If there was an armed man in the turret, he was either placed there by the King, to protect him while he summoned his minions by feigned cries of treason, or he was placed there by Gowrie to help the Master to seize the King. In the latter case, the Master’s position was now desperate; in lieu of an ally he had procured a witness against himself. Great need had he to consult Gowrie, but though Gowrie certainly entered the house, went upstairs, and returned to Lennox with the assurance that James had ridden away, it is improbable that he and his brother met at this moment. James, however, avers that they met, Ruthven running rapidly downstairs, but this was mere inference on the King’s part. James occupied the time of Ruthven’s absence in asking the man of the turret what he knew of the conspiracy. The man replied that he knew nothing, he had but recently been locked into the little chamber. Indeed, while Ruthven was threatening, the man (says James) was trembling, and adjuring the Master not to harm the King. James, having sworn to Ruthven that he would not open the window himself, now, characteristically, asked the man to open the window ‘on his right hand.’ If the King had his back to the turret door, the window on his right opened on the courtyard, the window on his left opened on the street. The man readily opened the window, says the King, and the person claiming to be the man deponed later that he first opened what the King declared to be the wrong window, but, before he could open the other, in came the Master, who, ‘casting his hands abroad in desperate manner, said “he could not mend it, his Majesty behoved to die.”’ Instead of stabbing James, however, he tried to bind the Royal hands with a garter, ‘swearing he behoved to be bound.’ (A garter was later picked up on the floor by one of the witnesses, Graham of Balgonie, and secured by Sir Thomas Erskine. {58})