tainly one of the few men of
honour as well as of rank in Scotland, James had entrusted his son,
Prince Henry; the care of the heir to the Crown was a kind of hereditary
charge of the Erskines. The Queen had already, in her resentment at not
having the custody of her son, engaged in one dangerous plot against Mar;
she made another quarrel on this point at the time (1603) when the King
succeeded to the crown of England. Now Mar was present at the Gowrie
tragedy, and his cousin, Sir Thomas Erskine, took part in the deeds.
Hating the Erskines, devoted to the Ruthven ladies, and always feebly in
opposition to her husband, the Queen, no doubt, paraded her grief, her
scepticism, and her resentment. This was quite in keeping with her
character, and this conduct lent colour to the myth that she loved
Gowrie, or the Master, or both, _par amours_. The subject is good for a
ballad or a novel, but history has nothing to make with the legend on
which Mr. G. P. R. James based a romance, and Mr. Pinkerton a theory.

Leaving fable for fact, what motives had James for killing both the
Ruthvens? He had dropped the hereditary feud, and had taken no measures
against the young Earl to punish his conspiracies with Bothwell in
1593-1594. Of Gowrie, on his return to Scotland in May, he may have
entertained some jealousy. The Earl had been for months in Paris,
caressed by the English ambassador, and probably, as we have seen, in
touch with the exiled and ceaselessly conspiring Bothwell. In London the
Earl had been well received by Elizabeth, and by Lord Willoughby, who, a
year earlier, as Governor of Berwick, had insulted James by kidnapping,
close to Edinburgh, an English gentleman, Ashfield, on a visit to the
King's Court. Guevara, a cousin of Lord Willoughby, lured Ashfield into
the coach of the English envoy Bowes, and drove him to the frontier.
Lord Willoughby had a swift yacht lying off Leith, in case it was thought
better to abduct Ashfield by sea. This is an example of English
insolence to the Scottish King--also of English kidnapping--and Lord
Willoughby, the manager, had made friends with Gowrie in England.

Thus James, who was then on the worst terms, short of open war, with
England, may have suspected and disliked the Earl, who had once already
put himself at the service of Elizabeth, and might do so again. In the
April of 1600, rumours of a conspiracy by Archibald Douglas, the infamous
traitor; Douglas of Spot, one of Mo