Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

CHAPTER IV
THE SCHOLAR OF THE REFORMATION

The age of Mary Stewart is in many ways the climax of Scottish national history, as well as one of the most interesting and exciting chapters in the history of the world. The Stewarts of Scotland had been up to this point a native race entirely Scots in training as in birth, and bent above all things upon the progress and consolidation of their own ancient kingdom, the poor but proud; a speck all but lost in the distance of the seas, yet known all over Christendom wherever errant squires or chivalrous pretensions were known. But the new sovereign of Scotland was one whose heart and pride were elsewhere, whose favourite ambitions were directed beyond the limits of that ancient kingdom with which she had none of the associations of youth, and to which she came a stranger from another Court far more dazzling and splendid, with hopes and prospects incapable of being concentrated within the boundary of the Tweed. There is no indication that the much-contested history of Mary Stewart has lost any of its interest during the progress of the intermediate centuries; on the contrary, some of its questions are almost more hotly contested now than they were at the moment when they arose. Her chivalrous defenders are more bold than once they were, and though the tone of her assailants is subdued, it is from a natural softening of sentiment towards the past, and still more from the fashion of our time, which finds an absorbing interest in the manifestations of individual character and the discussion of individual motives, rather than from any change of opinion. I do not venture to enter into that long-continued conflict, or to attempt to decide for the hundredth time whether a woman so gifted and unfortunate was more or less guilty. Both parties have gone, and still go, too far in that discussion; and Mary would not have thanked (I imagine) those partisans who would prove her innocence at the cost of all those vigorous and splendid qualities which made her remarkable. She could scarcely be at once an unoffending victim and one of the ablest women of her time.

As this is the most interesting of all the epochs of Scottish history—and that not for Mary's sake alone, but for the wonderful conflict going on apart from her, and in which her tragic career is but an episode—so it is the most exciting and picturesque period in the records of Edinburgh, which was then in its fullest splendour of architectural beauty and social life; its noble streets more crowded, more gay, more tumultuous and tragical; its inhabitants more characteristic and individual; the scenes taking place within it more dramatic and exciting than at any other part of its history. Fine foreign ambassadors, grave English diplomates trained in the school of the great Cecil, and bound to the subtle and tortuous policy of the powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the greatest change of all, the substitution for the ambitious Churchman of old, with a coat of mail under his rochet, of the absolute and impracticable preacher who gave no dispensations or indulgences, and permitted no compromise. All these new elements, complicated by the tremendous question of the English succession, and the introduction of many problems of foreign politics into a crisis bristling with difficulties of its own, made the epoch extraordinary; while the very streets were continually filled by exciting spectacles, by processions, by sudden fights and deadly struggles, by pageants and splendours, one succeeding another, in which the whole population had their share. The decree of the town council that "lang weapons," spears, lances, and Jedburgh axes, should be provided in every shop—so that when the town bell rang every man might be ready to throw down his tools or his merchandise and grip the ready weapon—affords the most striking suggestion of those sudden tumults which might rise in a moment, and which were too common to demand any special record, but kept the town in perpetual agitation and excitement—an agitation, it is true, by no means peculiar to Edinburgh. No painter has ever done justice to the scene which must have been common as the day, when the beautiful young Queen, so little accustomed to the restraints and comparative poverty of her northern kingdom, and able to surround herself with the splendour she loved out of her French dowry, rode out in all her bravery up the Canongate, where every outside stair and high window would be crowded with spectators, and through the turreted and battlemented gate to the grim fortress on the crown of the hill, making everything splendid with the glitter of her cortege and her own smiles and unrivalled charm. Sadder spectacles that same beautiful Queen provided too—miserable journeys up and down from the unhappy palace, sometimes through a stern suppressed tumult of hostile faces, sometimes stealthily under cover of night which alone could protect her. Everything in Edinburgh is associated more or less with Mary's name. There is scarcely an old house existing, with any authentic traces of antiquity, in which she is not reported to have taken refuge in her trouble or visited in her pleasure. The more vulgar enthusiasts of the causeways are content to abolish all the other associations of old Edinburgh for Mary's name.

