here set forth comes under these two marks of spuriousness or falsification of written evidence. It will also appear that the foregoing pages form a most instructive commentary on that chapter of the same work, entitled, 'Of Suppression or Fabrication of Evidence, considered as affording Evidence of Delinquency.'1 Wishart, in his Memoirs of the Marquis of Montrose,' 2 mentions that in 1650 the head of the Marquis of Montrose was fixed upon the tolbooth of Edinburgh over against the Earl of Gowries's [his uncle's], with an iron cross over it, lest by any of his friends it should have been taken down.' After the battle of Dunbar Montrose's head was taken down by Cromwell's orders; and it may be hoped that the Earl of Gowrie's was taken down at the same time and decently buried. But as truth gradually emerges out of the darkness of barbarism and romance, it will gibbet this King James and his ministers on an eminence of infamy from which it will need a stronger even than Cromwell to take them down. The question of the guilt or innocence of King James may, like that of the guilt or innocence of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, appear to some a question of small importance. But, besides the knowledge to be derived from the examination of this question, of the difficulty of getting at truth, the case of King James has more in it of a national, and not merely personal, character, than that of his mother queen Mary. For the character of this king and his court had so much to do in engendering the spirit that produced the great Puritan rebellion of the succeeding reign, that the true nature of that great insur 1 Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence, vol. iii. p. 165. rection cannot be thoroughly understood without at least some knowledge of the character of King James and his court. Having examined the whole of the evidence bearing on the affair which King James called the Gowrie Conspiracy; having carefully perused the depositions of the witnesses, the letters alleged to have been written by Logan to the Ruthvens, and manifestly forged (as I have proved) seven or eight years after the event to which they refer, and all the papers relating to the matter; having most anxiously sought to arrive at the truth by a careful examination and comparison of all the various parts of which the evilence consists, in order to learn how firmly or how loosely, how coherently or how incoherently, it hangs together; I have arrived at the conclusion that the assertion of the existence of the alleged conspiracy on the part of of the two murdered boys, the Earl of Gowrie and his brother, Alexander Ruthven, is based only on a vast fabric of circumstantial falsehood, propped up by perjury, torture, forgery, and murder. Even without insisting upon any particular explanation of the mysterious part of that affair called the Gowrie Conspiracy, the mere facts which are undisputed, and present themselves in the various stages of the transaction, appear to me to convey such conclusive evidence of an unjust and oppressive government as would of itself prove the necessity of the great rebellion against the tyranny of the Stuarts, which there is abundant evidence to show they intended to exercise in England as well as in Scotland: a necessity, be it added, which this case of itself proves as existing no less for the protection of the persons and property of the nobility than of the commons. ESSAY VI. THE GOVERNMENT OF THE COMMMONWEALTH AND THE GOVERNMENT OF CROMWELL. FOR a large portion of the materials bearing upon the dark passage of English history which forms the subject of the two essays that follow this essay-the first on the death of Prince Henry, and the second on the death of Sir Thomas Overbury, I am principally indebted to the laborious and skilful researches of Mr. Amos, the results of which he published in 1846, in a volume entitled 'The Great Oyer of Poisoning: the trial of the Earl of Somerset for the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower of London, and various matters connected therewith, from contemporary MSS.' I am also indebted to the same careful and laborious writer for the acute and ingenious hypothesis respecting the true causes of the death of Sir Thomas Overbury. To state thus much was but justice to Mr. Amos, for whose legal learning and acuteness, as well as for the minute accuracy of his laborious researches, I entertain a sincere respect. It is also, however, but justice to myself to state that the idea. of attempting to connect together the disjointed and scattered fragments of evidence respecting the plot, of which the death of Prince Henry was but one incident or link, and of which the death of Sir Thomas Overbury was another incident or link, is my own, and has not been acted upon, as far as I know, by any other writer. For the purpose of carrying out this idea I have also used materials both MS. and printed which have not before been made available. I should hardly have thought it necessary to trouble the reader with these few words respecting myself and my materials, if I had not found by experience what gross misrepresentations may be put forward by an anonymous critic respecting any book which he book which he may have reasons of his own to desire to suppress. There are certain circumstances connected with the article referred to which appear to take it out of the class of ordinary and legitimate criticism, and to impose upon the writer attacked the disagreable duty of placing on record an answer to it. For it appears that, if a writer has the presumption to differ from this critic's conclusions respecting questions that must be determined not by the opinion of any man or any body of men, but by evidence, he is to be put down by an elaborate attack, evidently written by a practised writer, and published a month after the publication of the book it attacked, in order that other critics might take their tone from this critic who writes as one having authority, and as if perorating from a professor's chair. As the critic referred to not only charges me with making false pretensions to the use of new materials in my History of the Commonwealth of England,' but also propounds principles of historical criticism which appear to me thoroughly unsound, it may be worth while to give a distinct answer both to his charges and to his criticism. I. With regard to Mr. Godwin's History of the Commonwealth,' as I had found in it neither new materials nor new ideas, I thought it needless to make any reference to it; but as this critic has dragged it forward, I will show how far the claim he sets up for it is from being valid. 6 In the course of the 480 pages of his third volume, in which Mr. Godwin deals with the period forming the subject of my two volumes, he has in all thirty references to the MS. Order Books of the Council of State-forty volumes of which-thin volumes with parchment covers1 -constitute the bulk of the new materials which I have used in my History of the Commonwealth of England.' Of these references very few contain, in my judgment, anything either of importance or of interest. There is one of these insulated references indeed which at first sight might seem to establish an important fact, but which on being closely examined is found to be quite inaccurate. It is the announcement of '2001. assigned to Mr. Scot quarterly, to be expended on secret service-Godwin, vol. iii. p. 190-and the reference is to Order Book July 9, 1649. On referring to the MS. Order Books in the State Paper Office under date July 9, 1649, I find this minute: That Mr. Scot shall have 2001. paid him quarterly, for his payment in managing the business of intelligence committed to his care, to begin from midsummer last, and that he have 1 These are the original rough Draft Order Books, written at the Council table of the Council of State, at the time when the minutes were made and passed by the Council. There are also in the State Paper Office fair copies of these Draft Order Books, which being in larger and thicker books, form a much smaller number of volumes. Some volumes of these fair copies being lost, I generally made use of the volumes containing the original rough drafts, which, as distinguished from the fair copies, may be called the Draft Order Books. On the parchment covers of some of these are written the words 'Foule Order Book,' meaning the original rough Draught Order Book. X |