This affair is one of the haunting mysteries of the past, one of the problems that nobody has solved. The events occurred in 1600, but the interest which they excited was so keen that belief in the guilt or innocence of the two noble brothers who perished in an August afternoon, was a party shibboleth in the Wars of the Saints against the Malignants, the strife of Cavaliers and Roundheads. The problem has ever since attracted the curious, as do the enigma of Perkin Warbeck, the true character of Richard III, the real face behind ‘The Iron Mask,’ the identity of the False Pucelle, and the innocence or guilt of Mary Stuart. In certain respects the Gowrie mystery is necessarily less attractive than that of ‘the fairest and most pitiless Queen on earth.’ There is no woman in the story. The world, of course, when the Ruthvens died, at once acted on the maxim, _cherchez la femme_. The woman in the case, men said, was the beautiful Queen, Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI. That fair and frivolous dame, ‘very very woman,’ certainly did her best, by her behaviour, to encourage the belief that she was the cause of these sorrows. Even so, when the Bonny Earl Moray—the tallest and most beautiful man in Scotland—died like a lion dragged down by wolves, the people sang: He was a brave gallant, And he rode at the ring, And the Bonny Earl Moray, He might have been the King. He was a brave gallant, And he rode at the glove, And the Bonny Earl Moray He was the Queen’s love. On one side was a beautiful Queen mated with James VI, a pedant and a clown. On the other side were, first the Bonny Earl, then the Earl of Gowrie, both young, brave, handsome, both suddenly slain by the King’s friends: none knew why. The opinion of the godly, of the Kirk, of the people, and even of politicians, leaped to the erroneous conclusion that the young men perished, like Königsmarck, because they were beautiful and beloved, and because the Queen was fair and kind, and the King was ugly, treacherous, and jealous. The rumour also ran, at least in tradition, that Gowrie ‘might have been the King,’ an idea examined in Appendix A. Here then was an explanation of the slaying of the Ruthvens on the lines dear to romance. The humorous King Jamie (who, if he was not always sensible, at least treated his flighty wife with abundance of sense) had to play the part of King Mark of Cornwall to Gowrie’s Sir Tristram. For this theory, we shall show, no evidence exists, and, in ‘looking for the woman,’ fancy found two men. The Queen was alternately said to love Gowrie, and to love his brother, the Master of Ruthven, a lad of nineteen—if she did not love both at once. It is curious that the affair did not give rise to ballads; if it did, none has reached us.