If the Master was sane, it was hardly credible that, as
James averred, he should menace the King with murder, in his brother's
house, with no traceable preparations either for flight or for armed
resistance. In James's narrative the Master is made at least to menace
the King with death. However true the King's story might be, his
adversaries, the party of the Kirk and the preachers, would never accept
it. In Lennox's phrase they 'liked it not, because it was not likely.'
Emphatically it was not likely, but the contradictory story put forward
by the Ruthven apologist, as we shall see, was not only improbable, but
certainly false.

There was living at that time a certain Mr. David Calderwood, a young
Presbyterian minister, aged twenty-five. He was an avid collector of
rumour, of talk, and of actual documents, and his 'History of the Kirk of
Scotland,' composed at a much later date, is wonderfully copious and
accurate. As it was impossible for King James to do anything at which
Calderwood did not carp, assigning the worst imaginable motives in every
case, we shall find in Calderwood the sum of contemporary hostile
criticism of his Majesty's narrative. But the criticism is negative.
Calderwood's critics only pick holes in the King's narrative, but do not
advance or report any other explanation of the events, any complete
theory of the King's plot from the Ruthven side. Any such story, any
such hypothesis, must be to the full as improbable as the King's
narrative.

There is nothing probable in the whole affair; every system, every
hypothesis is _difficile a croire_. Yet the events did occur, and we
cannot reject James's account merely because it is 'unlikely.' The
improbabilities, however, were enormously increased by the King's theory
that the Ruthvens meant to _murder_ him. This project (not borne out by
the King's own version of Ruthven's conduct) would have been insane: the
Ruthvens, by murdering James, would have roused the whole nation and the
Kirk itself against them. But if their object was to kidnap James, to
secure his person, to separate him from his Ministers (who were either
secretly Catholics, or Indifferents), and to bring in a new
administration favourable to Kirk, or Church, then the Ruthvens were
doing what had several times been done, and many times attempted. James
had been captured before, even in his own palace, while scores of other
plots, to take him, for instance, when hunting in Falklan