The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage
than now. The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for them
very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the
sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the
scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the
Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which
Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full
satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis of
thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who
knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of the
monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while,
a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more
redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by
intellect alone.
Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at
least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of
that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome,
and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate
modern could never equal.
If the "scholar" stopped in a town, his hostess probably begged of him a
charm against toothache or rheumatism. The penniless knight discoursed
with him on alchemy, and the chances of retrieving his fortune by the art
of transmuting metals into gold. The queen or bishop worried him in
private about casting their nativities, and finding their fates among the
stars. But the statesman, who dealt with more practical matters, hired
him as an advocate and rhetorician, who could fight his master's enemies
with the weapons of Demosthenes and Cicero. Wherever the scholar's steps
were turned, he might be master of others, as long as he was master of
himself. The complaints which he so often uttered concerning the cruelty
of fortune, the fickleness of princes, and so forth, were probably no
more just then than such complaints are now. Then, as now, he got his
deserts; and the world bought him at his own price. If he chose to sell
himself to this patron and to that, he was used and thrown away: if he
chose to remain in honourable independence, he was courted and feared.
Among the successful scholars of the sixteenth century, none surely is
more notable than George Buchanan. The poor Scotch widow's son, by force
of native wit, and, as I think, by force of native worth, fights his way
upward, through poverty and severest persecution, to become the
correspondent and friend of the greatest literary celebrities of the
Continent, comparable, in their opinion, to the best Latin poets of
antiquity; the preceptor of princes; the counsellor and spokesman of
Scotch statesmen in the most dangerous of times; and leaves behind him
political treatises, which have influenced not only the history of his
own country, but that of the civilised world.
Such a success could not be attained without making enemies, perhaps
without making mistakes. But the more we study George Buchanan's
history, the less we shall be inclined to hunt out his failings, the more
inclined to admire his worth. A shrewd, sound-hearted, affectionate man,
with a strong love of right and scorn of wrong, and a humour withal which
saved him--except on really great occasions--from bitterness, and helped
him to laugh where narrower natures would have only snarled,--he is, in
many respects, a type of those Lowland Scots, who long preserved his
jokes, genuine or reputed, as a common household book. {328} A
schoolmaster by profession, and struggling for long years amid the
temptations which, in those days, degraded his class into cruel and
sordid pedants, he rose from the mere pedagogue to be, in the best sense
of the word, a courtier; "One," says Daniel Heinsius, "who seemed not
only born for a court, but born to amend it. He brought to his queen
that at which she could not wonder enough. For, by affecting a certain
liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of
simplicity." Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their
friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had
nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap. "Austere in
face, and rustic in his looks," says David Buchanan, "but most polished
in style and speech; and continually, even in serious conversation,
jesting most wittily." "Roughhewn, slovenly, and rude," says Peacham, in
his 'Compleat Gentleman,' speaking of him, probably, as he appeared in
old age, "in his person, behaviour, and fashion; seldom caring for a
better outside than a rugge-gown girt close about him: yet his inside and
conceipt in poesie was most rich, and his sweetness and facilitie in
verse most excellent." A typical Lowland Scot, as I said just now, he
seems to have absorbed all the best culture which France could afford
him, without losing the strength, honesty, and humour which he inherited
from his Stirlingshire kindred.
The story of his life is easily traced. When an old man, he himself
wrote down the main events of it, at the request of his friends; and his
sketch has been filled out by commentators, if not always favourable, at
least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn--where an obelisk
to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century--of a
family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of
manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and
sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot--of whom one
wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers
probably holds good in her case. George gave signs, while at the village
school, of future scholarship; and when he was only fourteen, his uncle
James sent him to the University of Paris. Those were hard times; and
the youths, or rather boys, who meant to become scholars, had a cruel
life of it, cast desperately out on the wide world to beg and starve,
either into self-restraint and success, or into ruin of body and soul.
And a cruel life George had. Within two years he was down in a severe
illness, his uncle dead, his supplies stopped; and the boy of sixteen got
home, he does not tell how. Then he tried soldiering; and was with
Albany's French Auxiliaries at the ineffectual attack on Wark Castle.
