In 1573, Kirkcaldy of Grange and Maitland of Lethington gallantly held the last strength of the captive Mary Stuart, the Castle of Edinburgh. The fortress was to fall under the guns of the English allies of that Earl of Gowrie (then Lord Ruthven), who was the father of the Gowrie of our mystery. On April 17, 1573, a compact was made between Lord Ruthven and Drury, the English general. One provision was (the rest do not here concern us) that Alexander, Lord Home; Lethington; and Robert Logan of Restalrig, if captured, ‘shall be reserved to be justified by the laws of Scotland,’ which means, hanged by the neck. But neither on that nor on any other occasion was our Logan hanged. {152} He somehow escaped death and forfeiture, when Kirkcaldy was gibbeted after the fall of the castle. In 1577, we find him, with Lord Lindsay and Mowbray of Barnbogle (now Dalmeny) surety for Queen Mary’s half-brother, the Lord Robert Stewart, who vainly warned Darnley to escape from Kirk o’ Field. Lord Robert was then confined by the Regent Morton in Linlithgow, and Logan with the rest was surety in 10,000_l._ that he would not attempt to escape. Later, Logan was again surety that Lord Robert would return after visiting his dominions, the Orkney Islands. {153} Logan, though something of a pirate, was clearly a man of substance and of a good house, which he strengthened by alliances. One of his wives, Elizabeth Macgill, was the daughter of the Laird of Cranstoun Riddell, and one of her family was a member of the Privy Council. From Elizabeth Logan was divorced; she was, apparently, the mother of his eldest son, Robert. By the marriage of an ancestor of Logan’s with an heiress of the family of Hume, he acquired the fortress and lands of Fastcastle, near St. Abbs, on the Berwickshire coast. The castle, now in ruins, is the model of Wolfscrag in ‘The Bride of Lammermoor.’ Standing on the actual verge of a perpendicular cliff above the sea, whence it is said to have been approached by a staircase cut in the living rock, it was all but inaccessible, and was strongly fortified. Though commanded by the still higher cliff to the south, under which it nestled on its narrow plateau of rock, Fastcastle was then practically impregnable, and twenty men could have held it against all Scotland. Around it was, and is, a roadless waste of bent and dune, from which it was severed by a narrow rib of rock jutting seawards, the ridge being cut by a cavity which was spanned by a drawbridge. Master of this inaccessible eyrie, Logan was most serviceable to the plotters of these troubled times.