CHARACTERISTICS—(continued)

Did not seek power

Scaliger’s ascription to Buchanan of a spirit superior to the temptations of wealth and fame seems thus fairly well justified; but what of his further claim that he was insensible to ambition? He rose to be the foremost Latin poet and man of letters, or indeed poet and man of letters of any kind in his day, and to the highest positions, political, ecclesiastical, educational, in his native land. Did he reach all this without aiming at it? Did it all come upon him unsolicited? Substantially, it would seem, that was so. The key to his plan of life, I believe, is to be found in the beginning of the short autobiography which he wrote (1580) in the third person, two years before his death, not from motives of egotism, but at the request of friends. He is stating how he came to be sent to the University of Paris when about fourteen, and then he says, ibi cum studiis literarum, maxime carminibus scribendis, operam dedisset, partim naturÆ impulsu, partim necessitate (quod hoc unum studiorum genus adolescentiÆ proponebatur), etc.,—‘devoting himself there to literary studies, and chiefly to writing verses, partly from natural impulse and partly from necessity, that being the only sort of study open to youthful learners.’

That is really Buchanan in a nutshell. He followed the bent of his genius, and did not pick and choose his work, but performed, to the best of his ability, the task placed before him by Destiny. He lived up to his nature and his Fate, did with his might what his hand found to do, then took up the next undertaking that came along, and handled it in the same fashion. He waited upon ‘time and the hour’ rather than sought to force its hand—a very good way, if not indeed the best way, to confront life and its problems, for those who are wise enough and strong enough to do it. He made himself master of the spirit, ideas, and style of the great writers and thinkers of classic antiquity, because it was the work that lay nearest to his hand, and because he liked it—passionately—and could not rest until it was all and easily his own, and not because he thought he could make it pay, whether in money or reputation, or both. Except in the case of the unlucky and unfinished Sphere, he did not sit down to compose poetry deliberately and in cold blood, at the rate of so many scores or hundreds of lines before breakfast or dinner, as certain ‘poets’ are said to have done, or do. His best work of this kind was struck out of him like the fire from the flint, by the demand of the occasion, or the suggestion of friends, or an inspiration or impulse that came upon him at the moment.

It was the request of James V. (1537) that led to his becoming the most powerful satirist of his time and country, much above Lyndsay, at least on a level with Dunbar, and second only to Burns. His ‘Psalms’ were written (1550-51) to kill time while imprisoned in a Portuguese monastery. His Elegies, Epigrams, Tragedies, Masques, Addresses (1530-66) were thrown off in answer to the call of the moment and the circumstances. The Detectio ReginÆ (1569-71) was composed at the desire of the great anti-despotic and reforming party to which he belonged. The ‘Admonition to the Trew Lordis’ and the ‘Chameleon’ were political tracts for the times designed to stimulate the flagging zeal of the friends of freedom. The De Jure (1570-79) was inspired by a present and a foreseen necessity of making Liberty impregnable as against the reactionaries of Absolutism. The History was undertaken and completed (1569-82) less for a scientific than for a patriotic and politico-paideutic purpose, to set his country and its constitution in a true light before the world, and to help in moulding its future king into the constitutional ruler of a free people.

He held many appointments, and executed many commissions, not a few of them of the highest responsibility and dignity, but most of them sought him, not he them. Lord Cassilis had him for tutor-companion (1532-37). King James V. engaged him as tutor for one of his children (1538-39). The King of Portugal employed him to aid in founding and conducting his College at Coimbra, and did his best, though in vain, to retain him in his kingdom (1547-52). The famous MarÉchal de Brissac chose him to mould the mind of his son, and sometimes had him at a Council of War (1555-60). Queen Mary attached him to her Court, and as we have seen, read Livy with him, and, no doubt, much else (1562). The General Assembly of the Reformed Church of Scotland chose him, though a layman, as their Moderator (1567), he having already sat four years as a member and aided them in drawing up their First Book of Discipline. He was appointed by Regent Moray Principal of St. Leonard’s College, St. Andrews (1566), to reorganise its curriculum and constitution. He was selected as Secretary to the Commission sent by the Scots Government to deal with the high questions at issue between Queens Elizabeth and Mary (1568-69). The Scots Parliament chose him to the extremely responsible office of Tutor to the youthful King James VI. (1570), and continued him in that position nominally until his death (1582). He sat as a member of the Scots Parliament (1570-78) in virtue of his keepership of the Privy Seal, and did secretarial work for it, which nobody else was qualified to do, while at the same time assisting the General Assembly in revising their Book of ‘Policy.’ This keepership he may have solicited—he subsequently resigned it—although there is no proof of that, but all the other appointments came to him, and engaged his best ability as they passed him in procession.

