impossibility.

Despite these embroilments, I am, in this case, able to reach a
conclusion satisfactory to myself, a thing which, in the affair of the
Casket Letters and Queen Mary, I was unable to do. {7} There is no
doubt, in my own mind, that the Earl of Gowrie and his brother laid a
trap for King James, and fell into the pit which they had digged.

To what precise end they had plotted to seize the King's person, what
they meant to do with him when they had got him, must remain matter of
conjecture. But that they intended to seize him, I have no doubt at all.

These pages, on so old and vexed a problem, would not have been written,
had I not been fortunate enough to obtain many unpublished manuscript
materials. Some of these at least clear up the secondary enigma of the
sequel of the problem of 1600. Different readers will probably draw
different conclusions from some of the other documents, but perhaps
nobody will doubt that they throw strange new lights on Scottish manners
and morals.

The scheme adopted here is somewhat like that of Mr. Browning's poem,
'The Ring and the Book.' The personages tell their own stories of the
same set of events, in which they were more or less intimately concerned.
This inevitably entails some repetition, but I am unable to find any plan
less open to objection.

It must, of course, be kept in mind that all the evidence is of a
suspicious nature. The King, if he were the conspirator, or even if
innocent, had to clear himself; and, frankly, his Majesty's word was not
to be relied upon. However, he alone was cross-examined, by an acute and
hostile catechist, and that upon oath, though not in a court of justice.
The evidence of his retinue, and of some other persons present, was also
taken on oath, three months after the events, before a Parliamentary
Committee, 'The Lords of the Articles.' We shall see that, nine years
later, a similar Committee was deceived shamelessly by the King's
Government, he himself being absent in England. But the nature of the
evidence, in the second case, was entirely different: it did not rest on
the sworn testimony of a number of nobles, gentlemen, and citizens, but
on a question of handwriting, _comparatio literarum_, as in the case of
the Casket Letters. That the witnesses in 1600 did not perjure
themselves, in the trial which followed on the slaughter of the Ruthvens,
is what I have to argue. Next, we have the evidence, taken under
torture