But I will not attempt to revive those pageants either of joy or sorrow. There are other recollections which may be evoked with less historical responsibility and at least a little more freshness and novelty. No figure can be introduced out of that age who has not some connection one way or other with the Queen; and the great scholar, whose reputation has remained unique in Scotland, had some share in her earlier and happier life, as well as a link, supposed of treachery, with her later career. George Buchanan was the Queen's reader and master in her studies when all was well with her. He is considered by some of her defenders to be the forger of the wonderful letters which, if true, are the most undeniable proof of her guilt. But these things were but incidents in his career, and he is in himself one of the most illustrious and memorable figures among the throngs that surrounded her in that brief period of sovereignty which has taken more hold of the imagination of Scotland, and indeed of the world, than many a longer and, in point of fact, more important reign.

It is difficult to understand how it is that in later days, and when established peace and tranquillity of living might have been supposed to give greater encouragement to study, accurate and fine scholarship should have ceased to be prized or cultivated in Scotland. Perhaps, however, the very advantages upon which we have plumed ourselves so long, the general diffusion of education and higher standard of knowledge, is one of the causes of this failure—not only the poverty of Scotch universities and want of endowments, but the broader and simpler scale on which our educational systems were founded, and which have made it more important to train men for the practical uses of teaching than permit to them the waywardness and independence of a scholar. These results show the "défauts de nos qualités," though we are not very willing to admit the fact. But in the earlier centuries no such reproach rested upon us. Although perhaps, then as now, the Scotch intelligence had a special leaning towards philosophy, there was still many a learned Scot whose reputation was in all the universities, whose Latinity was unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in all the cities of the Continent, and at home his closest associates were among the highest in his own land. Yet he was the son of a very poor man, born almost a peasant and dying nearly as poor as he was born. From wandering scholar and pedagogue he became the preceptor of a King and the associate of princes; but he was not less independent, and he was scarcely more rich in the one position than the other. His pride was not in the high consultations he shared or the national movements in which he had his part, but in his fine Latinity and the elegant turn of those classical lines which all his learned compeers admired and applauded. The part that he played in history has been made to look odious by skilled critics; and the great book in which he recorded the deeds of his contemporaries and predecessors has been assailed violently and bitterly as prejudiced, partial, and untrue. But nobody has been able to attack his Latin or impair the renown of his scholarship; and perhaps had he himself chosen the foundation on which to build his fame, this is what he would have preferred above all. History may come and politics go, and the principles of both may change with the generations, but Latin verse goes on for ever: no false ingenuity of criticism can pick holes in the deathless structure of an art with which living principles have had nothing to do for a thousand years and more.