Sir James Melville backs Scaliger

This view of Buchanan’s character and scheme of life is confirmed by the remarkable and elaborate account of him given, in his own Memoirs, by Sir James Melville of Halhill (1545-1617), a professional courtier and diplomatist who had served on the Continent in important missions and affairs, and had been a confidential servant both to Queen Mary and her son James VI. He is describing the guardians of the boy-king at Stirling (1570-78), and after having highly eulogised the Governor, he proceeds: ‘The Laird of Dromwhassel, his Maiestie’s maister of houshald, was ambitious and greedy, and had gretest cair how till advance himself and his friendis. The twa abbots [Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh] were wyse and modest; my Lady Mar was wyse and schairp, and held [i.e. kept] the King in great aw; and sa did Mester George Buchwhennen. Mester Peter Young[2] was gentiller, and was laith till offend the King at any tym, and used himself wairily, as a man that had mynd of his awin weill, be keeping of his Maiestie’s favour. Bot Mester George was a stoik philosopher, and looked not far before the hand; a man of notable qualities for his learning and knawledge in Latin poesie, mekle maid accompt of in other contrees, plaisant in company, rehersing at all occasions moralities short and fecfull, whereof he had aboundance, and invented wher he wanted.

‘He was also of gud religion for a poet, bot he was easily abused, and sa facill that he was led with any company that he hanted for the tyme, quhilk maid him factious in his auld dayes; for he spak and wret as they that wer about him for the tym infourmed him. For he was become sleperie and cairles, and followed in many thingis the vulgair oppinion, for he was naturally populaire, and extrem vengeable against any man that had offendit him, quhilk was his gretest fault. For he wret dispytfull invectives against the Erle of Monteith, for some particulaires that was between him and the Laird of Buchwhennen; and became the Erle of Morton’s gret ennemy, for ane hackney of his that chancit to be tane fra his saru[v]and during the civil troubles, and was bocht be the Regent; wha had na will to part with the said horse, he was sa sur of foot and sa easy, that albeit Mester George had oft tymes requyred him again, he culd not get him, and wher he had bene the Regentis gret frend of before, he becam his deadly ennemy, and spak evil of him fra that tym fourth in all places and at all occasions. Dromwhassel also, because the Regent kepit all the casualtes[3] to himself, and wald let nathing fall till v[u]thers that wer about the King, becam also his ennemy, and sa did they all that wer about his Maiestie.’

Melville was scarcely the man to take the measure of Buchanan on the more important side of his character, but he may be trusted to have given an honest view of him according to his lights—which, in some serious respects, were darkness—as well as of the impression which Buchanan had made on better judges of remarkable men than was the worthy Sir James himself. The latter’s preface is a charming piece of naÏvetÉ. He tells us that though a courtier he had dealt faithfully and not flatteringly with ‘princes,’ but had not found it a paying procedure, and hints that if he had it to do over again, he might sail on the opposite tack. He had advised the Laird of Carmichael to do so, who profited greatly by the advice, both for himself and his friends, but did not show much gratitude to his counsellor, as the latter complains—rather unreasonably, one would say, since, if you corrupt a man’s morale, you must not be disappointed if he treats you accordingly. Perhaps Sir James recovers his honest standing by the honest simplicity with which he confesses his leanings to dishonesty, like the M. de Bussy whom he quotes as also bewailing, too late, the honesty of his courtier career, but excusing himself on the ground that he could not help it, as it was his ‘nature to.’

All the more trustworthy, however, is probably the distinction Sir James draws between Peter Young and Buchanan. ‘Mester Peter’ was evidently no Nathanael in his critic’s view, and his subsequent good fortune, as attested by history, shows that his character had been accurately enough diagnosed. There is no reason to doubt, accordingly, that Sir James is equally correct in describing Buchanan as one who ‘looked not far before the hand.’ That is, he was not a calculating person, and set his duties above his interests; did his work to the best of his ability, and took his reward if, as, and when it came, but was really less anxious about securing the reward than about doing the work as it ought to be done.

A Faithful Mentor

His whole connection with James makes this plain. It begins with his Genethliacon or Birthday Ode, in which, after apostrophising the infant prince as the hope of all who desired the unity and consequent tranquillity of the two kingdoms, he addresses the felices felici prole parentes (‘parents to be felicitated on an offspring born to a felicitous career’), and under guise of a sketch, in verse of Virgilian elevation and beauty, of the standard of character up to which they should train their child, lays down with ‘faithful’ outspokenness the lines of duty on which their own lives should run, and warns them of the ruin which neglect of his counsel would bring. It is not, except in style, a courtly production. Darnley probably could not, but Mary certainly both could and would see the poet’s drift, and happy would it have been for both had they avoided the faults against which the poet directed his pointed admonition.

