GEORGE BUCHANAN

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY AND GENERAL

On the 21st July 1683, Lord William Russell was beheaded in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, because Charles II., F.D., who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one, thought it would help to keep alive the Stuart doctrine of the Divine right of kings. On the same day, the political writings of George Buchanan and one John Milton were, by decree of the learned and loyal University of Oxford, publicly burned in front of their Schools by the common hangman, because they were regarded as the most formidable and dangerous defences of the principles on account of which it had been considered judicious to kill Lord William Russell, and perhaps also in token that if Buchanan and Milton had not been dead they might have been burned too, along with their books. It is comforting to reflect that this same decree was subsequently burned with the same publicity—and by the same common hangman, one would hope.

At the time, however, the Oxford transaction, in view of the sycophancy, obscurantism, and other degrading characteristics of the then University, was the highest compliment that could have been paid to Buchanan and Milton, and especially to Buchanan. For Buchanan was substantially a century before Milton, who, like the rest of the Roundheads, was inspired by Buchanan’s principles and greatly assisted by his arguments. Dryden, indeed, declared that Milton stole his Defence of the People of England from Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos; but that was only ‘Glorious John’s’ inglorious way of making himself controversially disagreeable. Milton put his own genius and experience into Buchanan’s idea, and produced an essentially original work. But what although he had not? Milton was fighting a great battle, and was entitled, or rather bound, to use the best weapons, wherever he could get them. The anti-plagiarising spirit is often a mere form of vanity. If the Royal Artillery declined to plagiarise from Armstrong and Krupp, and insisted on making all their ammunition themselves, I should tremble for the defence of the country. Not the less, however, does Buchanan amply merit the title of ‘Father of Liberalism,’ since the principles which he successfully floated in unpropitious times undoubtedly produced the two great English, the American, and the first French Revolutions, with all their continuations and consequences.

Let it be noted that the distinction which Buchanan achieved in this matter was not merely that of the political philosopher and thinker. The publication of the De Jure, at the time and under the circumstances in which it appeared, was a blow of the utmost consequence, delivered in the great politico-theological struggle with which he was contemporary. It was like one of Knox’s famous sermons, which were not mere religious meditations, but political events of the most immense influence, present and future. The Reformation, particularly in Scotland, was, in its inception and establishment, a political, quite as much as a religious revolution, of which Buchanan was not simply an interested but recluse critic and dilettante spectator. He thought profoundly about what he saw going on, but he also threw his thoughts into the fight that was raging round him, with bombshell results, and the effects of what he thought and did upon the fortunes of the great struggle for popular liberty against usurping ascendency—a struggle not even yet concluded—prove him to have possessed qualities of far-sightedness and statesmanship of the highest order.

In a totally different walk of life he achieved almost equal distinction. He was a great scholar-poet and general writer; and when, in this connection, I use the words ‘almost equal,’ I am thinking of the question whether the director of human affairs or the artist in words and ideas of beauty or human interest is the greater. Of course, comparison of things or people generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether CÆsar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. Henri Estienne, for instance,—Buchanan’s Stephanus, our Stephens—said that he was poetarum nostri sÆculi facile princeps, meaning thereby ‘easily the first poet of our time,’ which is sufficiently strong. Of course it may be said that Estienne or Stephens was only a printer. But there are printers and printers, and Stephanus belonged to the second class. Anybody who knows anything about the literary history of the time will understand that such praise from Estienne implied a very great deal.

Then there were the Scaligers, Julius CÆsar pÈre, and Joseph fils, a greater man than his father, in the opinion of the best judges—himself included, probably. They were not men easy to please, the Scaligers. Even Erasmus was not good enough for Julius CÆsar, who used language truly awful about the glory of the priesthood and the shame. As for Joseph, there was but one man alive in his own line for whom he had a vestige of respect, and that was Casaubon; and he told him so, intimating that he might think a good deal of the compliment, as he, Joseph, was the only man in Europe who was capable of forming an opinion about him—a perfectly true if not absolutely humble observation. But however difficult to please in most cases, the Scaligers had a sincere and unbounded admiration of Buchanan—an admiration abundantly shown while he lived, and when he was gone, expressed, especially by the younger Scaliger, with a tenderness and beauty which stamp the tribute with authority and value. His epitaphium on Buchanan concluded thus:—