Marching back through deep snow, he got a fresh illness, which kept him
in bed all winter. Then he and his brother were sent to St. Andrew's,
where he got his B.A. at nineteen. The next summer he went to France
once more; and "fell," he says, "into the flames of the Lutheran sect,
which was then spreading far and wide." Two years of penury followed;
and then three years of schoolmastering in the College of St. Barbe,
which he has immortalised--at least for the few who care to read modern
Latin poetry--in his elegy on 'The Miseries of a Parisian Teacher of the
Humanities.' The wretched regent master, pale and suffering, sits up all
night preparing his lecture, biting his nails, and thumping his desk; and
falls asleep for a few minutes, to start up at the sound of the four
o'clock bell, and be in school by five, his Virgil in one hand, and his
rod in the other, trying to do work on his own account at old
manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his wretched boys, who cheat
him, and pay each other to answer to truants' names. The class is all
wrong. "One is barefoot, another's shoe is burst, another cries, another
writes home. Then comes the rod, the sound of blows and howls; and the
day passes in tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows;
there is hardly time to eat."--I have no space to finish the picture of
the stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy, Earl
of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman, took him as
his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went back to Scotland.
But there his plain speaking got him, as it did more than once afterward,
into trouble. He took it into his head to write, in imitation of Dunbar,
a Latin poem, in which St. Francis asks him in a dream to become a Grey
Friar, and Buchanan answered in language which had the unpleasant fault
of being too clever, and--to judge from contemporary evidence--only too
true. The friars said nothing at first: but when King James made
Buchanan tutor to one of his natural sons, they, "men professing
meekness, took the matter somewhat more angrily than befitted men so
pious in the opinion of the people." So Buchanan himself puts it: but,
to do the poor friars justice, they must have been angels, not men, if
they did not writhe somewhat under the scourge which he had laid on them.
To be told that there was hardly a place in heaven for monks, was hard to
hear and bear. They accused him to the king of heresy: but not being
then in favour with James, they got no answer, and Buchanan was commanded
to repeat the castigation. Having found out that the friars were not to
be touched with impunity, he wrote, he says, a short and ambiguous poem.
But the king, who loved a joke, demanded something sharp and stinging,
and Buchanan obeyed by writing, but not publishing, the 'Franciscans,' a
long satire, compared to which the 'Somnium' was bland and merciful. The
storm rose. Cardinal Beaton, Buchanan says, wanted to buy him of the
king, and then, of course, burn him, as he had just burnt five poor
souls: so, knowing James's avarice, he fled to England, through
freebooters and pestilence.
There he found, he says, "men of both factions being burned on the same
day and in the same fire"--a pardonable exaggeration--"by Henry VIII., in
his old age more intent on his own safety than on the purity of
religion." So to his beloved France he went again, to find his enemy
Beaton ambassador at Paris. The capital was too hot to hold him; and he
fled south to Bourdeaux, to Andrea Govea, the Portuguese principal of the
College of Gruienne. As Professor of Latin at Bourdeaux, we find him
presenting a Latin poem to Charles V.; and indulging that fancy of his
for Latin poetry which seems to us now-a-days a childish pedantry; which
was then--when Latin was the vernacular tongue of all scholars--a
serious, if not altogether a useful, pursuit. Of his tragedies, so
famous in their day--the 'Baptist,' the 'Medea,' the 'Jephtha,' and the
'Alcestis'--there is neither space nor need to speak here, save to notice
the bold declamations in the 'Baptist' against tyranny and priestcraft;
and to notice also that these tragedies gained for the poor Scotsman, in
the eyes of the best scholars of Europe, a credit amounting almost to
veneration. When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once;
and--as his Scots biographers love to record--"three of the most learned
men in the world taught humanity in the same college," viz., Turnebus,
Muretus, and Buchanan.
Then followed a strange episode in his life. A university had been
founded at Coimbra, in Portugal, and Andrea Govea had been invited to
bring thither what French savans he could collect. Buchanan went to
Portugal with his brother Patrick; two more Scotsmen, Dempster and
Ramsay: and a goodly company of French scholars, whose names and
histories may be read in the erudite pages of Dr. Irving, went likewise.
All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a year or so. Then its
high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia too common in those days
and countries, Buchanan and two of his friends migrated, unwillingly,
from the Temple of the Muses for that of Moloch, and found themselves in
the Inquisition.
Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a Lutheran
than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his friends had
eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in Spain did. But
he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the Grey Friars formed
but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news among them travelled
surely if not fast: so that the story of the satire written in Scotland
had reached Portugal. The culprits were imprisoned, examined,
bullied--but not tortured--for a year and a half. At the end of that
time, the proofs of heresy, it seems, were insufficient; but lest--says
Buchanan with honest pride--"they should get the reputation of having
vainly tormented a man not altogether unknown," they sent him for some
months to a monastery, to be instructed by the monks. "The men," he
says, "were neither inhuman nor bad, but utterly ignorant of religion;"
and Buchanan solaced himself during the intervals of their instructions,
by beginning his Latin translation of the Psalms.
At last he got free, and begged leave to return to France; but in vain.
Wearied out at last, he got on board a Candian ship at Lisbon, and
escaped to England. But England, he says, during the anarchy of Edward
VI.'s reign, was not a land which suited him; and he returned to his
beloved France, to fulfil the hopes which he had expressed in his
charming 'Desiderium Lutitiae,' and the still more charming, because more
simple, 'Adventus in Galliam,' in which he bids farewell, in most
melodious verse, to "the hungry moors of wretched Portugal, and her clods
fertile in naught but penury."
Some seven years succeeded of schoolmastering and verse-writing:--The
Latin paraphrase of the Psalms; another of the 'Alcestis' of Euripides;
an Epithalamium on the marriage of poor Mary Stuart, noble and sincere,
however fantastic and pedantic, after the manner of the times; "Pomps,"
too, for her wedding, and for other public ceremonies, in which all the
heathen gods and goddesses figure; epigrams, panegyrics, satires, much of
which latter productions he would have consigned to the dust-heap in his
old age, had not his too fond friends persuaded him to republish the
follies and coarsenesses of his youth. He was now one of the most famous
scholars in Europe, and the intimate friend of all the great literary
men. Was he to go on to the end, die, and no more? Was he to sink into
the mere pedant; or, if he could not do that, into the mere court
versifier?
The wars of religion saved him, as they saved many another noble soul,
from that degradation. The events of 1560-1-2 forced Buchanan, as they
forced many a learned man besides, to choose whether he would be a child
of light or a child of darkness; whether he would be a dilettante
classicist, or a preacher--it might be a martyr--of the Gospel. Buchanan
may have left France in "the troubles" merely to enjoy in his own country
elegant and learned repose. He may have fancied that he had found it,
when he saw himself, in spite of his public profession of adherence to
the Reformed Kirk, reading Livy every afternoon with his exquisite young
sovereign; master, by her favour, of the temporalities of Crossraguel
Abbey, and by the favour of Murray, Principal of St. Leonard's College in
St. Andrew's. Perhaps he fancied at times that "to-morrow was to be as
to-day, and much more abundant;" that thenceforth he might read his
folio, and write his epigram, and joke his joke, as a lazy comfortable
pluralist, taking his morning stroll out to the corner where poor Wishart
had been burned, above the blue sea and the yellow sands, and looking up
to the castle tower from whence his enemy Beaton's corpse had been hung
out; with the comfortable reflection that quietier times had come, and
that whatever evil deeds Archbishop Hamilton might dare, he would not
dare to put the Principal of St. Leonard's into the "bottle dungeon."
If such hopes ever crossed Geordie's keen fancy, they were disappointed
suddenly and fearfully. The fire which had been kindled in France was to
reach to Scotland likewise. "Revolutions are not made with rose-water;"
and the time was at hand when all good spirits in Scotland, and George
Buchanan among them, had to choose, once and for all, amid danger,
confusion, terror, whether they would serve God or Mammon; for to serve
both would be soon impossible.
Which side, in that war of light and darkness, George Buchanan took, is
notorious. He saw then, as others have seen since, that the two men in
Scotland who were capable of being her captains in the strife were Knox
and Murray; and to them he gave in his allegiance heart and soul.
