35

A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY SCHOLAR.

PERCH

ERCHED high among the sloping pastures at the back of the Campsie Hills in Stirlingshire, stands a small hamlet conspicuous for many a mile. In the hamlet, and lending a peculiar distinction to the spot, rises a massive obelisk of white stone. From nearly every point in the quiet Endrick valley the place can be seen, and when struck by the flush of sunset from the Luss Hills beyond Loch Lomond, it shines out on the high hillside like some picturesque old town of the Apennines. The hamlet is Killearn, and the obelisk is a monument to the greatest of medieval Scottish scholars, George Buchanan the historian.

The neighbouring country-all the Endrick valley westward, and the southern shore of Loch Lomond-had been for centuries inhabited by the clan Buchanan. In this territory, some two miles south of Killearn, the father of the historian, cadet of a family represented yet by the Buchanans of Ross Priory, owned a farm called the Moss.

The Moss is now a manor containing three good farms; but in the sixteenth century it was probably what its name signifies, a stretch of wild bog pasture rather than a substantial agricultural holding. At any rate, when Buchanan's father died, in the childhood of the historian, he left his family very scantily provided for. The old sheiling, for it could be nothing more, in the moorland hollow by the burn side, has long ago disappeared, and the later manor on the spot, set deep among its trees and hedges, with the warm farmlands rising about it, has itself become a time-enriched place. A relic of the old house is preserved there in the shape of a chair made. from the wooden cross-beam of the roof; and near the gable is pointed out an oak-tree which, according to tradition, was planted by the historian himself. Add to these the burn still singing its immemorial secret over the pebbles close by, and the old stone bridge, half giving way, by which access is gained, and all that belongs to the interest of the past about the place has been chronicled.

Here, in February, 1506, eighteen years after the death of James III. at Sauchieburn, George Buchanan was born.

A career of learned adventure was the frequent fate of northern scholarship at that day, and to the present hour in the mind of Europe, the memory of her wandering scholars of the sixteenth century casts associations of romance round the name of Scotland. In previous centuries the names of Douglas and the northern nobles had already become heroic on the battlefields of France and Spain. A hundred years later, on the union of the English and Scottish Crowns, the Continent was again to be the tourney-ground of northern soldiers of fortune. And the chivalrous reputation of the north was to be renewed to the Continental mind at a more recent day by the romance of the Jacobite risings. But in the carlier decades of the sixteenth century the literary genius of Scotland was shooting up its highest flame. Side by side with the coruscations of a vernacular poetry then without a rival, the glow of Scottish medieval scholarship had reached its acme, and presently, upon the outburst of the Reformation, that medieval scholarship was to fling its latest and brightest embers broadcast over Europe. Most accomplished and most famous of the wandering scholars was George Buchanan; and his career, from its earliest beginnings at Killearn, was in many respects typical of its class.

The early promise of ability at the schools of the village and the county town attracting the interest of a wealthy uncle: the university curriculum, made possible by the uncle's generosity, suddenly crippled by that patron's death and the subsequent struggles towards knowledge under hindrances of health and purse—all these are still common preludes to distinguished scholarship north of the Tweed. Equally familiar, also, appears the chronic infirmity of health, brought on, it is to be feared, as much by the sparing of the mid-day meal as by the expenditure of the midnight oil. An enterprise peculiar to the scholarship of that time, however, was the part taken by Buchanan in the Duke of Albany's futile expedition against England in 1523. Under the vacillating Regent he shared in the attack on Wark Castle and the subsequent night retreat through the snow to Lauder, paying for his military experience with an illness of several months. Bachelor of Arts at St. Andrews in 1527, Master of Arts at his original university, Paris, in 1528, Buchanan's career was for the next thirty-three years entirely that of the distinguished man of letters. Professor of Humanity at the college of St. Barbe, and tutor presently to the youthful Earl of Cassilis; about 1538, having returned to Scotland, he gave the first

intimation of the Protestant ideas which he had acquired on the Continent by publishing a brief but biting satire upon monastic life, entitled "Somnium; or, the Dream." This brought him at one and the same step into collision with the entire ecclesiastical powers of the country, and into high favour with the king, James V. Another and still fiercer Latin poem, "Franciscanus," written at request of James, and exposing the sensual corruptions of the monastic system, was the signal for open war with the priesthood. Scotland, however, was not yet combustible enough to catch the fires of Reformation. Buchanan's attacks, with those of Sir David Lindsay, no doubt, as early torches thrown on the enemies' roofs, did much to hasten the conflagration of 1559; but meanwhile the ancient church remained impregnable, and the only immediate effect of the "Somnium" and the "Franciscanus " was to awaken the wrath of the alarmed hierarchy against Buchanan and his friends. The king himself found his authority insufficient to combat the roused forces of the Church; and the satirist and others of suspected opinions, included in a general arrest, were thrown into prison.

