At Perth, on the fifth of August 1600, King James VI of Scotland sat down at table in the house of the Ruthvens following a morning’s chase. He had arrived with but a slender escort. His host, John Ruthven, Earl of Gowrie, had ordered dinner to be prepared; his younger brother, Alexander, had only just returned from Falkland, where he had spoken with the King in private. Shortly after the meal, James ascended to an upper gallery. When he presently reappeared at a window, bareheaded and flushed in the face, he shouted aloud that he was being murdered.
Such is the scene unfolded in the depositions compiled by George Borrow, which were laid before the Scottish Parliament following the death of the two brothers. Their testimony charges the Ruthvens with having lured James into a secluded chamber, either to abduct or to assassinate him; posthumously, the Crown caused them to be attainted of high treason. This posthumous status is of paramount consequence: neither man ever appeared at the bar to confront the witnesses whose words were to fix the official history of the realm.
The day had opened before dawn. Andrew Henderson, the Earl’s chamberlain, had received orders the previous evening to attend Alexander Ruthven to Falkland. At four o’clock in the morning, he set out alongside another servant. The King was preparing for the hunt when the young Ruthven overtook him. Following a quarter-hour’s conference, Alexander dispatched Henderson back to Perth with a message: James would dine that day at his brother’s house, accompanied by a modest train.
Henderson reached Perth towards ten o’clock. The Earl questioned him closely as to what the King had said, how he had received Alexander, and how many huntsmen were in his retinue. He then commanded his chamberlain to put on his coat of mail and steel sleeves. When Henderson inquired wherefore this was needed, the Earl replied that an unquiet Highland man had to be apprehended near the gate of Shoe Lane. The explanation brought little ease to Henderson’s mind. Later, while dinner was being served, he received a further command to fetch his steel bonnet and gauntlets.
The King rode into Perth accompanied by Alexander, the Duke of Lennox, and several gentlemen of his court. The Duke subsequently related that upon the road James had spoken of a secret treasure: Gowrie’s brother claimed to have discovered a man bearing a broad pitcher filled with ancient gold coin. The King had professed a desire to view this find. Lennox looked upon the tale with suspicion; the King, nevertheless, rode on. Borrow records this detail without determining its true import: the gold may have served as a lure, or it may have been an invention conceived after the fact to give coherence to an encounter that remained shrouded in obscurity.
Within the house, the meal proceeded at first before numerous witnesses. There was a long delay before the wine, and subsequently the King’s dinner, were brought to table. When the service had concluded, the Earl withdrew for a space to attend upon James. Returning to the gentlemen, he informed them that the King had already departed through the back gate and that they might ride out to join him. The porter, however, insisted that this gate was locked and that the King had not passed through. The Earl persisted in his assertion. He stepped out into the street alongside the others, whilst doubt deepened throughout the courtyard.
At that moment, the Duke of Lennox and the Earl of Mar caught the sound of a voice shouting from above. Looking up towards the turret window, they beheld James bareheaded, his face scarlet, a hand clutched near his mouth. He was crying out for help and shouting of treason. The gentlemen rushed toward the turnpike stair. The door to the upper gallery resisted their efforts. They battered it with a ladder, which shattered beneath their blows, and then sent for iron hammers. The passage had to be won by force.
Henderson the chamberlain was already within the room. Alexander had conducted him thither and locked him inside a small cabinet, the Earl having charged Henderson to remain with his brother and do his bidding. Henderson wore his armour, sword, and whinger, yet had left his helmet behind. He related that he had fallen upon his knees to pray, convinced that some dreadful business was afoot. Alexander presently re-entered, holding the King fast by the arm. He seized Henderson’s weapon and bade James yield himself prisoner, calling to mind the death of his father, William Ruthven, who had been executed upon the scaffold in 1584.
The King answered, according to the deposition, that he had not held the reins of state when William was put to death, and that he would not suffer himself to be bound. Alexander maintained that he sought not the King’s life, but only a promise in his brother’s favour. He then quitted the chamber, turning the key behind him and leaving James alone with Henderson. When the King demanded of the chamberlain why he stood there, Henderson answered that he had been shut up like a dog. The King sought to thrust open the window. Alexander burst back into the room and threw himself upon his sovereign; Henderson stated that he wrenched away a garter intended to bind the King’s hands. The King and the young nobleman wrestled toward the sill. Henderson managed to force open the wooden shutter, and James shouted down to the courtyard below.
John Ramsay, a royal page carrying the King’s hawk, gained entrance to the chamber in the thick of the struggle. He testified that he struck Alexander with his dagger, the King having directed him to strike low, as the youth was clad in a doublet of fence. James thrust Alexander toward the head of the stair. Other courtiers surged into the house. Sir Thomas Erskine related that Alexander, wounded in the face and neck, staggered down the steps, protesting that he was not to blame for what had occurred. The men surrounding him cried out that he was a traitor and struck him down. He expired before the King could quit the chamber.
Gowrie, meanwhile, was in the street surrounded by armed retainers. The testimonies of the witnesses diverge in their particulars, yet they agree that he rushed back toward the house wearing a steel bonnet and wielding a sword in either hand. Henderson the chamberlain saw him near the threshold. Lennox recounted that the Earl at first denied all knowledge of the uproar, then forced his way inward. Erskine met him upon the stair; the Earl attacked him and wounded him in the hand. Ramsay and the King’s men fell upon him in return. Gowrie fell, mortally stricken. Amid the confusion, the King was at last joined by the remainder of his train.
The voices that reconstructed this day belonged almost entirely to the royal faction. The Crown rested its case upon the depositions of Henderson, Lennox, Mar, Ramsay, Erskine, the porter, and a multitude of other witnesses; two-and-twenty further depositions corroborated sundry particulars or set forth secondary circumstances. Yet the men whom these testimonies accused were dead. Parliament did not try them in an adversarial hearing: on the fifteenth of November, it proceeded upon an act of attainder directed against their heirs, pronouncing the brothers guilty after their deaths.
The sentence struck far beyond their own persons. It confiscated their estates, abolished their name and memory, tore down their coat of arms, and stripped their kindred of their civil rights. The surviving brothers and their posterity were forever barred from holding lands or offices under the Crown. Even before this decree was pronounced, three of the Earl’s retainers had been led to execution at Perth. Thus did the affair transmute the violent end of two young nobles into the utter proscription of an ancient house.
After the fray, Henderson returned to his own hearth, having walked for a long time beside the bridge. His wife asked him what had befallen them within that house. He answered her that, had he not stood where he did, the King had been struck through twice; and he added that he grieved bitterly for that which had come to pass. This brief utterance, embedded within the legal depositions, unites the relief of having shielded his prince with the heavy grief of having witnessed the slaughter of the two brothers in whose service he had lived. It leaves the mystery of Perth unresolved. It hints at what no parliamentary act could ever efface: that a day begun with a message upon a royal hunt had ended in blood, an attainted line, and an official history to which the condemned could never frame a reply.