Anybody with a fair understanding of Latin and a full understanding of epigram, who reads the last couplet here, will know that Scaliger was perfectly qualified to pronounce a judgment in the matter. For the benefit of the man in the street, it may be stated that what Scaliger was driving at was that Buchanan had brought poetry to a pitch of perfection beyond which it could not go; and that as Scotland had in the past been the last line of expansion for the Roman Empire, so in the future it would, in the person of Buchanan, be found to have given the highest note of Roman eloquence. Of course it may be said that this was only the customary and privileged lie of the epitaph; but that it was really Scaliger’s deliberate opinion appears from a well-known quotation from his table-talk, that ‘in Latin poetry Buchanan stands alone in Europe, and leaves everybody else behind.’ Coming to more modern times, it will probably be admitted that Wordsworth knew good poetry when he saw it, and he says of one of Buchanan’s poems—by no means his best—that it was equal in sentiment, if not in elegance, to anything in Horace.

This he said before a pedantic relative pointed out a false quantity. What he would have felt had he known this before he read the poem, Schoolmaster only knows. What the latter potentate would have done we may partly surmise from what Porson actually did when some one got him to commence reading Buchanan’s poetry and he stumbled up against a false quantity, or what he regarded as such. He at once got up and pitched the volume across the room in disgust, probably with an accompaniment of expressions not loud but deep. Regarding which behaviour, two remarks seem natural. The first is that possibly Buchanan was right and Porson wrong. At Eton, as is well known, Porson was a poor quantitarian, and fell behind in consequence. He may have made up his leeway afterwards, but not likely, and certainly his line of scholarship was not in the direction of Latin Prosody.

But suppose Buchanan were wrong, what then? Is Shakespeare to be flung into the corner because many of his lines will not scan? An indignant critic of the Agamemnon has discovered, what I believe is the fact, that in that play Æschylus has violated Dawes’s canon. Yet everybody that can reads the Agamemnon. Dr. Johnson points out that Milton uses the hideous solecism vapulandum. Only think of it! And yet we read Paradise Lost. Perhaps Porson did too, knowing nothing of vapulandum! Johnson was no such stickler, for he read and enjoyed Milton, vapulandum notwithstanding. He had also the highest opinion of Buchanan, both as a Latinist and as ‘a great poetical genius,’ and his authority on such matters, being both poet and critic himself, is much greater than Porson’s, great though the latter was in his own department of research. Hallam is inclined to qualify the almost universal admiration of Buchanan’s poetry, but one begins to doubt Hallam’s judgment in this matter when he finds him preferring Buchanan’s De SphÆra to the rest of his poetry. The Sphere may contain exquisite isolated passages ‘equal to Virgil,’ as the enthusiastic Guy Patin maintained, but it is not properly a poem at all. It is really a versified and very lame defence of the exploded Ptolemaic Astronomy, totally destitute of the human interest which inspires so much else that Buchanan wrote. On his own field of history Hallam is more of an authority, and here his admiration of Buchanan is unstinted and unequivocal. He extols the ‘perspicuity and power’ of the History of Scottish Affairs, recognises the ‘purity’ of its diction, and affirms that few writings of the Latinists are ‘more redolent of the antique air,’ and is almost as emphatic in his eulogy as Dryden, when the latter says of Buchanan, ‘our isle may justly boast in him a writer comparable to any of the moderns, and excelled by few of the ancients.’ Froude might be cited to the same effect, but enough has been said to establish Buchanan’s fame and power in the world of letters.

Of course, care must be taken to distinguish the precise character of Buchanan’s scholarship. He was not a scholar in the sense that Casaubon, or Porson, or Liddell and Scott were scholars. That is to say, he was not a classical antiquarian, or philologist, or grammarian, although he knew antiquities and such philology as was going, and had refurbished or even made a grammar or two as he went along. But he used these simply as instruments to his main aim as a scholar, which was to write as good Latin as Virgil, or Livy, or Horace, or Tacitus. There is nothing absurd or impossible in such an aim. I have heard ardent Aberdonians maintain that the late Dr. Melvin of their city wrote better Latin than Cicero, and, apart from the matter, I am quite ready to believe it. That Buchanan as good as accomplished his purpose we have already seen.

