We now have all the essential facts which rest on fairly good evidence, and we ask, did the Ruthvens lay a plot for the King, or did the King weave a web to catch the Ruthvens? Looking first at character and probable motives, we dismiss the gossip about the amorous Queen and the jealous King. The tatlers did not know whether to select Gowrie or the Master as the object of the Queen’s passion, or whether to allege that she had a polyandrous affection for both at once. The letters of the age hint at no such amour till after the tragedy, when tales of the _liaison_ of Anne of Denmark with the elder or younger Ruthven, or both, arose as a myth to account for the events. The Queen, no doubt, was deeply grieved in a womanly way for the sake of her two maidens, Beatrix and Barbara Ruthven. Her Majesty, also in a womanly way, had a running feud with Mar and the whole house of Erskine. To Mar, certainly one of the few men of honour as well as of rank in Scotland, James had entrusted his son, Prince Henry; the care of the heir to the Crown was a kind of hereditary charge of the Erskines. The Queen had already, in her resentment at not having the custody of her son, engaged in one dangerous plot against Mar; she made another quarrel on this point at the time (1603) when the King succeeded to the crown of England. Now Mar was present at the Gowrie tragedy, and his cousin, Sir Thomas Erskine, took part in the deeds. Hating the Erskines, devoted to the Ruthven ladies, and always feebly in opposition to her husband, the Queen, no doubt, paraded her grief, her scepticism, and her resentment. This was quite in keeping with her character, and this conduct lent colour to the myth that she loved Gowrie, or the Master, or both, _par amours_. The subject is good for a ballad or a novel, but history has nothing to make with the legend on which Mr. G. P. R. James based a romance, and Mr. Pinkerton a theory.