If James turned out ‘the wisest fool in Christendom,’ the folly was not the fault of Buchanan, but of James’s nature, and perhaps also of flatterers of the ‘Mester Peter Young’ order, who scattered tares among the wheat of the more worthy sower. At all events he made James a scholar, if the latter made himself a pedant; and this implied, in the circumstances and the particular case, an exercise of firm and even stern discipline—of which a famous if not quite elegant instance has been quoted above,—and which was better fitted to improve the morale of the pupil than the fortunes of the disciplinarian. As Melville puts it, Buchanan ‘held the king in awe,’ an awe which James felt and resented to the last, although, to do him justice, he also plumed himself on his training by an unrivalled scholar. Three works remarkable for their political teaching—his Baptistes, his De Jure Regni, and his History—Buchanan dedicated to James, in prefaces as remarkable as the works themselves. All three books were mainly, the second entirely, motived by the idea which Buchanan seems to have regarded as constituting and directing his true mission in life, namely, the unspeakable value of liberty, the constant possibility and deadly evil of tyranny, and the corresponding and always pressing duty of forestalling this possibility and resisting this evil by abundant proclamation and practice of the doctrine that legitimate political sovereignty exists only for the good and by the will of the people—a principle, of course, entirely subversive of the despotic doctrine of the Divine right of kings, so prevalent in usurpationist quarters in that day, and anticipatory of the modern and accepted democratic ‘platform’ of ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People.’

This is not the stage at which to describe the books themselves—it is their prefaces that make them relevant at present,—but a word to indicate their general character is necessary. The Baptistes was written (1540-41) when Buchanan was comparatively a young man, thirty-four or thirty-five, and was ‘regenting’ in a great secondary school or gymnasium at Bordeaux, called the CollÈge de Guyenne, organised and presided over by one AndrÉ de GouvÉa, a famous Portuguese Humanist and educator of the day. This Baptistes was simply a dramatic reproduction of the story of John the Baptist and his tragic end, the dramatis personÆ being King Herod, Queen Herodias, the latter’s dancing daughter, Malchus the high priest, Gamaliel, and the unlucky John himself. It was composed, Buchanan tells us in the dedicatory preface and in his autobiography (1574), in accordance with the rules of the college, and intended by him to win the students, who acted it, from the silly ‘mysteries’ of the monks to the imitation of classic antiquity, and the rising study of religion in its original documents. But there was something more intended. It is scarcely necessary to read ‘between the lines’ to find a complete condemnation of absolutist tyranny, and a picture of the misery which it brings on the tyrant himself as well as on his victims. This was not the kind of writing to please monarchs of the period. Nevertheless Buchanan dedicates it (1576) to the boy-king, as ‘having a peculiar appositeness to his position,’ warning him of ‘the agonisings and wretchedness which await tyrants, even when they seem to be most flourishing outwardly.’

This lesson, he goes on to say, he thinks ‘not only useful, but absolutely essential,’ for his royal pupil to learn now, so that he may ‘early begin to hate’ a fault which ‘he ought always to shun.’ Moreover, he ‘wishes to place it on record, for the information of posterity, that if the king should in the future, at the instigation of evil advisers, or by allowing the lust of power to overcome the principles of his education, act contrary to the warnings now given him, the blame must be laid, not on his teachers, but on himself, in not having listened to those who gave him good counsel.’ This was not the language of flattery; and though James was only ten when he was thus addressed, the precocity of his intelligence would enable him to understand its import. He was destined, in a very few years, to be king in fact as he was now in name, and Buchanan knew that if his charge turned out other than he was trying to make him—what actually happened—his own plain speaking would not be to his advantage. Knowing this, he did his duty, and had his sovereign for his enemy when the latter got used to being his own master. The fact reveals an elevation of character in Buchanan which cannot be justly forgotten in judging of him in other connections. It is not surprising that the agents in Scotland of Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s great minister, when on the look-out for ‘Biencontents,’ as they were called, who might be dealt with in the way of bribery with a view to forming a strong Elizabethan party in Scotland, should have secretly reported (1579, King’s age thirteen) Buchanan as ‘a singular man,’ while of ‘Mester Peter Young’ they say that he was ‘specially well affected, and ready to persuade the king to be in favour of her majestye.’

