He was left to inform himself, but Calderwood says, that the story about Craigengelt’s dying confession was untrue. Bruce had frankly given the lie to the King and Mar, though he remarked that he had never heard Mar and Lennox tell the tale ‘out of their own mouths.’ Mar later (September 24) most solemnly assured Mr. Bruce by letter, that the treason, ‘in respect of that I saw,’ was a certain fact. This he professed ‘before God in heaven.’ Meanwhile Mr. Hall was restored to his Edinburgh pulpit, and Mr. Bruce, after a visit to _Restalrig_, a place close to Edinburgh and Leith, went into banishment. {105a} If he stayed with the Laird of Restalrig, he had, as will presently appear, a strange choice in friends (pp. 148–167). A later letter of Bruce’s now takes up the tale. In 1601, Bruce was in London, when Mar was there as James’s envoy. They met, and Bruce said he was content to abide by the verdict in the Gowrie trial of November 1600. What he boggled at, henceforward, was a public apology for his disbelief, an acceptance, from the pulpit, of the King’s veracity, as to the events. In London, Bruce had found that the Puritans, as to the guilt of Essex (which was flagrant), were in the same position as himself, regarding the guilt of Gowrie. {105b} But they bowed to the law, and so would he—‘for the present.’ The Puritans in England would not _preach_ that they were persuaded of the guilt of Essex, nor would Bruce preach his persuasion of the guilt of Gowrie, ‘from my knowledge and from my persuasion.’ He assured Mar ‘that it was not possible for any man to be fully persuaded, or to take on their conscience, but so many as saw and heard.’ However Bruce is self-contradictory. He _would_ be persuaded, if Henderson swung for it, adhering to his statement. Such were Mr. Brace’s theories of evidence. He added that he was not fully persuaded that there was any hell to go to, yet probably he scrupled not to preach ‘tidings of damnation.’ He wanted to be more certain of Gowrie’s guilt, than he was that there is hell-fire. ‘Spiteful taunts’ followed, Mar’s repartee to the argument about hell being obvious. Bruce must have asserted the existence of hell, from the pulpit: though not ‘fully persuaded’ of hell. So why not assert the King’s innocence?