.
so guarded, and confined to the knowledge of these four individuals, and Logan's
one trusty messenger, " Laird Bower," " who would not spare," he wrote to his
mysterious ally, " to ride to hell's yett " to pleasure him. " And who was this
unnamed coadjutor who was trysted to meet them in the Canongate, or at
Restalrig, or to take boat as if for a pleasure trip, and land at Fast Castle ?" On
the appointed day, when the royal prisoner was expected to pass," NICOLSON,"
Queen Elizabeth's agent, was known to ride to Leith, and there to wait long for
a signal from a passing sail — which, however, never came ! And when the news
arrived that Lord Gowrie and his brother had been killed in their own house
— the latter by the king's own hand, after having passed the day together in
amity and good fellowship — it is scarcely to be wondered at that many doubted
who were the conspirators !
Another inaccuracy we must observe upon in one of these memoirs. It is
said that Mr Bruce had great sorrow and distress of mind from the conduct of
a daughter. The daughters of his house were irreproachable, and married and
settled well — Martha, as we have seen, tending him to the last. But there was,
indeed, a lamb of his flock, a distant relation of his mother's, to whom he acted
a father's part, when abandoned in her last agonies of mind and body by her
own father and all her friends. For her, and with her, he sorrowed and prayed
incessantly during the last three days of her miserable existence, and brought
her to earnest repentance and full confession of her crime. Jane Levingstone,
daughter of John Levingstone of Dunipace, was married at sixteen to the Laird
of Warristoun, " Kincaid of Warristoun House, near Edinbro'." Her nurse went
with her to her new home. Kincaid was a man of intemperate habits and brutal
manners ; and in the indictment, his brothers set forth that " the said Jeane
Levingstoune, guidwife of Waristoune, having conceivit ane deidlie rancour,
haitred, and malice against umquhile John Kincaid, for the allegit biting of her
in the arm, and striking her divers times, the said Jean, in the month of July
1600, directit Jonet Murdo, her nurse, to a certain Robert Weir, in the Abbey
of Halyrudhouse, where he was for the time, desiring him to cum down to War-
ristoun and speak with her," &c. &c.
This man was a groom, who was once in her father's service ; and the lady,
at the instigation of her nurse, and with the knowledge and consent, it appears,
of one at least of her female servants, arranged to conceal him in a cellar until
the laird should be asleep, and then that he should come forth and strangle him.
For this deed Weir was to be rewarded with a bag of money.
But she says in her confession, — " I think I hear presently the pitifull and
fearfull cryes which he gave when he was being strangled ; and the vile sin
which I committed, in murdering my own husband, is yet before me." It appears