This is the critical epoch in Buchanan's life. By his conduct to Queen
Mary he must stand or fall. It is my belief that he will stand. It is
not my intention to enter into the details of a matter so painful, so
shocking, so prodigious; and now that that question is finally set at
rest, by the writings both of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, there is no need
to allude to it further, save where Buchanan's name is concerned. One
may now have every sympathy with Mary Stuart; one may regard with awe a
figure so stately, so tragic, in one sense so heroic,--for she reminds
one rather of the heroine of an old Greek tragedy, swept to her doom by
some irresistible fate, than of a being of our own flesh and blood, and
of our modern and Christian times. One may sympathise with the great
womanhood which charmed so many while she was alive; which has charmed,
in later years, so many noble spirits who have believed in her innocence,
and have doubtless been elevated and purified by their devotion to one
who seemed to them an ideal being. So far from regarding her as a
hateful personage, one may feel oneself forbidden to hate a woman whom
God may have loved, and may have pardoned, to judge from the punishment
so swift, and yet so enduring, which He inflicted. At least, he must so
believe who holds that punishment is a sign of mercy; that the most
dreadful of all dooms is impunity. Nay, more, those "casket" letters and
sonnets may be a relief to the mind of one who believes in her guilt on
other grounds; a relief when one finds in them a tenderness, a sweetness,
a delicacy, a magnificent self-sacrifice, however hideously misplaced,
which shows what a womanly heart was there; a heart which, joined to that
queenly brain, might have made her a blessing and a glory to Scotland,
had not the whole character been warped and ruinate from childhood, by an
education so abominable, that any one who knows what words she must have
heard, what scenes she must have beheld in France, from her youth up,
will wonder that she sinned so little: not that she sinned so much. One
may feel, in a word, that there is every excuse for those who have
asserted Mary's innocence, because their own high-mindedness shrank from
believing her guilty: but yet Buchanan, in his own place and time, may
have felt as deeply that he could do no otherwise than he did.
The charges against him, as all readers of Scotch literature know well,
may be reduced to two heads. 1st. The letters and sonnets were
forgeries. Maitland of Lethington may have forged the letters; Buchanan,
according to some, the sonnets. Whoever forged them, Buchanan made use
of them in his Detection, knowing them to be forged. 2nd. Whether Mary
was innocent or not, Buchanan acted a base and ungrateful part in putting
himself in the forefront amongst her accusers. He had been her tutor,
her pensioner. She had heaped him with favours; and, after all, she was
his queen, and a defenceless woman: and yet he returned her kindness, in
the hour of her fall, by invectives fit only for a rancorous and reckless
advocate, determined to force a verdict by the basest arts of oratory.
Now as to the "casket" letters. I should have thought they bore in
themselves the best evidence of being genuine. I can add nothing to the
arguments of Mr. Froude and Mr. Burton, save this: that no one clever
enough to be a forger, would have put together documents so incoherent,
and so incomplete. For the evidence of guilt which they contain is,
after all, slight and indirect, and, moreover, superfluous altogether;
seeing that Mary's guilt was open and palpable, before the supposed
discovery of the letters, to every person at home and abroad who had any
knowledge of the facts. As for the alleged inconsistency of the letters
with proven facts: the answer is, that whosoever wrote the letters would
be more likely to know facts which were taking place around them than any
critic could be one hundred or three hundred years afterwards. But if
these mistakes as to facts actually exist in them, they are only a fresh
argument for their authenticity. Mary, writing in agony and confusion,
might easily make a mistake: forgers would only take too good care to
make none.
But the strongest evidence in favour of the letters and sonnets, in spite
of the arguments of good Dr. Whittaker and other apologists for Mary, is
to be found in their tone. A forger in those coarse days would have made
Mary write in some Semiramis or Roxana vein, utterly alien to the
tenderness, the delicacy, the pitiful confusion of mind, the conscious
weakness, the imploring and most feminine trust which makes the letters,
to those who--as I do--believe in them, more pathetic than any fictitious
sorrows which poets could invent. More than one touch, indeed, of utter
self-abasement, in the second letter, is so unexpected, so subtle, and
yet so true to the heart of woman, that--as has been well said--if it was
invented there must have existed in Scotland an earlier Shakespeare; who
yet has died without leaving any other sign, for good or evil, of his
dramatic genius.
As for the theory (totally unsupported) that Buchanan forged the poem
usually called the Sonnets; it is paying old Geordie's genius, however
versatile it may have been, too high a compliment to believe that he
could have written both them and the Detection; while it is paying his
shrewdness too low a compliment to believe that he could have put into
them, out of mere carelessness or stupidity, the well-known line, which
seems incompatible with the theory both of the letters and of his own
Detection; and which has ere now been brought forward as a fresh proof of
Mary's innocence.
