Chapter VI: Biographical Facts (1)

_Earlier and Continental_

Buchanan was born early in February 1506, at Moss or Mid-Leowen, on the Blane Water, about two miles south-east of Killearn in Stirlingshire, of a ‘family ancient rather than opulent,’ as he tells us in his _Autobiography_, so that he was delivered from the peasant or upstart consciousness which, except in the priesthood, would, in those feudal times, have handicapped him heavily in the race of life. His real and Scoto-Irish clan name was Macauslan, but the Macauslan having acquired the lands of Buchanan in the Lennox, took the name of his property, and became Buchanan of that Ilk; and thus it came to pass that our George ranked as a ‘cadet of Buchanan,’ as Hannay was proud and particular to specify. Ancient lineage, however, is no insurance against misfortune, and the Buchanans of Moss, never rich, sank into deep poverty. The father died in George’s youth, and the grandfather who survived him was a waster and became a bankrupt, and Agnes Heriot, the mother, was left to struggle with the upbringing of five sons and three daughters--a task however, which she successfully accomplished, like the heroine she was, as her most distinguished son gratefully commemorates. Having never known wealth or luxury, perhaps it was easier for Buchanan to reconcile himself to their opposites in after years. In the Lennox they talked Gaelic, and Buchanan picked up that speech to begin with. He would also learn some Scotch or Northern English from his mother, who came from Haddingtonshire, and in addition she was careful to have him sent to the schools in the neighbourhood, where he could learn the elements of Latin.

For the old Church had not entirely neglected popular education, as has been shown, in a very interesting way, in Grant’s _Burgh Schools of Scotland_, and as, indeed, appears on the face of the Reformers’ _First Book of Discipline_ itself (1560). Most of the burghs maintained schools, both secondary and elementary, so that the barons and freeholders who were ordered by the celebrated Act of James IV. (1494) to keep their heirs at school until they had learned ‘perfyt Latyn’--then the international language of the educated and of diplomacy--had abundant opportunity of doing so had they chosen, although unfortunately they too seldom chose; so that the burgh schools were largely recruiting-grounds for the priesthood. There were also elementary Church schools, in many cases taught by women, and private adventure schools; and in these a considerable number of the children of the poor were taught at least to read. Accordingly, when it is said that Knox and the Reformers established the Scottish Parish School system, a little discrimination must be exercised. They did not invent popular education--they found it; but they did invent, on paper, in the _First Book of Discipline_, the idea of bringing education to the people’s doors, by securing that there should be a school wherever there was a ‘kirk’--that is, practically in every parish; so that ‘the youth-head and tender children shall be nourished and brought up in vertue, _in presence of their friends_, by whose good attendance many inconveniences may be avoyded in which the youth commonly fall, either by over much libertie which they have in strange and unknowne places, while they cannot rule themselves; or else for lack of good attendance, and of such necessaries as their tender age requires.’

So far the _Book of Discipline_, at once recognising an existing educational system, and suggesting, for reason given, the vital improvement of its national application! The whole scheme, indeed, is admirable, including as it does compulsion, the picking out and, in the case of the poor, supporting the class of youth suited for the higher kinds of service to society, while the others not so gifted ‘must be set to some handie craft, or to some other profitable exercise’--that is, technical education, or some other form of practical training. I have said ‘on paper,’ but not by way of sneer, and ought to add in passing, that it was not the fault of Knox and his associates that it remained to a great extent merely ‘on paper,’ instead of being immediately and effectually established. It was the fault and the disgrace of a different type of men. Knox, as I have already said, was a politician, and made dexterous use of the ‘Lords of the Congregation’ to secure the triumph of Protestantism. But these ‘Lords of the Congregation’ were politicians also, and made an equally dexterous use of Knox to fill their own pockets with Church spoil--I except a few, who were really noble men. They gave little for parish churches, and nothing that I ever heard of for parish schools. The whole thing broke poor Knox’s heart. It did not ruffle Buchanan, although he was probably the greatest educational enthusiast in Europe at the moment. But he was really a greater intelligence and a calmer master of himself than Knox, and probably knew that any one who expects to find more than twenty-five per cent.--if so much--of the race as existing at any given moment worthy of intellectual or moral respect, must either have had little experience of life, or possess a very low standard of human excellence.

