ABSTRACT
The events of 5 August 1600 at Gowrie House, Perth, are certainly one way into a discussion of noble power during the reign of James VI, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There is no good example of noble lordship to see here; no great clash between centralising government and territorial magnates; no struggle in which a godly noble stands up to an ungodly king. No – this famous incident instead illustrates the limits on noble power brought on by the human frailties of incompetence, bad temper and bad luck. The Gowrie Conspiracy revolved around a bungling bid for royal favour that went tragically and, at times, farcically wrong. By its confused nature it could only ever have been presented afterwards as a murder plot. It is important to stress from the outset that we cannot ever know exactly what happened that afternoon; despite many advances in the study of James VI and I over the past four decades, we will, after all, still have to wait patiently for the Day of Judgement to know what happened.1 The following interpretation does not concentrate on the major grand themes outlined in the introduction to this volume, nor does it dwell on finance and the crown’s debts to Gowrie, often seen as a major factor in other studies.2 Instead, it is time to look beyond grand theories and at the day for what it was – a ridiculous, but tragic, series of contingent events.