And, as with the letters, so with the sonnets: their delicacy, their
grace, their reticence, are so many arguments against their having been
forged by any Scot of the sixteenth century, and least of all by one in
whose character--whatever his other virtues may have been--delicacy was
by no means the strongest point.
As for the complaint that Buchanan was ungrateful to Mary, it must be
said: That even if she, and not Murray, had bestowed on him the
temporalities of Crossraguel Abbey four years before, it was merely fair
pay for services fairly rendered; and I am not aware that payment, or
even favours, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in
questions of highest morality and highest public importance. And the
importance of that question cannot be exaggerated. At a moment when
Scotland seemed struggling in death-throes of anarchy, civil and
religious, and was in danger of becoming a prey either to England or to
France, if there could not be formed out of the heart of her a people,
steadfast, trusty, united, strong politically because strong in the fear
of God and the desire of righteousness--at such a moment as this, a crime
had been committed, the like of which had not been heard in Europe since
the tragedy of Joan of Naples. All Europe stood aghast. The honour of
the Scottish nation was at stake. More than Mary or Bothwell were known
to be implicated in the deed; and--as Buchanan puts it in the opening of
his 'De Jure Regni'--"The fault of some few was charged upon all; and the
common hatred of a particular person did redound to the whole nation; so
that even such as were remote from any suspicion were inflamed by the
infamy of men's crimes." {343}
To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as to
save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the Scotch
nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit
justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses in
the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chief authors of those measures
had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to answer for their
conduct to the Queen of England. Queen Elizabeth--a fact which was
notorious enough then, though it has been forgotten till the last few
years--was doing her utmost to shield Mary. Buchanan was deputed, it
seems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly never
people had an abler apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must
be remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used--and
it may be abused--all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he
was fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national life, of his
country, and striking--as men in such cases have a right to strike--as
hard as he could. If he makes no secret of his indignation, and even
contempt, it must be remembered that indignation and contempt may well
have been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part of
his countrymen; with that reforming middle class, comparatively untainted
by French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience,
which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in
the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If,
finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burton
thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says, these
charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must be
remembered also, that that popular feeling need not have been altogether
unfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank God, in these milder
days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true.
Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary, were possible enough--as
no one knew better than Buchanan--in that very French court in which Mary
had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, and
for at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan has
overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding to a
temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power is
roused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation.
And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that
"hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has
well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we are
face to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of the
loftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want
of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness--but still a genius worthy
to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner.
Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled
Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the
side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pass from this painful
subject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's wise
and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he says, "though a zealous
Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of
Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful.
Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of the
lustre that surrounded the early career of his mistress. More than once
he expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of a genius
deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme. There is not,
perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of
shipwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds in
turning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful epigram
'Nympha Caledoniae' in one part, the 'Detectio Mariae Reginae' in
another; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the
reaction in the popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general,
and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which
it became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in
her innocence had not arisen."
If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by
subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in
Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murray
did not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could
do it, by that 'Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis,' in which he showed
himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin, prose. His
satire of the 'Chameleon,' though its publication was stopped by
Maitland, must have been read in manuscript by many of those same "True
Lords;" and though there were nobler instincts in Maitland than any
Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation
against that wily turncoat's misdoings, which could not but recommend the
author to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not because
he was a rogue, and a hired literary spadassin, that to the best heads in
Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be
provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James I.;
as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy
seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the
laws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government
had to do everything in the way of organisation--in the committee for
promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming the
University of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were again
and again called for; and always ready. The value of his work,
especially that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged by
Scotchmen, rather than by an Englishman: but all that one knows of it
justifies Melville's sentence in the well-known passage in his memoirs,
wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young King. "Mr.
George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plain
words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which
lay nearest him. The worst that can be said against him during these
times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as
one of those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of
England"; and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that
Buchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character of
malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever
that Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month,
seemingly, in which that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan had
given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought,
by publishing a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it was
to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous 'De Jure Regni apud Scotos,'
the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of constitutional
liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, "not only as his monitor,
but also an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender and
flexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery." He
has complimented James already on his abhorrence of flattery, "his
inclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and noble
attempts, his promptitude in obeying his instructors and governors, and
all who give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in
examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight with
him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons." Buchanan may have
thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James's
ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar's
sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with
which--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan's
nephew, be true--James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen
days, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Buchanan act in open
court the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last made him a
scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man:
yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations
would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be,
as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin. He at least will
be no flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with
a calm but distinct assertion of his mother's guilt, and a justification
of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan,
for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but
to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles
by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign,
over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian
researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but
they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which
Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his
Detection of Mary. In that book also, "liberavit animam suam;" he spoke
his mind, fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must
have known--for Buchanan was no dullard--regarded him with deep dislike,
who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.