Not till 1696 was the plan of the _Book of Discipline_ adumbrated in legislation, and the successors of the ‘Lords of the Congregation’ bound by law to provide a school-house and a salaried teacher in every parish. But during the whole of the intervening century and a third, the Presbyterian clergy never ceased in their efforts, and often their sacrifices, for popular education, while at the same time fighting a steady battle for liberty against as mean and cruel a crusade of Absolutist Monarchy and Ecclesiastical Tyranny as ever was preached by a ridiculous and pedant Peter against a self-respecting people. For myself, I fail to find much of the theology of the Covenanters credible--although I must say I should like if we could hear Knox and Melville, or even Cameron and Cargill, on the existing state of things. I think we should get some different guidance from what we are receiving from those blind leaders of the blind who shiveringly and stammeringly attempt to fill their places. For it is almost impossible to appraise too highly the service done by the Covenanters for the cause of liberty and popular education; and although they had their very obvious faults, one is always sorry to think that the aristocratic and Episcopalian prejudices of Scott should have led him to hold them up to ridicule, while glad that a higher and juster view was taken by a greater Scotsman even than Scott, when, in answer to a contemptuous critic of the men of the Covenant, Burns turned on him with the withering _impromptu_:--

‘The Solemn League and Covenant
Cost Scotland blood--cost Scotland tears--
But it sealed Freedom’s sacred cause--
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneers.’[5]

We go back to young George Buchanan (1517-19) at the Catholic local grammar-school of Killearn or Dumbarton, or wherever else in the neighbourhood secondary education was to be had. The boy had shown such aptitude that his uncle, James Heriot, who is said to have been Justiciar of Lothian, sent him to the University of Paris, then, though not quite so much as at an earlier date, enjoying the reputation of the most notable of any seat of learning in existence. Instead of being required to pass through the preparatory school, he at once began his studies in the Arts faculty (1520, age fourteen), his Scottish acquirements having apparently been sufficient to pass him through whatever entrance examination was imperative. Here he spent about two years, working mainly at Latin versification, which, as his reputation for Latin poetry was to be the making of him in after years, was perhaps the best thing he could do, especially as he liked it. At this point, as evil fate would have it, his uncle died, and he himself fell ill. But as he was penniless, he had to struggle home, illness and all, as best he could, and was not able to move about again for a year or thereabouts (1523). And then it turned out that a very singular purpose had entered the mind of the ill or convalescent student of seventeen.

[_Here ends Dr. Wallace’s MS._]

That purpose was to enlist as a volunteer in an army for the invasion of England, to be led by the Regent Albany, who had supposed wrongs of his own as well as of the borders to avenge against that old neighbour and untiring enemy. That army, consisting of French auxiliaries and Scottish recruits, marched to Melrose and then partly crossed the Tweed by a wooden bridge, then, holding Flodden in memory, intimated a mutinous resolution not to cross the border, then marched down the left bank of the river, and for three days besieged Wark Castle to little effect, then made a sudden night-march to Lauder in a snowstorm, ‘which told heavily on man and beast,’ and reduced Buchanan to very bad health for the rest of the winter. Buchanan, when he came to write his own life in his old age, had come to believe that he joined this abortive expedition to learn the art of war, which, without intentions more far-seeing than those of a lad of eighteen, he certainly did, just as Gibbon was educated to understand the evolution of the phalanx and the legions, by what he saw, in his two and a half years’ captaincy of the Hampshire Militia, of the evolutions of a modern battalion. In the spring of 1525 Buchanan appeared as a ‘pauper student’ at the University of St. Andrews, doubtless specially well qualified both as a student and as a ‘pauper’--which epithet ‘pauper,’ however, meant probably nothing more opprobrious than a youth who required board and education free, like many a score of St. Andrews students, from poet Buchanan to poet Fergusson, who about two and a half centuries later sat at the bursar’s free table and said grace over the too plentiful college rabbits that were last century procured from the links that now swarm only with golfers. He was sent there, he tells in his _Autobiography_, to ‘sit at the feet of John Major,’ the celebrated logician of that age; but he did not long sit at his feet as pupil before he felt in a position to criticise his master as a teacher of sophistry rather than logic. Next summer, having taken the St. Andrews B.A. degree, he followed or accompanied Major to Paris, and there passed through two years’ adversity under pressure of poverty and the suspicion of not being an orthodox Papist. Fortune relaxed her frown, and he was admitted to the College of Ste. Barbe, in which he was Professor of Grammar for three years. Meanwhile Gilbert Kennedy, the young Earl of Cassilis, one of the earliest of Scottish hero-worshippers, had the insight to appreciate his learning and genius, and the devotion to adhere to him as friend, pupil, and protector for five years. In 1533, the tutor dedicated to the pupil his translation of Linacre’s Grammar, one of the items of work done by him during his professorship in the College of Ste. Barbe; and in 1558, after this pupil, who had held a prominent position among Scottish nobles, died, probably from poison, at Dieppe, on his way home from the marriage of Mary Stuart to the Dauphin, along with the other three Scottish commissioners who had attended it, Buchanan celebrated him in emphatic Latin verse that is now better known than most contemporary epitaphs. Let it be told, however, to illustrate the cross-threads that run through the web of life, that Queen Mary, on 9th October 1564, granted to Buchanan, who had been her tutor also, and probably the most learned and intellectual of all her friends, a pension of £500 Scots, or £25 sterling a year, from the Abbey of Crossraguel; that the then Earl of Cassilis, son of Buchanan’s old pupil, claimed the temporalities of that abbey as his own, and sometimes stopped temporarily, and often permanently diminished, the pension which had been granted by the Queen out of the spoils of the Reformation, tarnishing by pious Protestant greed the brightest page in the history of the earldom of Cassilis.