Buchanan was born in a farmhouse, "a lowly cottage thatched with straw," in the year 1506, in Killearn in the county of Stirling; but not without gentle blood in his veins, the gentility so much prized in Scotland, which makes a traceable descent even from the roughest of country lairds a matter of distinction. His mother was a Heriot, and one wonders whether there might not be some connection between the great scholar and the worthy goldsmith of the next generation, who did so much for the boys of Edinburgh. Buchanan's best and most trustworthy biographer, Dr. Irving,⁵ pictures to his readers the sturdy young rustic trudging two miles in all weathers to the parish school, with his "piece" in his pocket, and already the sonorous harmonies of the great classic tongues beginning to sound in his ears—a familiar picture which so many country lads born to a more modest fame have emulated. In the parish school of Killearn, in that ancient far-away Scotland before the Reformation, which it is hard to realise, so different must it have been from the characteristic Scotch school of all our traditions, the foundations of Buchanan's great scholarship and power were laid. His father died while he was still a mere child, and the future man of letters had plenty of rough rustic work, helping his mother about the farm on the holidays, which must have been more frequent while all the saints of the calendar were still honoured. Trees of his planting, his biographer says, writing in the beginning of this century, still grow upon the banks of the little stream which runs by the beautiful ruins of Dunblane, and which watered his mother's fields. When he had reached the age of fourteen an uncle Heriot seeing his aptitude for study sent him off, it would seem alone, in all his rusticity and homeliness, to Paris—a curious sign of the close connection between Scotland and France—where he carried on his studies or, a phrase more appropriate to his age, learned his lessons amid the throngs of the French schools. Before he was sixteen, however, his uncle died, leaving him desolate and unprovided for amongst strangers; and the boy had to make his way home as best he could, half begging, half working his passage, stopping perhaps here and there to help a schoolboy or to write a letter for the unlearned, and earning a bed and a meal as poor scholars were used to do. He remained a year in his mother's house, but probably was no longer wanted for the uses of the farm, since his next move was to the wars. He himself informs us in the sketch of his life which he wrote in his old age that he was "moved with a desire to study military matters," a desire by no means unusual at seventeen. These were the days when the fantastic French Albany was at the head of affairs in Scotland, during the childhood of James V, and the country was in great disorder, torn with private quarrels and dissensions. It is evident that, the kind uncle being dead and affairs in general so little propitious, there would be little chance in the resources of the farm of securing further university training for the boy who had his own way to make somehow in the world; and perhaps his experience of Paris and possession of the French language (no inconsiderable advantage when there were so many French adventurers and hangers on about the Court) might be expected to give him chances of promotion; while his service perhaps exempted an elder brother, of more use than he upon the farm, from needful service, when his feudal lord called out his men on the summons of the Regent.

NORTH DOORWAY, HERIOT'S HOSPITAL

George Buchanan accordingly followed the Laird's flag upon one of the wildest and most fruitless of Albany's expeditions to the Border, for the siege of Wark. The great Border stronghold, the size and wonderful proportions of which astonished the Scots army, stands forth again, clear as when it first struck his boyish imagination, in the description which Buchanan gives of it nearly half a century later in his history of that time—where the reader can still see the discomfited army with its distracted captains and councils, and futile leader, straggling back through the deep snow, each gloomy band finding its way as best it could to its own district. Buchanan would seem to have had enough of fighting; and perhaps he had succeeded in proving to his relatives that neither arms nor agriculture were his vocation; for we next find him on his way to St. Andrews, "to hear John Major who was then teaching dialectics or rather sophistry." Here he would seem to have studied for two years; taking his degree in 1525 at the age of nineteen. After this he followed Major to France, whether for love of his master, or with the idea that Major's interest as a doctor of the Sorbonne might help him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingratitude, as one of them says, "was the great and unpardonable blemish of his life"—by the epigram in question, in which he distinguishes his professor as "solo cognomine Major." It might very well be, however, that Buchanan expected a kind recommendation from his St. Andrews master, such as the habit of the kindly Scots was apt to give, and some help perhaps in procuring employment, and that the failure of any aid of this description betrayed the youth into the national tendency to harshness of speech and the bitter jeer at one who was great only in his name.

A stranger with nothing but his learning and his Latin epigrams (though these last were a more marketable commodity then than now) would no doubt be forlorn enough, struggling to find himself standing-ground and a living, subsisting hardly on what chance employment might fall in his way, and reflecting, as most adventurers are apt to do, how easy it would be for his prosperous countryman to befriend him. Paris, always full of stir and commotion, had at this moment a new source of agitation in the rising force of the Reformation principles or, as Buchanan calls it, "the Lutheran controversy, which was already spreading far and wide," and into the midst of which he fell on his return. Whether his interest in the new creed did him harm in his search for an establishment we are not told: and probably the "struggle with adverse fortune for about two years" which he records was merely the difficulty in making himself known which affects every young man. At the end of that time he got an appointment in the College of St. Barbe as Professor of Grammar, and was henceforward exempted at least from the heart-sickening conflict with absolute poverty.

