Leaving this point, we ask why a man already suspicious, like James, let the Master lock any door behind him. We might reply that James had dined, and that ‘wine and beer produce a careless state of mind,’ as a writer on cricket long ago observed. We may also suppose that, till facts proved the locking of one door at least (for about that there is no doubt), James did not know that any door _was_ locked. On August 11 the Rev. Mr. Galloway, in a sermon preached before the King and the populace at the Cross of Edinburgh, says that the Master led the monarch upstairs, ‘and through a _trans_’ (a passage), ‘the door whereof, so soon as they had entered, _chekit to with ane lok_, then through a gallery, whose door also _chekit to_, through a chamber, and the door thereof _chekit to_, also,’ and thence into the turret of which he ‘also locked the door.’ {53} Were the locks that ‘chekit to’ spring locks, and was James unaware that he was locked in? But Ramsay, before the affray, had wandered into ‘a gallery, very fair,’ and unless there were two galleries, he could not do this, if the gallery door was locked. Lennox and Mar and the rest speak of opposition from only one door. While we cannot explain these things, _that_ door, at least, between the gallery and the gallery chamber, excluded James from most of his friends. Can the reader believe that he purposely had that door locked, we know not how, or by whom, on the system of compelling Gowrie to ‘come and be killed’ by way of the narrow staircase? Could we see Gowrie House, and its ‘secret ways,’ as it then was, we might understand this problem of the locked doors. Contemporary criticism, as minutely recorded by Calderwood, found no fault with the number of locked doors, but only asked ‘how could the King’s fear but increase, perceiving Mr. Alexander’ (the Master) ‘ever to lock the doors behind them?’ If the doors closed with spring locks (of which the principle had long been understood and used), the King may not have been aware of the locking. The problem cannot be solved; we only disbelieve that the King himself had the door locked, to keep his friends out, and let Gowrie in. NOTE.—_The Abbey of Scone_. On page 48 we have quoted the statement that James had bestowed on Gowrie the Abbey of Scone ‘during his life.’ This was done in 1580 (_Registrum Magni Sigilli_, vol. iii. No. 3011). On May 25, 1584, William Fullarton got this gift, the first Earl of Gowrie and his children being then forfeited. But on July 23, 1586, the Gowrie of the day was restored to all his lands, and the Earldom of Gowrie included the old church lands of Scone (_Reg. Mag. Sig._ iv. No. 695, No. 1044). How, then, did John, third Earl of Gowrie, hold only ‘for his life’ the Commendatorship of the Abbey of Scone, as is stated in S. P. Scot. (Eliz.) vol. lxvi. No. 50? IV. THE KING’S NARRATIVE—II. THE MAN IN THE TURRET