Маргарет Олифант
Royal Edinburgh: Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets
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.
Buchanan took the opportunity of this quiet and prosperous period, when all was hopeful in the nation as well as in his own prospects, to publish the poetical version of the Psalms which had occupied his enforced leisure in the Portuguese monastery years before. They had not yet seen the light in a complete form, although several of them had been included by the well-known printer Etienne, or Stephanus as he is more generally called, in a collection of similar translations by several learned hands, among which he gives in a flattering preface by far the highest place to Buchanan. The terms of laudation in which he speaks, and which it was the fashion of the time to employ, may be judged from the following extracts quoted by Irving. After commenting upon the general excellence of his friend's work, superior to all others, he adds,—
"There is nothing more honourable, nothing more splendid, than after excelling all others, at length to excel one's self; so in my judgment you have most happily attained to this praise in your version of these psalms. For in translating the other odes of this sacred poet, you have been Buchanan, that is, you have been as conspicuous among the other paraphrasists as the moon among the smaller luminaries; but when you come to the hundred and fourth psalm you surpass Buchanan; so that you do not now shine like the moon among the lesser luminaries but like the sun you seem to obscure all the stars by your brilliant rays."
The community of letters in these days was in the habit of expressing the intensest mutual admiration, except when a contrary feeling not less strong animated their minds and pens. Buchanan dedicated his psalms to his beautiful pupil and patron in terms as highflown but more elegant, and with a justifiable wealth of hyperbolical adulation. It would be an undue demand upon humanity to require nothing more than plain fact in a poetical address to a young Sovereign so gracious, so accomplished, and so fair. And yet in the extraordinary circumstances, so soon to be swallowed up in the abyss of a catastrophe still more extraordinary, there is little extravagance in Buchanan's address, of which we shall attempt a translation though most unworthy.
"Lady, who bears the sceptre of this land
By endless forefathers transmitted down,
Whose worth exceeds thy fortune far, as stand
Thy virtues o'er thy years, and the renown
Of noble gifts over thy noble line,
And spirit o'er thy sex:—without a frown
Accept in this poor Latin garb of mine
The noble songs of Israel's prophet king.
Far from Parnassus and the classic shore,
From under northern stars my gift I bring;
Nor had I ventured such an ill-born thing
To lay before thee, but for fearing more
To miss the little chance of pleasing thee,
Whose understanding gives a merit not in me."
Buchanan followed this publication by various others, and strangely enough, while still enjoying the royal favour brought out his Franciscanus, his Fratres Fraterrimi, and other satires specially directed against the monks: which, however, seem to have done him no harm, for he talks in 1567 of "the occupations of a court," which kept him from bestowing the time and trouble he wished on the preparation of his various books for the press. Whether the readings from Livy went on all this time we have no record; but when Queen Mary married Darnley, and when her son was born, Buchanan would still seem to have occupied the position of Court poet, and celebrated both events by copies of verses as flattering, as well as elegant, as the dedication. From the first of these we may quote the lines in which Buchanan proves, notwithstanding his long absence and cosmopolitan training, that the native brag of the Scot was as strong in him as if he had never left his native shores. It could scarcely be to flatter either of the bridal pair that he burst forth into this celebration of "the ancient Kingdom."
"For herein lies the glory of the Scot,
To fill the woods with clamour of the chase;
To swim the stream, and cold and heat defy,
And hunger and fatigue. To guard their land
Not with deep trench or wall, but with the force
Of arms, contemning life for honour's sake;
To keep their troth, to reverence the bonds
Of friendship, to love virtue and not gifts.
Such acts as these secured throughout the land
Freedom and peace, when war raged o'er the world,
And every other nation was constrained
To change its native laws for foreign yoke,
The fury of the Goth stopped here; the onslaught fierce
Of the strong Saxon, and the tribes more strong,
The Dane and Norman, who had conquered him,
Nay, in our ancient annals live the tales
Of Roman victory stayed—the Latin tide
Which neither south wind checked, nor Parthia bleak,
Nor waves of Meroi, nor the rushing Rhine,
Was here arrested by this only race
Before whose face the Roman paused and held
The frontier of his empire, not by lines
Of hill and river, but by walls and towns,
By Caledonian axes oft assailed,
Laying all hope of further gain aside."