Buchanan would seem to have had already high ambitions and a certainty that he was fit for something better than the post of schoolmaster in a French college—for notwithstanding his eagerness to get this post we soon find him lamenting, in the abstract indeed, but in a manner too particular to be without special meaning, the small profit of intellectual labour and the weariness of a continual toil which was so little rewarded. His plaint of the long night's work, the burning of the midnight oil, the hunt through dusty and rotting manuscripts, seems touched with a tone of bitterness unusual in the student's murmurs over a lot which after all brings him as much pleasure as weariness. The ambitious lad was already, it is evident, longing for more brilliant scenes.

 
"Pervigil in lucem lecta atque relecta revolves
Et putri excuties scripta sepulta situ:
Sæpe caput scalpes, et vivos roseris ungues,
Irata feries pulpita sæpe manu."
 

At St. Barbe, however, he secured a noble young pupil of his own country, the future Earl of Cassilis, who opened to him a brighter way, and finally led him back to his own country and for a time to higher fortune. When young King James came to Paris to meet Magdalen of France—with the sudden pathetic result of a hasty romantic marriage soon followed by the poor young lady's death—young Cassilis was still there with his tutor, who was himself but little advanced in life beyond his patron. And it was presumably in the train of the royal pair that the young men returned home. In that case Buchanan must have witnessed the touching scene that took place at the poor young Queen's disembarkation when she kissed the soil of her new country, the land which was to afford her only a grave. Whether dreams of Court favour and advancement were beginning to germinate in the young scholar's brain as he was thus suddenly swept into the train of royalty there is nothing to say; but at all events he observed everything with keen attentive eyes, unconsciously collecting the best materials for the history he was yet to write. And it is clear that this accidental connection with the King bore after-fruit. Buchanan went to Ayrshire with his young patron who had come of age, and whose studies were over it is to be supposed: and in the leisure of that relaxation from former duties amused himself with compositions of various sorts, and in particular with the Somnium, a lively poetical satire upon the Franciscans. The monks, who had been the favourite butt of all the ages, were more than ever open to the assaults of the wits now that the general sentiment had turned so strongly against them, and Buchanan said no more than Dunbar with full permission, before any controversy arose, had said, nor half so much as David Lindsay was privileged to say. And Lord Cassilis' tutor had all the freedom of a private individual responsible to no one while he lingered at his young patron's castle, pleased to make as many as comprehended his Latin laugh, though probably there were few capable of appreciating its classical beauty. This, however, was but a pastime, and his mind again began to turn towards Paris, where alone perhaps there was to be found the kind of work for which he was most fit and the literary applause and emulation which were dear to his soul.

He was about to set out when the King, who doubtless had owed some entertainment to Buchanan on the lingering homeward journey, and who must have been well aware of his character and gifts, made him pause by offering him the tutorship of his illegitimate son, one among several for whom James, so young as he was, not more than twenty-five, was already responsible, another James Stewart, though not the notable James who was afterwards the Regent Murray. This appointment brought Buchanan at once within the charmed circle of the Court, and probably prepared the way for all his after-honours. But his career in Edinburgh at this moment was not especially glorious. Delighted by the Somnium, which had been read to him and applauded by all the obsequious audience round, James, who though a good Catholic liked a clever assault upon the priests as much as any one, recommended the new member of his household to resume the subject. It is supposed that the Grey Friars from their great lodgment so near the Court had found fault with the appointment of Buchanan and assailed himself as a profane and scoffing heretic. It was certainly strange that a man who had adopted the heresies of Luther should be appointed to the care of the son of a Catholic King, but Buchanan it is probable kept his religious opinions to himself, and it was not necessary to be a Protestant to give vent to the broadest satires against the monks and friars who had been for so long the least defensible portion of the Catholic establishment. Buchanan, however, was not bold enough to fall upon his enemies as Sir David Lindsay did. A poor man and a dependant, had he the highest spirit in the world, must still bear traces of the yoke to which circumstances have accustomed him, and a scholar is not necessarily brave. He shrank from encountering the great and powerful community of the Grey Friars in the eye of day, and instead of the lively assault expected from him, temporised and wrote something which was neither satisfactory to the King who wanted a laugh at the expense of the monks, nor to the monks who were more enraged by the covert character of a satire which could be read both ways, than they would have been by straightforward abuse. The dissatisfaction of James moved Buchanan to bolder measures, and after his halfhearted attempt to compromise himself as little as possible, he was goaded into the most virulent use of his pen, and cut down his adversaries with the sharp shafts of his Franciscanus with a vigour and malice which left nothing to be desired. The Court had its laugh which was resounding and long, but neither King nor courtiers had any penalty to pay for the pranks which the classical Samson wrought for their pleasure.