This was one of the unpleasant experiences which scholars of that stormy time had not infrequently to undergo. Nor was it Buchanan's last experience of the sort. Escaping from prison he fled to London and the Continent. There, throughout his wanderings, holding professorships at college after college, he found himself dogged by the jealous influence of the Scottish Cardinal Beaton and the powerful Franciscan order, and favoured, for his opinions, at another crisis of his career, with a year or two of seclusion in the dungeons of the Portuguese Inquisition. Nevertheless, besides the ordinary routine of scholarship, these wandering years were not without literary fruit. During residence at Bordeaux he wrote for the reform of the college stage there his scriptural dramas "Baptistes" and "Jephthes," and his translations of the "Medea" and the "Alcestis" of Euripides; and while under monastic confinement in Portugal he produced his unrivalled Latin paraphrase of the Psalms of David, the work which placed him first among modern Latin poets. Latin odes also upon the most distinguished events of the day, such as the capture of Vercelli and the surrender of Calais, with his unfinished philosophical poem, "De Sphæra," were the fruits of this time. Among those who boasted that they had been his pupils during these years, were the learned and quaint Montaigne, who studied under him at Bordeaux, and the son of the famous Marshal de Brissac, to whom he acted as preceptor for five years in Italy.

So far his life had been entirely that of the poor scholar and poet, and his sole reward, apart from an occasional smile of royalty, had been a European renown. Fortune, however, at last, after long looking askance, made a substantial turn in his favour. Mary, Queen of Scots, whose marriage with the Dauphin had been celebrated by Buchanan in an Epithalamium, invited the scholar to return to Scotland, engaged him to assist her classical studies, and conferred upon him the temporalities of Crosraguel Abbey. At this point began his rise to solid eminence in his native country.

While under the patronage of Mary he did not scruple to prepare for the press some of his keenest satires, "Fratres Fraterrimi," against the Roman Church. He also finished his "Franciscanus," which, dedicated to the Earl of Moray, induced that nobleman to confer upon him the principalship of St. Leonard's College, St. Andrews. As a "doctor" in virtue of this position, he had a seat in the General Assembly, and so quickly were his powers acknowledged that in 1567 he was chosen the Assembly's moderator.

It may be regarded as a strong testimony to the liberality of the Queen's mind that she should encourage learning at her court when the exponent of that learning was one like Buchanan, so strongly opposed to herself on religious principles, the most momentous question of that time. A contrast between the spirits of the two political parties of that day might be drawn from the tolerant attitude of the Queen towards her Latin preceptor, and the inveteracy, on the other hand, with which Buchanan pursued his Protestant invective before and after the downfall of his mistress. He even set his pen to draw up for the impeachment conferences at York and Westminster in 1568-9 the "Detection of the doings of Mary, Queen of Scots." Here, no doubt, grave exception may be taken to the action of Buchanan. It is but small palliation to urge that he had never concealed his opinions, that he was actually persuaded of the Queen's guilt, and that the document was purely official and impersonal on the writer's part. Mary had been his patron: he had been willing enough to court her favour when that favour was of value to him; and now, on the winning side, even supposing his attachment broken by a conviction of his sovereign's misdeeds, he could have afforded to remain generously silent. Such was his type of mind, however; and it may be taken to represent a type of mind more or less common to his political party—a stern, even hard and unlovely, adhesion to the right as it appeared to them, giving small regard to the refinements of feeling and taste. Self-interest can hardly be insinuated as a motive in Buchanan's case. His action in the prosecution of the Queen was

more than paralleled by his later attitude towards her successor, James VI., when his personal interest stood the other way. It cannot be denied, however, that in both instances was displayed a certain ungracious rigidity of opinion and disposition. Buchanan's best excuse must be that the times were hard, and needed hard-edged tools.

From the "Detection," of course, must be carefully dissociated the violent" Actio contra Mariam," written by some meaner and more acrid pen, and printed along with Buchanan's indictment.

During the Earl of Moray's short regency Buchanan would appear to have been Director of Chancery; and in this period, besides publishing a further Latin collection, "Elegia, Silvæ, Hendecasyllabi," he produced in the vernacular two political tracts which effectively hit their mark at the time, and which remain to prove the vigour of their author's powers in his native tongue. The height of his political fortunes was reached in 1570, when he obtained the office of Lord Privy Seal, and was appointed preceptor to the young king. By virtue of his office he had now a seat in Parliament, and besides taking an active part in general politics, he was employed on several special commissions directed to deal with the system of education and the codifying of the law.

But he was by this time an old man, and political enterprise, after all, had been an episode and not the main concern of his life. The monumental work by which he was to be remembered had still to be accomplished, and a king's mind was in his hand to train. That he did not succeed in making greater things of James VI. was probably owing as much to the material he had to work upon, and to the adverse influences with which he had to contend, as to possible faults in the methods he employed. Buchanan's stern ideals, it is true, were alien to the traditional character of the Stuarts, and some harm may have been done in the endeavour to form the descendant of a gallant and romantic line of kings upon a Calvinistic model: but the transitional nature of the time must be considered to some extent responsible for the halting, pedantic character of James. It must at least be said that the preceptor honestly, without thought of interest or favour, did his utmost for his pupil. It was for the king's behoof that he now published a treatise, written years before to justify the deposition of Queen Mary. This treatise, "De Jure Regni apud Scotos," became at once immensely popular on the Continent, and its teaching, that the true power of government springs from the goodwill of the people, is acknowledged to-day as the most ordinary truism of political economy. But it was a work hardly calculated to please the youthful sovereign of the sixteenth century to whom it was addressed,