The evidence of that other man was also subject, for reasons which will appear presently, to the gravest suspicion. James, if himself guilty of the plot, had to invent a story to excuse himself; the other man had to adopt the version of the King, to save his own life from the gibbet. On the other hand, James, if innocent, could not easily have a credible story to tell. 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.