aid interest on the debts, 'he had already
paid many sums of money.' James had already restored to Gowrie the
valuable lands of Scone. {142}

However, taking things as the King's adversaries regard them, the
cumulative effect of these several grudges (and of the mystery of
Gowrie's Catholicism) would urge James to lay his very subtle plot. He
would secretly call young Ruthven to Falkland by six in the morning of
August 5, he would make it appear that Ruthven had invited _him_ to
Perth, he would lure the youth to a turret, managing to be locked in with
him and an armed man; he would post Ramsay below the turret window, and
warn him to run up the dark staircase at the King's cry of treason. By
the locked door he would exclude Lennox and Mar, while his minions would
first delay Gowrie's approach, by the narrow stairs, and then permit him
to enter with only one companion, Cranstoun. He would cause a report of
his own departure to be circulated, exactly at the right moment to bring
Gowrie under the turret window, and within reach of his cries. This plot
requires the minutest punctuality, everything must occur at the right
moment, and all would have been defeated had Gowrie told the truth about
the King's departure, or even asked 'Where is the King's horse?' Or
Gowrie might have stood in the streets of Perth, and summoned his
burgesses in arms. The King and the courtiers, with their dead man,
would have been beleaguered, without provisions, in Gowrie's house. Was
James the man, on the strength of the grudges which we have carefully
enumerated, to risk himself, unarmed, in this situation? As to how he
managed to have the door locked, so as to exclude the majority of his
suite, who can conjecture? How, again, did he induce Gowrie to aver, and
that after making inquiry, that he _had_ ridden homewards?

I cannot believe that any sane man or monarch, from the motives
specified, would or could have laid, and that successfully, the plot
attributed to the King.

Turning to Gowrie, we find that his grudges against James may have been
deep and many. If revengeful, he had the treacherous method of his
father's conviction, and the insults to his mother, to punish. For a boy
of seventeen he had already attempted a good deal, in 1593-1594. His
mother had set him an example of King-catching, and it looks as if his
mother had been near him in Perth, while he was at Strabane. If
ambitious, and devoted to Elizabeth and England