Though they were thus mocked in high places, the Churchmen, however, had lost none of their power, and even the protection of the royal household did not avail the audacious poet. In the raid upon heretics which was made in the beginning of the year 1539 Buchanan's name was included among the guilty. He himself tells us that "Cardinal Beatoun bought his life from the King with money": making it probably the price of some concession that this audacious assailant should be delivered into the hands of the Church. At all events the terrified scholar had no confidence in the power or will of his Sovereign to protect him, and, scared by the flames of various burnings which had taken place throughout the kingdom, directed his best wits to finding a way of safety. He escaped through a window while his keepers were asleep, some say from the Castle of St. Andrews, some from that of Edinburgh. His own account is more simple and goes into no detail. "He made his way into England, eluding the guards set for him." But England was not more secure than Scotland. The quick-witted fugitive found Henry VIII impartially burning victims from both sides, on the same day at the same stake, and considered this sublime indifference as still more dangerous than the strife of Scotch affairs. "His old familiarity with the French, and the singular hospitality of that nation," led him back to the city which was then the favourite resort of all the Muses. When, however, Buchanan arrived in Paris he found that his special enemy, Cardinal Beatoun, had preceded him there as ambassador from King James, and, alarmed by so dangerous a vicinity, he accepted at once an offer made to him by Andrew Govra, one of his colleagues of former times, who had been appointed to the charge of a college in Bordeaux, and removed thither with the greatest expedition before his foe could be made aware of his presence in Paris.

This was in the end of the year 1539, when Buchanan had attained the age of thirty-three. His residence in the capital of the famous province of Gascony seems to have been active and happy. He was Professor of Latin in the college; perhaps the terms would be more just if we said he was Latin master in one of the most flourishing and successful of French schools; but our neighbours still prefer the more high-sounding nomenclature. The great Garonne was not full of ships and trade at that period as it is now; but Bordeaux was one of the old capital cities of France, possessing a rank which now belongs to no French provincial town, and had its own characteristic society, its scholars and provincial statesmen. But the most important and notable human being of all whom Buchanan found in his new sphere was a certain small seigneur of Gascony, six years old, and already an accomplished Latinist, having learned no other language from his cradle, bearing the name of Michel de Montaigne and already a little philosopher as well as scholar. The great essayist speaks afterwards of "George Buchanan, the celebrated Scotch poet," as one of his masters, but he does not say whether Buchanan was the enlightened pedagogue who connived at his endless reading and let him off as much as was possible from other less congenial studies.

