George Buchanan - Robert Wallace

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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.

       Table of Contents

      CHARACTERISTICS

      Buchanan’s life, like the lives of most people who have done anything worth speaking of in their time, divides itself roughly into two sections—the period of preparation, and the period of performance. What I shall call his period of performance, or at all events chief performance, was from the time when he finally returned to Scotland, after an absence abroad, with brief interruptions, of twenty-two years, and spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life in more or less intimate occupation with the public affairs of his country. On the 19th of August 1561, Queen Mary, then in her nineteenth year, landed at Leith, and was escorted to Holyrood by her enthusiastic subjects, by whom she was also serenaded at night in a style which, as the queen’s French retinue thought, showed more heart than art. Shortly before or after this date, Buchanan, now fifty-five years old, also appeared in Scotland, for his final settlement there. It is a curious coincidence that these two persons, eminent alike in their widely divergent spheres, and destined alternately to a literary friendship that was pleasant to both, and a political antagonism that was fatal to one of them, should have appeared on the scene of their sympathies and conflicts practically at the same time. I have said that the division of Buchanan’s life into a period of preparation and a period of performance is a rough division. By that I mean that what really deserves to be called performance could not be absolutely excluded from the preparation period, and that, to some extent, one stage of the performance period was often a preparation for the next; but taken with this qualification, the division is a sufficiently valid one.

      It was, for instance, mainly during the preparation or foreign period that Buchanan wrote those poems which stamped him not only as a man of wit and poetic genius, but as the first Latin stylist in Europe of his day. During this period, too, he acquired from classic and other sources those broad and comprehensive ideas on the leading questions of the day which made him the thinker and Humanist as contrasted with the mere cleric or scholastic obscurantist. It was then also that, through observation on the spot, he was able to comprehend the

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