There is nothing probable in the whole affair; every system, every hypothesis is _difficile à 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 Falkland woods, remote from his retinue, had been recently planned, and had failed. To kidnap the King was the commonest move in politics; but as James thought, or said, that the idea at Gowrie House was to _murder_ him, his tale, even if true, could not be easily credible. The first narrative was drawn up at Falkland in the night of August 5. Early on August 6 the letter reached the Chancellor in Edinburgh, and the contents of the letter were repeated orally by the Secretary of State (Elphinstone, later Lord Balmerino) to Nicholson, the English resident at the Court of Holyrood. Nicholson on the same day reported what he remembered of what the Secretary remembered of the Falkland letter, to Cecil. Yet though at third hand Nicholson’s written account of the Falkland letter of August 5 {38} contains the same version as James later published, with variations so few and so unessential that it is needless to dwell upon them, they may safely be attributed to the modifications which a story must suffer in passing through the memories of two persons. Whatever the amount of truth in his narrative, the King had it ready at once in the form to which he adhered, and on which he voluntarily underwent severe cross-examination, on oath, by Mr. Robert Bruce, one of the Edinburgh ministers; a point to which we return. James declares in a later narrative printed and published about the end of August 1600, that the Master, when he first met him at Falkland, made a very low bow, which was not his habit. The Master then said (their conference, we saw, occupied a quarter of an hour) that, while walking alone on the previous evening, he had met a cloaked man carrying a great pot, full of gold in large coined pieces. Ruthven took the fellow secretly to Gowrie House, ‘locked him _in a privy derned house_, and, after locking many doors on him, left him there and his pot with him.’