Buchanan, however, must have found the cheerful southern city, with its Parliament and its colleges, and all the teeming life and restless energies of the Gascon race, not unlike a kind of warmer and more brilliant Scotland, full of national brag and gallantry, a congenial sphere. He had been for a long time shedding complimentary verses, sonnets, dedications, about him after the manner of the time, serving out to everybody who was kind to him a little immortality in the shape of classic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly a play, generally of an allegorical character—one of the fantastical miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great classicist considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist, alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little Montaigne was one of the chief performers. "Before a fit age, Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus," says that great writer, "I sustained the first parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, which were played in our College de Guienne, with dignity." The little scene is pleasant to think of, not too long out of date to recall the scholastic pastimes of to-day, though there is no Buchanan to produce plays for Eton or Harrow, and probably no young Montaigne to play the hero. The learned Scot, with his peasant breeding no doubt making him still more conscious of the strain of gentle blood in his veins, a little rough, irascible, and impatient in nature, notwithstanding the elegance of his Latin speech, and the little noble, gentilhomme to his fingers' end, half respectful, half contemptuous of the pedagogue, make a picturesque contrast.

Buchanan, however, did not feel himself safe even in Bordeaux, where he remained only three years. It is said that Cardinal Beatoun wrote to the Archbishop recommending his arrest, and the Franciscan community in the Gascon city, which had heard from their brethren of his offences against the Order, kept an unfriendly eye upon him, ready to take advantage of any hostile opportunity. He therefore returned to Paris, where in a similar but apparently more obscure position he spent some years. In 1547 he was very glad to accompany Govra, who had brought him to Bordeaux, and whom Montaigne describes as "beyond comparison the greatest Principal in France," to his native country Portugal, whither his King had summoned him in order that his talents might be of use to his own nation as the head of the new University of Coimbra. It would seem that Govra carried his whole staff along with him to Portugal. "Most of them," Buchanan says, "were men bound to him (Buchanan) for many years in the ties of closest friendship, men who were renowned for their works all over the world," and in whose society the Scottish scholar felt that he would be not among strangers but among kinsmen and friends. A still stronger inducement was, that while all Europe was ablaze with wars and religious controversies, that one little kingdom was at peace. The band of scholars thus removed together to their new sphere, like a hive of bees, and at first all went well with them; but they had not been long in Portugal when Govra died, leaving them without any powerful patronage or protection, a band of strangers, no doubt appearing in the aspect of supplanters of native talent to many hostile lookers-on. Men of their pursuits and modes of thought, aliens in an unknown country, perhaps sufficiently free of speech to alarm the narrow-minded, no great observers of ritual or ceremony, were too likely under any circumstances to attract the notice of the Inquisition in a place so wholly given over to its sway.

Buchanan was probably the most distinguished among this band of scholars; and a vague report that he had written something against the Franciscans attached to him a special prejudice. As nobody knew what this work was, it could not be brought formally against him, but lesser crimes were found, such as that of eating meat in Lent and speaking disrespectfully of monks, sins which even in Portugal most people were more or less guilty of. Buchanan, however, had no very dreadful penalty to bear. He was imprisoned for some months in a monastery, that he might be brought by the monks' instruction to a better way of thinking. The prisoner was fair enough to admit that he found his jailors by no means bad men or unkindly in their treatment of him—an acknowledgment which is greatly to his credit, since prejudice was equally strong on both sides and a persecuted scholar was as little apt to see the good qualities of his persecutors as they were to accept his satires. It would be interesting to know what the homely fathers thought of him, this dreadful freethinker and satirist committed to their care for instruction. He found them "entirely ignorant of religious questions," though evidently so much less hostile than he had expected, and occupied his enforced leisure in making his translation of the Psalms, a monument of elegant verse and fine Latinity, for which the quiet of the convent and the absence of interruptions must have been most favourable. He would seem to have corrected the bad impression he had at first made, by these devout studies and his behaviour generally; for when he was released the King would not let him go, but gave him a daily allowance for his expenses until some fit position could be found for him. But there was evidently nothing in Lisbon which tempted Buchanan to stay. He languished in the little capital separated from all congenial society, and sighed for his beloved Paris which he addressed as his mistress, writing a poem, Desiderium Lutetiæ, in praise of and longing for the presence of that nymph whom so many have wooed.