Both Mr. Anderson (who has greatly aided me by his acuteness and learned experience of old MSS.) and myself disbelieve that Logan’s hand wrote Letter IV. The matter, the contents of Letter IV, may be Logan’s, but the existing document may be ‘a Sprot after Logan.’ Sprot may have reinserted the genuine Logan IV among Bower’s collection of papers, pretended to find it, and returned it to Logan, after copying it _in Logan’s hand_. Or he may have copied it in his ‘course hand’ (the copy in the Haddington MSS.), and later, in autumn 1606, after Logan’s death, have rewritten his copy in an imitation of Logan’s hand. The contents, Mr. Anderson believes, as I do, are, none the less, genuine Logan. If readers accept these conclusions, there was a Gowrie conspiracy, and Logan was in it. ‘I trow your Lordship has a proof of my constancy already ere now,’ he says in Letter IV, and Gowrie may have had a proof, in his early conspiracies of 1593–1594, or in a testimonial to Logan from Bothwell, Gowrie’s old ally. But, if readers do not accept our conclusions, they may still rest, perhaps, on the arguments adduced in the earlier chapters of this essay, to demonstrate that neither accident nor the machinations of the King, but an enterprise of their own, caused the Slaughter of the Ruthvens. The infamous conduct of the Privy Council in 1608–1609 does not prove that, in 1600, the King carried out a conspiracy in itself impossible. I have found nothing tending to show that King James was ever made aware of Sprot’s confessions of forgery. It is true that Sir William Hart, the Lord Justice, went to Court after Sprot’s death, and, in September, the Scottish Privy Council asked James to send him home again. {239} But Hart need not have told all the truth to James. There is a kind of rejoicing _naïveté_ in all of James’s references to the Gowrie affair, which seems to me hardly consistent with his disbelief in his own prowess on that occasion. If one may conjecture, one would guess that the Privy Council and the four preachers managed to persuade themselves, Sprot being the liar whom we know, that he lied when he called his Logan papers forgeries. The real facts may have been concealed from the King. Mr. Gunton, the Librarian at Hatfield, informs me that, had he not seen Letter IV (which he is sure was _written_ by Sprot), he does not think he should have suspected the genuineness of Letters II and III, after comparing them with the undoubted letters of Logan in the Cecil manuscripts. The Government and the four preachers, with such documents in their hands, documents still apt to delude, may easily have brought themselves to disbelieve Sprot’s assertion that they were all forgeries. Let us hope that they did! XVII. INFERENCES AS TO THE CASKET LETTERS