After Buchanan’s tutorship of the father of this grasping Protestant was ended, and Buchanan was proposing to return to his old scholar’s life in Paris, James V. detained him to act as tutor to one of his natural sons--not the one known afterwards as the Good Regent, but James Stewart, Prior of Coldingham. This king, who entertained the idea that the clergy ought not to disregard the moral law as if they were royal personages like himself, set Buchanan to the not uncongenial task, upon which Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay of the Mount had previously been engaged, of ‘lashing the vices’ of the clergy, and especially of the monks. In the form of a dream, _Somnium_, he represented to St. Francis the reasons of a decent man for refusing to enter this order of sainthood--reasons which, because of their truth, might satisfy a saint, but which also, because of their truth, would likely be disagreeable to sanctified hypocrites and scoundrels. Two palinodes, wearing the aspect of apologies, were seen by those who understood irony to be rather stinging aggravations of the original satire. After some months of a mixed tumult of priestly rage and secular laughter, the royal love of fun and of virtue again prompted Buchanan to renew the attack, which he did by beginning _Franciscanus_, not published till 1560, and then dedicated to the Regent Moray and gradually extended to a thousand Latin lines, which contain the most polished, skilfully contemptuous exposure of the arts, ignorance, and vices of the later generations of the Romish clergy in Scotland. It is still worth reading by all who enjoy rough, boisterous, coarse humour, as also by all anti-Papist fanatics, even if they should renew their Latin studies for nine months to enable them to understand and utilise it. These men, drenched with satire, published and unpublished, whose craft of various hues was endangered by it, of course thought that it would be judicious if not just to burn its author. Cardinal Beaton had him on his list of heretics,--for what heresy could be so dangerous as disbelief in the solid, well-fed, red-faced exponents of infallible truth? In 1539 he escaped from prison in Edinburgh[6] when his guards were asleep. But being warned after the King had received the MS. of _The Franciscan_ that Beaton had offered this fickle monarch a price for his head, he felt constrained to bid farewell once more to his native country. He fled to England, but, as Henry VIII. was then busy burning all shades of believers that did not suit his personal fancy, Buchanan thought it prudent to trust his safety and his fortunes once more to Paris. On arriving there, however, he found that Cardinal Beaton was there before him as ambassador, so on the invitation of Andrew Gouvéa he withdrew to Bordeaux. There he taught three years at least in the public schools, and wrote four tragedies for the annual exhibitions of these schools, to wit _The Baptist_, _Medea_, _Jepthes_, and _Alcestis_. In the College of Guyenne he had Gouvéa as a principal, and as a pupil Montaigne, the celebrated sceptic, who is dogmatic enough to state in one of his essays that Gouvéa was ‘without comparison the chiefest rector in France,’ and that he himself had, as a principal actor, ‘undergone and represented the chiefest parts in the Latin Tragedies of Buchanan.’ When here, Beaton and the Franciscans harassed him until that fear was dispelled by the plague raging over Aquitaine and the death of his fickle patron, the King of Scots.