In the meantime, while these poetical performances went on, and the scholar occupied his leisure in preparing for publication his scattered works—an occupation which of itself proved the quiet and good hope in which he was living—more serious labours also occupied his mind. Notwithstanding his tutorship at Court, Buchanan took advantage of the moment to declare himself an adherent of the newly formed and very belligerent Church, now settled and accepted on the basis of the Reformation, but with little favour at Court as has been seen. He not only put himself and his erudition at once on that side in the most open and public way, but sat in the General Assembly, or at least in one of the Assemblies which preceded the formal creation of that great ecclesiastical parliament, in 1563, less than two years after his arrival in Scotland. Nor was his position that of a simple member taking part in the debates; he seems to have sat upon various special committees, and to have been entrusted, along with several others, to revise the Book of Discipline, the standard of order and governance: and this while he was still a courtier, Mary's tutor and gossip, holding his place in her presence, and celebrating the events of the time in courtly and scholarly verse—a curious instance of toleration in a time which scarcely knew its name.
To recompense Buchanan's services Queen Mary granted him, in the year 1564, an allowance from the forfeited Church property, making him pensioner of the Abbey of Crossraguel, with an income of five hundred pounds Scots—a sum very different, it need not be said, from the same sum in English money. The abbey had been held by a Kennedy, the brother of Buchanan's first pupil, the Earl of Cassilis, and very probably he had thus some knowledge of and connection with the locality, where he had gone with Cassilis many years before. The grant would seem for some years to have profited him little, the then Earl of Cassilis, son of his gentler Gilbert, having little inclination to let go his hold of the rents which his uncle had drawn, either in favour of a new abbot or of the pensioner; and the cruelties with which this fierce Ayrshire lord treated the functionary who succeeded his uncle seem incredible to hear of. George Buchanan kept out of his clutches; but it was not till some years afterwards that we find the local tyrant bound over in sureties to leave the two lawful proprietors of these funds alone. So far as can be made out, Mary's grant to Buchanan was almost identical in date with the publication of the Psalms and the sonnet which he placed at their head: a graceful and royal return for the compliment, quite in harmony with the customs of the time. Both events occurred, as would appear, in the year 1564, when all was still well with the unfortunate Queen.
Buchanan has been accused of great ingratitude to Mary, because at one time he served and flattered her, and received as a recompense for the incense he offered, a substantial benefit: but afterwards turned from her party to that of her brother, and condemned her with unsparing blame in his History, as well as acted against her after her downfall. But the ingratitude is quite incapable of proof. To be devoted to a royal personage in his or her youth, and to maintain unbroken, however he or she may change, this early devotion through evil and through good report, is a romantic grace which is given to few. It was given to very few of those who received with enthusiasm the young Queen of Scotland, when she came unsullied, with all her natural fascination and charm, into the country which hoped everything from her, yet knew nothing of her. After the half-dozen years of disaster and tragedy, of which a much greater number of her people believed her the guilty cause than the innocent victim, there were few indeed who maintained their faith. And Buchanan was neither romantic nor young; he had none of the elements of an enthusiast in him. A caustic man of the world, a self-absorbed scholar without domestic ties or usage in the art of loving, it would have been wonderful indeed had he constituted himself the champion of his beautiful pupil in her terrible adversity because she had shown him a little favour and he had laid poetical homages at her feet in a brighter time. It would be hard indeed if such a passage of mutual good offices were to bind a man's judgment for ever, and prevent him from exercising the right of choosing whom he will serve to all time. Mary's bounty would suffice to give to her tutor the independence which he had struggled for all his life, if it had been paid; but it was not paid for several years; and it was a bounty which cost the giver nothing, so that the claim for eternal gratitude is overweening in any case.
At the same time, both then and ever, Buchanan's patron and backer was the Lord James, a man with whom he was very much more likely to find himself in sympathy than with the young Queen. A grave temper and some learning, and also the charm of early association, would naturally attract the elderly scholar more than Mary's feminine gifts, however great their charm. It was Murray, no doubt, who presented him to the Queen, and procured him his position at Court; and just as the tragic moment approached, when Mary's brilliant life was about to plunge into darkness, Murray bestowed on Buchanan the place of all others best suited for him, and to which his whole previous existence tended—that of Principal of the College of St. Leonard's in the University of St. Andrews. A more fit position, as the best field for his great gifts and dignified retirement for his old age, could not be imagined. Buchanan was sixty; he was of all the scholars of his time facile princeps, according to the opinion of the great French printer and scholar, whose expressions were adopted in the register of the University as describing the qualifications of the new Principal. It might well have been supposed that in the reconstitution and improvement of that old University, in the supervision of his students, in the periodical visit to Edinburgh for Church matters or educational duties, which has afforded the necessary relaxation to many a succeeding principal, the peaceful days of the greatest scholar in Europe would now have passed tranquilly, until he found his resting-place, like so many others, under the soft green mantle of the turf which, broken only by solemn mounds—the last traces of individuality—encircled the great Cathedral of St. Andrews as it now encircles the ruins of that once splendid shrine.
