During the same year (1612) another event occurred in the north, which created considerable uproar and discord in the northern Highlands. A person of the name of Arthur Smith, who resided in Banff, had counterfeited the coin of the realm, in consequence of which he, and a man who had assisted him, fled from Banff into Sutherland, where being apprehended in the year 1599, they were sent by the Countess of Sutherland to the king, who ordered them to be imprisoned in Edinburgh for trial. They were both accordingly tried and condemned, and having confessed to crimes even of a deeper dye, Smith’s accomplice was burnt at the place of execution. Smith himself was reserved for farther trial. By devising a lock of rare and curious workmanship, which took the fancy of the king, he ultimately obtained his release and entered into the service of the Earl of Caithness. His workshop was under the rock of Castle Sinclair, in a quiet retired place called the Gote, and to which there was a secret passage from the earl’s bedchamber. No person was admitted to Smith’s workshop but the earl; and the circumstance of his being often heard working during the night, raised suspicions that some secret work was going on which could not bear the light of day. The mystery was at last disclosed by an inundation of counterfeit coin in Caithness, Orkney, Sutherland, and Ross, which was first detected by Sir Robert Gordon, brother to the Earl of Sutherland, when in Scotland, in the year 1611, and he, on his return to England, made the king acquainted therewith. A commission was granted to Sir Robert to apprehend Smith, and bring him to Edinburgh, but he was so much occupied with other concerns that he intrusted the commission to Donald Mackay, his nephew, and to John Gordon, younger of Embo, whose name was jointly inserted in the commission along with that of Sir Robert. Accordingly, Mackay and Gordon, accompanied by Adam Gordon Georgeson John, Gordon in Broray, and some other Sutherland men, went, in May, 1612, to Strathnaver, and assembling some of the inhabitants, they marched into Caithness next morning, and entered the town of Thurso, where Smith then resided.