Three years after dedicating the Baptistes to James in the style we have seen, he dedicated the De Jure to him (1579). This was a still bolder and more independent proceeding. Without entering, for the present, into the details of its argument, it may be enough to remember that, with its doctrine of Sovereignty as originating from the People, existing for their benefit, and not autocratic, but bounded by laws to which the People have consented, the De Jure must have appeared to Absolutist and ‘Divine right people’ generally, revolutionary rubbish of the most pernicious description; and accordingly, in 1584, when Buchanan had been dead two years, they had it condemned and its publication and circulation forbidden by express Statute of the Scots Parliament—the King, of course, assenting, if not inciting; while, as we have already seen, the University of Oxford, later on, paid it the compliment of having it publicly burned. Buchanan must have, in a general way, foreseen the possibility of something like this, and the risk he ran if the King should, in his riper age, turn upon him and seek to rend him. This, however, did not deter him from pressing his democratic treatise on the attention and study of his royal pupil.

He praises him, not in the fulsome and fawning language of the Dedication literature of the time, but with evident sincerity and honest, hearty admiration for the brightness of his abilities, his intellectual interests, his independence of judgment while inquiring into the truth of things and opinions. He congratulates him, too, on his present aversion to flattery, that ‘nurse of Tyranny, and deadliest of plagues to genuine kingship’—tyrannidis nutricula, et legitimi regni gravissima pestis,—and rejoices that he seems ‘instinctively to detest’—naturÆ quodam instinctu oderis—‘the courtly solecisms and barbarisms’—solÆcismos et barbarismos aulicos—affected by those self-chosen ‘arbiters of elegance’—elegantiÆ censores—who ‘spice their conversation’—velut sermonis condimenta—with ‘profuse employment of “Your Majesty,” “Your Lordship,” “Your Illustrious Highness,” and any other still more sickening title they can find’—passim Majestates, Dominationes, Illustritates, et si qua alia magis sunt putida, adspergant. Was there any latent reference here to ‘Mester Peter Young’ and his courtier ways? Anyhow, Buchanan plainly owns that he has doubts and fears for James’s future. He tells him of the dangers of evil companionship, and invites him to the study of the essay thus dedicated to him, not only as an instructor that will show him the right and wrong of the subject, but as a Mentor that may ‘keep at him’ in importunate and even audacious fashion, as it may seem for the moment. If he is faithful to the principles commended to him, there will be peace in the present for him and his, and lasting glory in the future. James subsequently thought he could do better, and threw off his early training; but, notwithstanding, or in consequence, he failed alike to achieve a peaceful career or to transmit a glorious memory. The citation from the chorus in the Thyestes of Seneca—who also was tutor to a royal failure, although James must, of course, be admitted to have been a brilliant success compared with Nero—in which the great but ill-starred Roman delineates the Stoic king, appended to Buchanan’s dedication, no doubt expresses his own view of what James might and should have been: beginning with—

‘It is not wealth nor the purple robe that makes a king,’ etc.

and ending—

‘He is a king who has conquered Fear and Desire. Such a kingship every man may give himself, and none else.’

It is in the same spirit that he dedicates his History to the King (1582, James sixteen). He knows perfectly well how his book is likely to be taken. Writing (1577) to Sir Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the Scottish court, and Buchanan’s quondam pupil at Paris, he says: ‘I am occupiit in wryting of our historie, being assurit to content few, and to displease many thairthrow.’ Among the many ‘displeased,’ he could not but foresee that possibly the young King might be found, on account of the unfavourable view which, in common with most historians, he felt himself obliged to take of the character and career of the King’s own mother, Queen Mary. He must have felt too that, unless James were all the more magnanimous, he might take deep offence—as he did, death alone saving Buchanan from criminal proceedings on account of his ‘seditious’ writings—at his now nominal preceptor’s contention that by the Constitution of Scotland the monarchy had, as an historical fact as well as by a true philosophy, been all along a derivative and limited, even very limited, one, and anything but a divinely authorised Absolutism, as maintained by courtly authorities. Buchanan, however, prefers to assume that James had enough of the king and the public man in him to sink private feeling in public duty and accept truth, however unpleasant; and accordingly he dedicates his History to him, urging him to follow the example of his good predecessors and eschew that of the bad ones, and more particularly commending to his notice and imitation the career of the saintly David I., the ‘sair saunt for the crown’ of one of his successors and descendants, as a ruler who, according to his lights—some of which, however, especially those that led to his profuse and corrupting liberality to the Church, Buchanan, herein endorsing John Major, his early St. Andrews ‘regent’ in Logic, emphatically decries—devoted himself not to pleasure, or the strengthening of his prerogative, but to what seemed to him to be the true welfare of his people. In all this, some of Buchanan’s critics have thought him too stern, and that gentler methods might have won over James to better thoughts. But truth must always be stern to those who dislike or fear it. Yet those only are the real friends of these latter who give them the chance of profiting by it; and in so acting by James, come what might of himself and his personal fortunes, Buchanan will be thought by most admirers of a high morale to have stamped himself as a wholly high-minded and even heroic character.