mother or grandmother to the Earl of Gowrie, so that by this he might be glad to put the King out of the way, that so he might stand next to the succession of the crown of England.’ {249} If this were true, the meaning of Gowrie’s device would be flagrantly conspicuous. But where is that patent of James V? Burnet conceivably speaks of it on the information of his father, who ‘took great pains to inquire into the particulars of that matter,’ so that he could tell his son, ‘one thing which none of the historians have taken any notice of,’ namely, our Gowrie’s Tudor descent, and his claims (failing James _and his issue_) to the crown of England. Now Burnet’s father was almost a contemporary of the Gowrie affair. Of the preachers of that period, the King’s enemies, Burnet’s father knew Mr. Davidson (_ob._ 1603) and Mr. Robert Bruce, and had listened to their prophecies. ‘He told me,’ says Burnet, ‘of many of their predictions that he himself heard them throw out, which had no effect.’ Davidson was an old man in 1600; Bruce, for his disbelief in James’s account of the conspiracy, was suspended in that year, though he lived till 1631, and, doubtless, prophesied in select circles. Mr. Bruce long lay concealed in the house of Burnet’s great-grandmother, daughter of Sir John Arnot, a witness in the trial of Logan of Restalrig. Thus Burnet’s father had every means of knowing the belief of the contemporaries of Gowrie, and he may conceivably be Burnet’s source for the tale of Gowrie’s Tudor descent and Royal claims. They were almost or rather quite baseless, but they were current. In fact, Dorothea Stewart, mother of Gowrie, was certainly a daughter of Henry Stewart, Lord Methven, and of Janet Stewart, of the House of Atholl. We find no trace of issue born to Margaret Tudor by her third husband, Lord Methven. Yet Gowrie’s emblem, adopted by him at Padua in 1597, and his device left in the Paduan dancing school, do distinctly point to some wild idea of his that some crown or other was ‘for him alone.’ At the trial of Gowrie’s father, in 1584, we find mention of his ‘challenginge that honor to be of his Hignes blud,’ but _that_ must refer to the relationship of the Ruthvens and the King through the Angus branch of the Douglases. {250a}