And be it remembered that all this cultivation of a Latin style was not mere dilettante work on his part. He and one Sturm of Strasbourg, along with other Humanists, had formed the design of making Latin the vernacular of Europe, and actually believed that it would ultimately become such. Hence they had a twofold purpose in writing Latin. They desired to forward this reform of a universal language, and they wished to be intelligible to a Latin-speaking posterity. I state this on the authority of Dr. P. Hume Brown, the well-known author of George Buchanan, Humanist and Reformer, and I should not advise any one rashly to contradict Dr. Brown on any Buchanan matter. He seems to me to have mastered the entire subject, and to have left very little for subsequent research to do, unless some lucky ‘find’ of new sources should occur. I have been able to glean nothing from any quarter that I have not found already known to Dr. Brown, and recorded by him, unless it be some such small fact as the presence of Joseph Scaliger in Edinburgh in 1566, along with his friend Chastaigner, but not expressly to see Buchanan; and other little things of that sort. I do not pretend to contribute any fresh Buchanan materials. My object is the humble, but not, I hope, useless one of boiling down Dr. Brown and the other scientific biographers, and attempting a brief popular presentation of what Buchanan was and did.

Another proof of the varied power of Buchanan is found in the storm he raised as a controversialist, in the still burning question as to the guilt or innocence of Mary Queen of Scots. In 1571, four years after the Scottish people had deposed their sovereign, Buchanan published a pamphlet, or what in these days would probably have taken the shape of a magazine article, with the title Detectio MariÆ ReginÆ, i.e. The Detection or Exposure of Queen Mary, or as an editor of to-day would have been sure to head it, The Truth about the Queen. Buchanan’s object in this publication is to vindicate the Scottish people and their leaders before the public opinion of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, brought Mary’s career as sovereign to a close, as being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by Buchanan’s immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the bÊte noire of Mary’s friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown away upon an unworthy age. Not content with pity—it would be inhuman not to feel it in any case—they show how true it is that pity is akin to love, and falling victims in some degree to the spell which ruined the unhappy and love-maddened Chastelard, they conduct a necessarily Platonic flirtation with their idol’s romantic and fascinating memory, across the separating interval of three hundred years. Had Mary been ugly, or even plain, she would have had fewer champions.

In vituperation of Buchanan they are not a whit behind his contemporary assailants. Mr. Hosack, for instance, one of the most ingenious of Mary’s modern defenders, calmly says, ‘Buchanan was without doubt the most venal and unscrupulous of men.’ His usual way of alluding to the Detectio is ‘Buchanan’s famous libel,’ varied occasionally by ‘the highly coloured narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the subsequently invented slanders of Buchanan,’ or ‘the slanderous narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the atrocious libel of Buchanan.’ Sir John Skelton, whose treatment of the subject is distinguished by a literary grace which cannot be claimed for Mr. Hosack, is on a level with him when he reaches Buchanan. ‘Buchanan’s atrocious libel’ is common form with the Marians, and Sir John has it. Perhaps his gentlest reference is when he speaks of ‘the industrious animosity of the man who had been her pensioner,’ and when he desires to be specially severe, he speaks of ‘grotesque adventures invented, or at least adapted, by Buchanan, whose virulent animosities were utterly unscrupulous, and whose clumsy invective was as bitter as it was pedantic.’ The present is not the place to inquire into the truth or falsehood of these statements. They are adduced merely as a tribute to Buchanan’s power. ‘Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you,’ does not logically justify the counter statement, ‘Good for you when all men shall speak ill of you’; but when a controversialist has been abused by his opponents as Buchanan has been, it is at least a proof that he has been found a formidable antagonist, either for his ability or veracity, or both, and that in the direct ratio of the violence with which they attack him.