The events of the time, however, permitted no such dignified and calm conclusion. One can imagine the horror and dismay with which the little community at St. Andrews heard the dreadful news, carried far and wide on every breeze, with every kind of whispered comment and suggestion—soon to be no longer whispered with pale face and bated breath, but proclaimed from the housetops—of Darnley's murder. Buchanan had poured forth his celebrations of Mary's marriage and of the birth of the heir while still a member of her household. And no doubt he had become aware of the dissensions in that royal house, of Darnley's ingratitude and folly and the Queen's impatience, before he escaped from all the talk and endless gossip to the quiet of his college. But it would seem equally clear that when the action of the sombre tragedy quickened he was absent from the scene and knew of it only by the rumours and reports that came across the Firth. First Rizzio's murder, which the distant spectators would discuss, no doubt, with a thrill not entirely of horror, a stern sense that justice had been done, a satisfied prejudice—and no doubt some patriotic, if still prejudiced, hope that now the Italian was removed there would be less of foreign policy, and a more entire regard for the welfare of affairs at home. Then would come the rumours of the Queen's vengeance, lightly held at first, of Bothwell always in the foreground, her chief supporter and partisan—Bothwell who, though loved by nobody, was yet a Protestant, and therefore not altogether beyond hope. And then with ever-quickening haste event after event—the murder of the King, for whom no one would have mourned much had it been attended by circumstances less terrible; the mad proceedings of the Queen, whether constrained or free, her captivity, outrage, or conspiracy, whichever it was, her insane and incomprehensible marriage, which no force or persuasion could account for. As the posts arrived at uncertain intervals, delayed by weather, strong winds and heavy seas, by breaking down of conveyances, by the very agitations and tumults in the capital which made them so terribly interesting, the eager spectators in Fife must have congregated to await their arrival with an intensity of excitement, of which, with our endless sources of information and constant communication, we can form little idea now.
And there would seem to be no doubt of the strong immediate feeling which arose against the Queen, the instant conclusion of the bystanders as to her guilt. There have been no greater fluctuations in historical opinion than those that have arisen around the facts of Mary's life. Historians of the eighteenth century considered it as a test of a man's moral sanity whether he persisted in believing in Mary's innocence or not. Among her contemporaries the progress of time which softened impression, and the many pathetic situations of her later history, the terrible misfortunes under which she fell, her endless miseries and troubles, and the brave spirit with which she met them, turned some hearts again towards her, an ever-troubled but ever-devoted body of partisans. But at the moment when these terrible events occurred there can be little doubt that the horror and condemnation were almost unanimous. No reasoning could explain away those wild and mad acts, no discussion of probability come in. The mob in Edinburgh which raged against her was checked in its fierceness and subdued to pity at sight of the wretched lady in her despair, at that awful moment when she appeared at the window of the Provost's lodging in the High Street, and made her wild appeal, in all the force of impassioned and terrible emotion, to the overawed and excited crowd. They saw her in the carelessness of misery half-dressed, unadorned, disenchanted, and delivered from the maddening delusion which had carried her away, recognising in its full extent the horrors of the result—and their hearts were rent with pity. But notwithstanding that pity and all the innate chivalry which her sufferings called forth, Edinburgh and Scotland, the whole alarmed and terrified nation, believed at first the evidence of their senses. There seems nothing more distinct than this fact throughout all the trouble and tumult of the moment. It is not to be taken as an absolute proof of Mary's guilt. Such impressions have existed in other though less conspicuous cases and have been proved untrue. But that it did exist universally there can be little doubt.
