Transcriber’s Notes
Irregular or archaic spelling and irregular hyphenation are retained.
Minor changes to punctuation, in the index and in section headings,
have been made without comment.
Footnotes have been moved to the end of the book.
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GEORGE BUCHANAN
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready:--_
THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON.
ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK.
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES.
ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN.
THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE.
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS.
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE.
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK.
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. OMOND.
THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS.
NORMAN MACLEOD. By JOHN WELLWOOD.
SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor SAINTSBURY.
KIRKCALDY OF GRANGE. By LOUIS A. BARBÉ.
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. GROSART.
JAMES THOMSON. By WILLIAM BAYNE.
MUNGO PARK. By T. BANKS MACLACHLAN.
DAVID HUME. By Professor CALDERWOOD.
WILLIAM DUNBAR. By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
SIR WILLIAM WALLACE. By Professor MURISON.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. By MARGARET MOYES BLACK.
THOMAS REID. By Professor CAMPBELL FRASER.
POLLOK AND AYTOUN. By ROSALINE MASSON.
ADAM SMITH. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON.
ANDREW MELVILLE. By WILLIAM MORISON.
JAMES FREDERICK FERRIER. By E. S. HALDANE.
KING ROBERT THE BRUCE. By A. F. MURISON.
JAMES HOGG. By Sir GEORGE DOUGLAS.
THOMAS CAMPBELL. By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN.
GEORGE BUCHANAN. By ROBERT WALLACE. Completed by J. CAMPBELL SMITH.
[Illustration]
GEORGE BUCHANAN
BY ROBERT WALLACE
COMPLETED BY J CAMPBELL SMITH
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON & FERRIER
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
The designs and ornaments of this volume are by Mr. Joseph Brown, and
the printing from the press of Messrs. T. and A. Constable, Edinburgh.
PREFACE
The concluding chapter of the book I intended to serve the purpose of
prologue and epilogue, but on reflection I find that readers both in
and out of Scotland may desire to be told a little more about Robert
Wallace, M.A., D.D., and M.P., a collocation of titles of honour, so
far as I know, unexampled. He was a minister of the Church of Scotland
from the summer of 1857 to the autumn of 1876; was in succession the
minister of Newton-on-Ayr, of Trinity College Church, Edinburgh,
and of Old Greyfriars’, Edinburgh, in which last he succeeded Dr.
Robert Lee, as also in the leadership of the Liberal Party of the
Church of Scotland. The degree of D.D. was conferred upon him by the
University of Glasgow, pretty much, it was believed, through the
influence of Dr. Caird, the most eloquent preacher and one of the most
profound theologians of our day. After Dr. Wallace became editor of
the _Scotsman_ he resigned his chair of Church History, his church,
and even his licence to preach, and he left in abeyance the title of
D.D., and became in his time, as a barrister-at-law, plain Mr. Robert
Wallace. But the degree of a university is, I believe, indelible, and
he will always be Dr. Wallace to me. His degree of M.A., like mine, was
conferred by the University of St. Andrews in April 1853 after four
years’ study, during which we attended simultaneously every Humanity
class. He was first in every literary class, and by far the best
classical scholar of my day. Dr. Alexander, the venerable professor of
Greek, who had taught for thirty years, pronounced him the best student
he had ever taught.
His splendid classical attainments, the erudition necessary to the
chair of Church History, his extensive and distinguished practice as a
debating gladiator in Church Courts, especially the General Assembly,
perhaps even his experience in the solid, stolid, non-mercurial House
of Commons, all fitted him, as few men have been fit, to do justice to
the life, labours, and supreme European culture of George Buchanan.
To equal fitness I do not pretend. To the best of my ability I have
tried to complete the unfinished task of my friend, with whom I at
intervals interchanged ideas since the beginning of our college
career in October 1849. I am not sure he would have agreed with all I
say in the last chapter. For the views expressed therein I alone am
responsible.
From one error in fact and a doubtful assumption as to Buchanan’s
relation to Montaigne, the ‘representative’ sceptic, I have been
saved by Dr. P. Hume Brown, the author of the best life of Buchanan,
whose knowledge of the history of Buchanan and his contemporaries is
probably unrivalled. He read the proof-sheets, and for his friendly,
disinterested attention Dr. Wallace’s representatives and I are greatly
obliged to him, as all readers ought to be, for they have the assurance
that the most enlightened eye on the subject of Buchanan examined what
they are expected to believe.
J. CAMPBELL SMITH.
DUNDEE, _December 1899_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
PRELIMINARY AND GENERAL 9
CHAPTER II
CHARACTERISTICS 26
CHAPTER III
CHARACTERISTICS (_continued_) 48
CHAPTER IV
FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS 66
CHAPTER V
BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM 89
CHAPTER VI
BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS 111
EPILOGISTIC 138
INDEX 147
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:--
‘Namque ad supremum perducta Poetica culmen
In te stat, nec quo progrediatur habet.
Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes;
Romani eloquii Scotia finis erit.’
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.