ted, menaced, and driven to a personal struggle,
as he declared? Is the fact not that, finding himself alone with
Ruthven, and an armed man (or no armed man, if you believe that none was
there), James lost his nerve, and cried 'Treason!' in mere panic? The
rest followed from the hot blood of the three courtiers, and the story of
James was invented, after the deaths of the Gowries, to conceal the
truth, and to rob by forfeiture the family of Ruthven. But James had
certainly told Lennox the story of Ruthven and the pot of gold, before
they reached Perth. If he came with innocent intent, he had not
concocted that story as an excuse for coming.

We really must be consistent. Mr. Barbe, a recent Ruthven apologist,
says that the theory of an accidental origin of 'the struggle between
James and Ruthven may possibly contain a fairly accurate conjecture.'
{94} But Mr. Barbe also argues that James had invented the pot of gold
story before he left Falkland; that, if James was guilty, 'the pretext
had been framed'--the myth of the treasure had been concocted--'long
before their meeting in Falkland, and was held in readiness to use
whenever circumstances required.' If so, then there is no room at all
for the opinion that the uproar in the turret was accidental, but Mr.
Barbe's meaning is that James thus forced a quarrel on Ruthven. For
there was no captive with a pot of gold, nor can accident have caused the
tragedy, if Ruthven lured James to Falkland with the false tale of the
golden hoard. That tale, confided by James to Lennox on the ride to
Perth, was either an invention of the King's--in which case James is the
crafty conspirator whom Mr. Bruce, in 1602, did not believe him to be (as
shall be shown);--or it is true that Ruthven brought James to Perth by
the feigned story--in which case Ruthven is a conspirator. I reject, for
reasons already given, the suggestion that Lennox perjured himself, when
he swore that James told him about Ruthven's narrative as to the captive
and his hoard. For these reasons alone, there is no room for the
hypothesis of accident: either James or Ruthven was a deliberate traitor.
If James invented the pot of gold, he is the plotter: if Ruthven did,
Ruthven is guilty. There is no _via media_, no room for the theory of
accident.

The _via media_, the hypothesis of accident, was suggested by Sir William
Bowes, who wrote out his theory, in a letter to Sir John Stanhope, from
Bradley, on Septemb