A SCOTTISH MYSTERY.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8091, 8 January 1903, Page 4

A SCOTTISH MYSTERY.

(Illustrated London News.) Tlia worker in romantic history will soon find liis occupation gone. The last rose has almost faded, and yearly from mystery's gleaming circle- the gems drop away. _ Thatfertile held for conjecture, the Man in the Iron Mask, is now exposed to the pitiless analysis of fact, and tie is mysterious no more. The Casket Letters aiid the innocence of Mary no more divide households and eclipse the gaiety of nations, except for those who derive their history from Aytoun's melodramatic "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." Mary, the beav.tifui :i;iiy of the sentimentalists, is now snug in the portraii-stfllery of historical criminals, while Burke and Hare as yet find no apologists. 'Pickle the Spy and his detection may have incensed the Gael against Mr Lang, hut he also lias been booked beyond doubt for the historian of the future.

Everyone has heard of the Gowrie Conspiracy! Has not that old monarch of the circulating library, Mr G. P. R. James, whose novels we see are to be issued in twenty-five volumes, made it the subject of a. story. "Gowrie," with the romanticpassion of King- James' giddy spouse, Anno of Denmark, for the young and handsome Earl? A pretty tale, doubtless, like tho old legends about Don Carlos, yet rather too much in the vein of Miss Jane Porter's "Scottish Chiefs." Mr Lang, in "James VI. and the Gowrie Mystery" (Longmans), quotes a Scottish lady," of four generations ago.- who said it was a- great comfort to think that at the Day of Judgment we shall know the whole truth about the Cowrie Conspiracy at- last. We hope Mr Lang's" memory does not here betray him, for the words "bear a curious resemblance to Colonel John Hay's "Mystery of Gilgal," and the remark "of the "bar-keeper about the seemingly blank effect of revolvers. Anyway, one more page is torn from the book of fate, for the facts are now all in, and the verdict cannot be disputed, though we had to wait two hundred years. Abysmal liar and moral knave as was James VI., lie was fairly correct- here, though ho has had himself to blame for ths persistent incredulity that awaited his- narrative. Everyone knows about that pot of gold, James'" insatiate curiosity, his ride from Falkland to Perth, the death of the Ear! and his brother, the man in the turret, and the rescue of the King. With the help of the plans in this book, and the reader can construct the scene .as clearly as it then took place on that Tuesday, August 5, 1600. The lover of an exciting plot, full of mysteries and inconsistencies, wdll find his i imagination fully gratified in these pages. Mr Lang says meaningly enough that the memory of the British Solomon does not smell sweet and blossom in the dust; and it is well perhaps that the taint of royal moral obliquities does not come out. A theory which the present writer had developed twenty years ago seems to have occurred to a former student of the conspiracy, but the shambling hypocrite has at least not now to bear that particular suspicion. His story was ridiculed in Scotland, in France, and by Elizabeth. Still, Scott, Tytler, and Burton were fully" justified in their belief that there was a conspiracy, and that Gowrie was.-the author of the plot. They were all lawyers, and their legal instinct had kept them correct. From 1600 to 1608 there was general jncredulity. That year added a fresh chapter on the arrest of George Sprot, a notary of Eyemouth, who confessed to a quiet knowledge of the affair, by which Gowrie and Logan of Restalrig were directly implicated as principals. In brief, this famous plot was one to lure James _to Perth, and thence convey him, either down the Tay or through (Fife and over the Firth of Forth, to Logan's Keep of Fastcastle, the Wolfscrag of "The Bride of Lammermoor." The plot failed because the King came with a larger retinue than- had been expected, while the details of the affair had all to be carried out on the original plan. It was a bold scheme, but crude and juvenile in execution. Gowrie was only 22, and his brother 18. The complication was all the greater through Sprot: he maintained up to his execution his knowledge of the conspiracy, while yet in the assertion that the five letters—implicating Gowrie and iogan—were his own unaided forgery! This hopeless inconsistency was never until now—by.fresh documentary-evidence, burked by the Crown agents for shameful purposes—made clear. They had been concocted by Sprot from his personal acquaintance with the fact, in order £b blackmail the heirs or executors of Logan. The so-called genuine letters are accordingly, paradoxically enough, all bogus; yet_the conspiracy was actually genuine. SucF'is the theory of Mr Lang,! given in detail from a mass of existing documents hitherto unavailable, and it seems to be entirely conclusive. There is now no more mystery about this celebrated incident in Scottish -history. By the facts, old and new, we can colligate the entire mass of details that must be pieced together from State papers, the reports of Elizabeth's spies, and the contemporary annals of Scotland. No other theory can possibly hold the field now. The main thesis our author conclusively proves. Sprot the forger is a new acquisition to the historical picture-gallery of rogues, and even yet the labyrinthine track of his lies and equivocations is not clear. He is so far beyond the villains in the weak novels of to-day that readers in search of a sensation should not fail to make his acquaintance in this book. He is the man that Scott could have made much of, while the rough and drunKen Logan was the Border knave after his own heart. Not less interesting is the glimpse afforded of the University of Padua, then frequented by Scotsmen, and the belief in witchcraft "learned in Padua far beyond the sea," as Scott says-in the "Lay," with reference to Gowrie that has escaped Mr Lang. We think the book final and convincing, but why does the writer describe Restalrig as "a ' mile frae Embro town"? Herein is" the nemesis of literary allusiyeness. Tom D'TJrfey wrote, " 'Twas within a furlong of Edinburgh town,"and no version of the song knows such a dialectical absurdity as "Embro town." Not even the wildest Kailyarder could devise such a phrase. If Mr Lang sings the song, let him try it in that form.