But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done his
work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come wherein
no man can work. One must be excused for telling--one would not tell it
in a book intended to be read only by Scotchmen, who know or ought to
know the tale already--how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomas
went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he was
ill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage,
true to his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his
servant-lad; and how he told them that doing that was "better than
stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that
dedication to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a hero
whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose
liberality to the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "David
was a sair saint for the crown." Andrew Melville, so James Melville
says, found fault with the style. Buchanan replied that he could do no
more for thinking of another thing, which was to die. They then went to
Arbuthnot's printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as that
terrible passage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as
"laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late
queen." Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they
stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was in
bed. "He was going," he said, "the way of welfare." They asked him to
soften the passage; the king might prohibit the whole work. "Tell me,
man," said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth." They could not, or
would not, deny it. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's;
pray, pray to God for me, and let Him direct all." "So," says Melville,
"by the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and
godly man ended his mortal life."
Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James I.'s
time--that Buchanan, on his death-bed repented of his harsh words against
Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when she was
young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words from
George Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and
Love have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question: whatever
conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which George
Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars,
who by the repetition of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction
as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his
Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regarded
his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts."
At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in that
coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having,
namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind him--if at
least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which he
gives in his appendix--save arrears to the sum of 100_l_. of his
Crossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story in
Mackenzie's 'Scotch Writers,' that when he felt himself dying, he asked
his servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding he had not
enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to the
poor, and said that if they did not choose to bury him they might let him
lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little to
him. He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh,
in the Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among the
marble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; and
whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in the
Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701,
was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselves
little for several generations where he lay.
For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only Catholic
Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir
Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the 'De Jure Regni.'
They may have had some reason on their side. In the then anarchic state
of Scotland, organisation and unity under a common head may have been
more important than the assertion of popular rights. Be that as it may,
in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned
his Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of
copies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensive
and extraordinary matters" which they contained. The 'De Jure Regni' was
again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in manuscript; and in 1683,
the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned by
the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and
others, as "pernicious books, and damnable doctrines, destructive to the
sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all human
society." And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had
watered--for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is
probably true, and equally honourable to both--lay trampled into the
earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and
bore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688.
To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England owes
likewise, much of her modern liberty. But Scotland's debt to him, it
seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public and
private. What the morality of the Scotch upper classes was like, in
Buchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there remains proof
enough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay--that the
morality of the populace which looked up to the nobles as its example and
its guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy increased, immorality was
likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of
falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin,
within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of
feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by
a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell,
the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern
freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she
should be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in
moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief
in the government and the judgments of a living God. And the tone which
Buchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of their day,
helped notably that national salvation. It gathered together, organised,
strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality. It
assured the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong;
and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever might
be the doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience of men. It
proclaimed a universal and God-given morality, a bar at which all, from
the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.
The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life and
death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told that the
crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond
punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an
end of morality among them. Every man, from the greatest to the least,
would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That method
was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very
years. Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty;
excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable
weaknesses. The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and
Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the stand-point of an old Hebrew
prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the
other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to
conscience and to God. The result was virtue and piety, and that manly
independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in
a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into
two hostile camps, two rival races.
And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided
with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. The
Roman Catholic preachers, who at first asserted Mary's right to impunity,
while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves
to assert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their
example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have
fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality:
they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability of
intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a
Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long
while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity
have proved so untrue to herself. Their noblest and purest sympathies
have been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen,
chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the
innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of
facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--been
right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary's
guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual,
theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French
literature,--too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English
novels. They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed so
very inexcusable?" They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but she
did not do it." And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered
among them many a pure and noble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have
kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously
or not, that they too share in that sturdy Scotch moral sense which has
been so much strengthened--as I believe--by the plain speech of good old
George Buchanan.