One other aspect of Buchanan’s varied power seems to call for some mention. Up to the middle of this century, a chapbook usually entitled The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, sometimes adding The King’s Jester, ran through many editions original and revised, and had a certain vogue all over Scotland among a considerable class—not the most refined, certainly—of the population. It is an ignorant, coarse, and indecent production, and can be read only by the historical student for the purpose of investigating the popular taste of its time. Its description of Buchanan as the ‘Fule’ instead of the tutor of King James, and its placing him at the English court of James, who did not ascend the throne of England until Buchanan had been twenty-one years dead, are sufficient commentary on its historical accuracy. At first sight one might imagine that it had been put together by an enemy of Buchanan, but its brutish zeal in holding up Buchanan as a desperately clever fellow who was continually turning the tables and raising the laugh against people who wished to take him off, and who were generally English, and often English nobles, bishops or other clergy, show that it was earnest in its admiration according to its dim and dirty lights.

Buchanan was a humorist, and saw the ludicrous side of existence with a depth and keenness and enjoyment very different from the barbarian faculty which produced the ‘merry bourds’ of Knox and certain of his iconoclastic cronies. Even the prospect of having soon to leave the world could not make him utterly solemn, although the circumstances lend a grim aspect to the humour which may make it distasteful to wooden seriousness. ‘Tell the people who sent you,’ he said to the macer of the Court of Session, who came to summon him for something objectionable in some of his writings, ‘tell them I am summoned before a higher tribunal.’ When good John Davidson called on him and reminded him of the usual evangelical consolations, he repaid him with some original causticity À propos of the Romish doctrine of the Mass, which would no doubt delight that worthy man. He never had much money at any time, and less than usual at the close; and when, on counting it up with his attendant, he found that there was not enough to bury him, he directed it to be given to the poor. But ‘what about the funeral?’ naturally asked the servitor. ‘Well,’ Buchanan said, ‘he was very indifferent about that,’ as he meditated on the dilemma in which he saw he was placing the people of Edinburgh, who had not been over kind to the greatest scholar of the age. ‘If they will not bury me,’ he said, ‘they can let me lie where I am, or throw my body where they like.’ Of course, as he knew, they had to bury him, so he could enjoy his posthumous triumph of wit; but they had their repartee, denying him a gravestone for a generation or two.

There is a weird humour in the famous interview between himself on the one hand and the Melvilles, Andrew and James, on the other, who had crossed from St. Andrews to Edinburgh to see him shortly before he passed away. They found him teaching his young attendant his a b, ab. Andrew Melville, amused by the spectacle of the greatest scholar in Europe engaged in so disproportionate a task, made a suitable observation. ‘Better this than stealing sheep,’ quoth Buchanan, or ‘than being idill,’ he added, which latter he maintained to be as bad as the stealing of sheep. Then the conversation wandered to his History, which was by this time in the hands of the printer. The Melvilles noticed in the proofs the well-known and ugly story of Mary’s having got Rizzio’s body removed to the tomb of James V. They suggested that the king might take offence at this reflection on his mother’s memory, and that the publication might be stopped. ‘Tell me,’ said the dying historian, ‘if it is true.’ They said they thought so. ‘Then I will bide his feud, and all his kin’s,’ was the answer. There was, no doubt, a dash of the heroic in this, but there was a chuckle in it too, as the speaker reflected that the king who had neglected him, and whom he had flogged for persistent boyish insolence, according to the pedagogic fashion of the time, would once more have his pride humbled at his hands when he was gone.

No story was better known in Scotland than his correction of the king, and his now unrepeatable sarcasm in reply to the Countess of Mar’s haughty demand how he, a mere man of learning, could dare to lift his hand upon the Lord’s anointed. It tickled the popular mind, and along with other reports of Buchanan’s fun—for it is not to be supposed that his table-talk with the Scaligers, or even with Knox, was wholly funereal in character—indeed we know it was not—formed a sort of Buchanan myth, to which every witling who thought he had invented a good thing, and wanted to get it listened to by fathering it on a well-known name—a device not yet extinct—would contribute further bulk, although not more ornament. In this way an idea of Buchanan as a man of mirth and facetiousness[1] would take root and spread in the public consciousness, and as the people could not get at the real Buchanan for his Latin, they formed a picture of him according to their own uncivilised conceptions. Hence the chapbooks—a hideous reflection from a cracked and distorted mirror, but still showing that there was something to reflect.

Such was Buchanan, political thinker, practical statesman, poet, scholar, historian, controversialist, humorist, and great in all these diverse directions—certainly a personality worth knowing in greater detail.