Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets

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 revolvesEt 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.

At last he contrived to escape in a ship bound for England, which, however, he found as little congenial as Portugal, and with as short a delay as possible he returned to that Lutetia which he loved. Arrived there, he would seem to have resumed his old work as schoolmaster in one of the colleges, no way advanced, despite his fame and adventures, from the first post he had held when little more than a boy, though he was now between forty and fifty, and one of the best-known scholars of his time. A few years later he became a member of the household of the Maréchal de Brissac as tutor to his son, and with him spent five years, partly in Italy in the province of Liguria where the Maréchal was governor. For the first time he would seem to have been treated with honour, and his advice taken in affairs of state and public business generally, and here he tells us he devoted much of his time to the study of sacred literature, so that he might be able to form a matured judgment as to the controversies which were tearing the world asunder. In the year 1560, his services being no longer required by his pupil, Buchanan at last decided upon returning to his native country. "The despotism of the Guises," he says, "was over, and the religious excitement had begun to calm down." It would appear that though his convictions had so long been on the side of the Reform, he had not yet publicly made himself known as a member of that party. And his return to Scotland was made with the full intention so to do.

Such was the wandering and uncertain career of the scholar and man of letters of the sixteenth century. Perhaps Buchanan's temper was less compliant, his character less easily adaptable to the society in which he found himself, than most; but it may be doubted whether this was the cause of the very small advancement in life to which he had come, since he was complaisant enough to indite many fine verses in praise of people who gave him a banquet or a shelter, and he seems to have gone nowhere without making friends. He had got abundant reputation, however, if not much else, and was known wherever he went as the celebrated poet, which doubtless was agreeable to him if not very profitable. But it gives us a certain insight into the life of the literary class in his time to see so notable a man wandering from one place to another, professor or regent or private tutor as it happened, never well off, never secure, often in the position of a dependant. When Milton speaks of the "others," poets whom he thus adopts into a kind of equality, who "use"

"To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,"

it is supposed to be Buchanan whom he refers to, which is perhaps honour enough for a modern classicist; though Amaryllis, the critics say, was no more individual a love than the Lutetia before mentioned, for whom he pined. Yet though all the scholars of his time admired and followed him, he had to return again and again to his Latin grammar, and to small boys not so wonderful as Michel of Montaigne; and when he returned to Edinburgh at the age of fifty-five his worldly position was scarcely better than when he got his first appointment at twenty-one to the College of St. Barbe. His life was now, however, to take another form.

Buchanan's return to Scotland "after the despotism of the Guises was over" corresponded very nearly with the return of Queen Mary. It is surmised that he may have travelled in the suite of "the Lord James," the future Earl of Murray, who paid his sister a visit very soon after the death of her husband, King Francis: certainly nothing could be more probable than that the Scotch scholar, seeking an opportunity to return to his native country, should have joined himself to the train of the prince, who probably had been acquainted in his childhood with his brother's tutor, and who was himself a man of education and a patron of literature. If this guess should be correct it would account for Buchanan's rapid promotion to Court favour. Edinburgh was in a state of happy expectation when the poet came back. What was virtually a new reign, though Mary had been the nominal possessor of the throne from her birth, was about to begin; the fame of the young Queen had no doubt been blown far and wide about the country on every breeze—that fame of beauty, sweetness, and grace which is the most universally attractive of all reputations, and which made the proud Scots prouder still in the possession of such a prodigy. That there were graver thoughts among the very serious and important party, who felt the safety of their newly-established and severely-reformed Church to be in doubt if not in danger, and who hated and feared "the mass" and the priests who performed it as they did the devil (with whom indeed they were more amiably familiar), does not alter the fact that the anticipation of Mary's return was a happy one, and her welcome cordial and without drawback. Nobody knew that there had been a project of a landing at Aberdeen, where Huntly and the other northern lords had proposed to meet her with twenty thousand men, thus enabling her to march upon her capital as a conquering heroine of the old faith, putting Satan, in the shape of John Knox, under her feet. Had she accepted this proposal how strangely might the face of history have been changed! But there is no reason to suppose that Mary desired to come to Scotland with fire and flame, any more than there is that her destruction was a foregone conclusion. She came with many prognostics of success, though also with a continual possibility that "terrible tragedies" might come of it; and for some time it would appear that her Court was as seemly and pleasant as any Court could be, full of youthful pleasure and delight as became her years and the gay youthful company that surrounded her, but also of graver matters and thoughts and purposes becoming a noble Queen.

The first notice we have of Buchanan after his return to Scotland is conveyed in a letter from Randolph, the English envoy in Edinburgh, in which the question, "Who is fittest to be sent from this Queen to attende upon the Queen's Majesty (Elizabeth) for the better continuance of intelligence with her Highness?" is discussed. "Of any that I know," says the representative of England, "David Forrest is likeliest, and most desireth it. There is with the Queen one called Mr. George Buchanan, a Scottishe man very well learned that was schollemaster unto Monsieur de Brissac's son, very godly and honest, whom I have always judged fitter than any other I know." This was written in January 1562, and shows that Buchanan was at that time about the Court and in the way of employment, though he was not then chosen as confidential messenger between the two queens. A little later he is visible in the exercise of his old vocation as the tutor of Mary herself. "The Queen readeth daily after her dinner," says the same careful narrator, "instructed by a learned man, Mr. George Buchanan, somewhat of Lyvie." These few words set before us a curious scene. Mary at the height of her good resolutions and good beginning, keeping up her literature as well as all her pleasures, her hunting, her riding, her music, her embroideries, all the accomplishments of her royal training—makes a delightful picture. She had the habit of working with her needle like any innocent lady in her bower, while the lords of her Council, grim lords whom it is strange to associate with this pretty pose of royal simplicity, discussed around her the troublous affairs of the most turbulent kingdom in Christendom: and after her dinner, in the languor of the afternoon, one wonders if the lovely lady was diligent over her Livy or rather seduced her preceptor to talk about Paris, that much-desired Lutetia which he had so longed for, as no doubt in the bottom of her heart she too was sometimes doing. The two so unlike each other—the beautiful young princess not quite twenty, the old scholar and schoolmaster though a poet withal, drawing near the extreme boundaries of middle age, and worn with much struggling against the world and poverty—would yet find a subject and mutual interest far apart from the book, which made endless conversation possible, and many a pleasant comparison of experiences so different. Buchanan had dedicated a book to one of those fair and famous Margarets who adorned Paris at that epoch, and presumably knew her or something of her state, and could understand her Majesty of Scotland's allusions, and knew something of the gossip of the Court, or at least could pretend to do so, as a man who was aware what was expected of a courtier. It is possible indeed that Mary was truly studious, and liked her Livy as her contemporary did, the gentle Lady Jane who had so sad a fate; but it is much more likely, we think, that the big volume lay open, while the scholar's eyes glowed and shone with cherished reminiscences of that enchanting city in which his best days had flown, and Mary Stewart responded to his recollections with all her gay wit and charm of pleasant speech. Many are the tragic associations of Holyrood: it is well to note that other companions more sober than Signor Davie, more calm than Chastelar, shared now and then the Queen's leisure. Grave commentators conclude that it spoke well for her Majesty's Latinity that Buchanan put her on Livy; for my part I have no doubt that these two unlikely gossips, after perhaps a sentence or two, forgot about Livy, and talked of their Paris all the time.