The scene at the window of the Provost's lodging where the unfortunate Queen was lodged, near the Nether Bow of Edinburgh, when brought back from Dunbar after the flight of Bothwell by the angry lords, with the mob clamouring underneath, and her enemies holding her fate in their hands, seems to me one of the most significant in her history. No woman was ever in circumstances more terrible. The situation is stronger if we suppose her guilt, and that what we see before us is a great spirit carried away by passion—that something beyond reason, beyond all human power to restrain, which sometimes binds an angelic woman to a villain, and sometimes a man of the highest power and wisdom to a lovely trifler or a fool. It seems to me as at once more consistent with the facts and with human nature to realise the position of the unhappy Queen as transported by that overwhelming sentiment, and wrought on the other side to an impatience almost maddening, by the injuries, follies, treacheries, and universal provocation of her unworthy husband, until the force of the bewildering current carried her in a disastrous moment over a precipice worse than any Niagara, in a headlong course of mingled misery, exasperation, love, and despair. Before she had even accomplished the terrible circle of events, and become Bothwell's wife, it requires no strong effort of the imagination to perceive that the despair might well have come uppermost, and that Mary fully recognised, not only the horror, but the futility and wretched failure into which she had plunged. We do not pretend to believe that there was much to cause remorse in the mind of such a woman in such an age in the death, however brought about, of the miserable Darnley. Mary could have brushed him from her memory like a fly, had that been all. But the rage of despair and failure was in her soul when she raved like a caged lion from door to window, imprisoned, trapped, and betrayed, expressing her incoherent transport of pain to the mob which would have had her blood, but which, overcome by the spectacle of that supreme and awful passion, became silent with awe or hushed by a spasm of pity and tears.
So it has remained, a spectacle to all the earth, which the fiercest assailant and the most rigid judge cannot long contemplate without yielding to a painful compassion which rends the heart. Why should all that faculty and force, all that wonderful being, with every capacity for happiness and making happy, for wise action and beneficent dealing, for boundless influence and power—why such youth, such strength, such spirit, equal to every enterprise, should they have been swept away by that remorseless fate? We can still see the trapped and ruined Queen—exasperated still further by the consciousness that many of the men now holding her in bonds were at least as guilty as she, guilty of Darnley's blood, guilty if not of favouring yet of fearing Bothwell and yielding their countenance to his plans—pacing that chamber, appearing at that window, her loveliness, her adornments, and all the wiles of triumphant beauty forgotten, throwing forth to the earth that was as brass and the skies that were as iron, like a wild animal in its torment, her hoarse inarticulate cry. And, whatever we may think of her merits, that terrible spectacle is more than flesh and blood can bear. Pity takes the place of wrath and indignation that she alone should suffer: why not Lethington, Huntly, Athole, and the rest, all those stern peers who counselled with her upon the most effectual way of having Darnley removed, the thankless fool who disturbed every man's peace—why were not they tried along with her, they who took such high ground as her judges? Why should she bear the brunt of all? Even Bothwell had escaped, and Mary stood at the bar of the world alone.
But such thoughts would not seem to have moved the first spectators, to whom all that damning sequence of events, one precipitated on the heels of another, came fresh as they occurred day by day. As for Buchanan, he would be less prone to doubt than any. He knew something of the Court of France and of the atmosphere in which Mary had received her training. He was acquainted with many a royal scandal, and had much experience of a world in which vice was the rule and good behaviour a mere exception, due to a cold temperament, or a wariness uncongenial to generous youth. Such an old man of the world is slow to believe in innocence at all, and it is very likely that to him who knew her so well it was impossible to conceive of Mary as an example of weak but spotless virtue. The Principal of St. Leonard's went over to Edinburgh a few days after the completion of that tragic chapter, when Mary had been consigned to Lochleven, and Murray had assumed the Regency. The city was still agitated by much discussion of the dreadful questions which occupied all minds yet was slowly calming down like an angry sea, with long seethings and swellings of excitement. The object of Buchanan's visit was not curiosity or desire to be in the centre of that excitement, but a simpler matter, which has drawn many a Principal of St. Andrews since to the capital of Scotland, an Assembly of the Church, which opened "in the Nether Tolbooth" on the 25th of June. Of this Assembly he, though a layman, was appointed Moderator "for eschewing of confusion in reasoning"—a curious motive, which proves at least that his contemporaries had great confidence in his judgment, and also that the passion of this excited and tumultuous time ran so high in the Church that a stronger authority than usual was wanted to keep it within bounds. The sentiment of the Church, or at least of the dominant party in it, would seem to have been rather satisfaction that the Sovereign, foreign alike in training and religion, had been set aside than any distress at the cause. The Assembly congratulates itself that "this present has offered some better occasion than in times bygane, and has begun to tread down Satan under foot," which is not a very amiable deliverance: but kindness and charity were not the Christian virtues most approved in those days.
