That James had introduced and suborned Henderson and that Henderson fled to give tone and colour to his narrative, is not among the most probable of conjectures. I do not find that this desperate hypothesis was put forward at the time. It could not be, for apologists averred (1) that Henderson was eating an egg in the kitchen: (2) that he was waiting on the gentlemen in the hall, at the moment when, by the desperate hypothesis, he was, by some machination of James, in the turret: (3) there is a third myth, a Perth tradition, that Henderson had been at Scone all day, and first heard the tragic news, when all was over, as, on his return, he crossed the bridge over Tay. As it is incredible that there was no man in the turret at all, and that James took the outside chance that somebody, anybody, would claim to be the man; the assailants of the King must offer a working hypothesis of this important actor in the drama. My own fancy can suggest none. Was he in four places at once, in the kitchen, in the hall, on the bridge, and in the turret? If he was in the kitchen, in the hall, or on the bridge, why did he instantly abscond? If _James_ put him in the turret, why did he fly? The King’s word, I repeat, was the word that no man could rely on. But, among competing improbabilities, the story which was written on the night of August 5, and to which he adhered under Bruce’s cross-examination, is infinitely the least improbable. The Master of Gray, an abominable character, not in Scotland when the events occurred, reported, _not_ from Scotland, that Lennox had said that, if put on his oath, ‘he could not say whether the practice proceeded from Gowrie or the King.’ (Sept 30, 1600) [Picture: Falkland Palace] The Master of Gray wrote from Chillingham, on the English side of the Border, where he was playing the spy for Cecil. Often he played the double spy, for England and for Rome. Lennox may well have been puzzled, he may have said so, but the report rests on the evidence of one who did not hear his words, who wished to flatter the scepticism of James’s English enemies, and whose character (though on one point he is unjustly accused) reeks with infamy. That of James does not precisely ‘smell sweet and blossom in the dust.’ But if the question arises, whether a man of James’s position, age, and temperament, or whether a young man, with the antecedents which we are about to describe, was the more likely to embark on a complicated and dangerous plot—in James’s case involving two murders at inestimable personal risk—it is not unnatural to think that the young man is the more likely to ‘have the wyte of it.’ XI. THE KING AND THE RUTHVENS