Next, about 1547, in the wake or under the convoy of Gouvéa, he migrated to Portugal in response to the invitation of the King to teach in a resuscitation of the University of Coimbra that was being then worked out at great expense for education in the liberal arts and the philosophy of Aristotle. Many of his friends, eminent for learning, were there before him, and he expected to find peace in that out of the way corner of the world. But Gouvéa died suddenly, and then all his enemies ran at him with open mouth. He was thrown into prison, charged with writing against the Franciscans and eating flesh in Lent. The Inquisitors tormented themselves and him for six months without stateable result; and then, thinking it prudent, and perhaps honest, to conceal that their toil had been in vain, they shut him up in a monastery to be converted to the true faith or to be prepared for the fagots. To the great scholar, however, the monks, though ignorant, behaved not unkindly. They allowed him the truest literary leisure and quiet he ever had except perhaps in St. Andrews; and he devoted it to the so-called translation of David’s Psalms into Latin verse, which are in truth artistic evolutionary expositions from Hebrew hints, or splendid blossoms of sacred poetry grown from the seed given by the poet-king of Israel to the winds of heaven, in the moments of inspiration occurring in a life of suffering, of passion, and of hope. Never elsewhere did the iron fetters of Buchanan’s own environment permit him to soar so close to the firmament.

When set at liberty, though the King of Portugal offered him the means of subsistence, he returned to England. But as affairs were then in disorder under a young king, he in a short time returned to France and celebrated the siege of Metz in a Latin poem, not without the approbation which rewarded all his efforts in that line of composition. Thereafter the Marshal de Brissac called him to Italy, and he lived with him and his son in Italy and France for four years till 1560, spending much time in writing his poem _De Sphæra_, and in study of the religious controversies then seething through civilised Europe, and carrying it into a scientific region that rendered a poetic exposition of the Ptolemaic system a work of futility and utterly misspent power.

In 1561 he returned to his native country, and there indicated his Rationalistic leanings to the side of Protestantism. Nevertheless, the non-Protestant Mary Stuart, of ever-living memory in the realm of history and romance, pursued her studies in Livy and other classics with his help. As formerly mentioned, she endowed him with a pension of £500 a year. But in after years Mary’s faults or her misfortunes threw them into the hostile camps that tore Scotland into confusion and deadly discord. In regard to the murder of Darnley, he came to the conclusion, on the evidence of open foes and of professed friends, that she was guilty. He preferred truth to the beautiful queen, and it is difficult to comprehend how any man capable of weighing and scrutinising such evidence as was accessible to him can blame him.[7]

Buchanan has been accused of ingratitude to Mary, his friend as well as his mistress, divinely gifted and divinely appointed. He may have been compelled to seem ungrateful through the lying of ill-informed Reformers and rogues; but sure am I that his Latin and other Humanist studies with that most fascinating and accomplished of women, or at least of queens, gave him the opportunity of forming an idea of her intellectual powers and unsurpassed personal charms that no other contemporary in Scotland was mentally and morally capable of forming, and I don’t doubt that this idea finds sincere expression in his dedication to her of his version or paraphrase of the Psalms of the Hebrew poet-king, without any hint whatever of kindred royal frailties, or of tendencies thereto. What Buchanan must have seen in her when he had the best opportunity of sight and knowledge stands recorded unalterably in his noble verse that rolls down the centuries, bearing an impress of insight and sincerity unequalled in the poetical portraiture of queens till Tennyson laid his dedication at the feet of the most illustrious and fortunate of all her countless descendants. A true poet I believe to be a true seer, and incapable of falsehood to the extent that he has had the chance to see. But a true poet may be deceived. Spenser and Shakespeare were deceived into uttering gross flatteries about Queen Elizabeth; but they were deceived by the dense atmosphere of lying by which one of the cleverest, falsest, most hateful of women of all history encompassed herself. That Queen Mary should have been no worse than she was in a world with her royal cousin and rival flaunting her fictitious moral and physical beauties at the head of it, and getting prematurely canonised as the Good Queen Bess, ought certainly to qualify or blot out for ever all that can be stated truly and justly in condemnation or even grave censure of Queen Mary. Therefore let the modest and honest muse of History cease howling and canting about her crimes, and try to refrain from lavishing eulogy upon her kindred in position and in blood--Henry VIII., the Royal Bluebeard, and his inconstant, cruel, deceitful daughter--a pair of monarchs whose fickle affections led so many adventurous wives and ambitious wooers to the scaffold, by processes that involved the partial but temporary corruption of their country’s conscience.

The wants and troubles of his country beset Buchanan with many a call of duty, and cast upon him loads of multifarious work, such as perhaps never in the history of human-kind before were thrown upon the most accomplished and studious of living men. The tasks assigned to Buchanan, and the duties imposed upon him, reflect no inconsiderable honour and credit upon his lawless, homicidal, half-civilised countrymen. While still friendly with Queen Mary, he gave effect to his Reformation convictions, by sitting and working for years, from 1563 onwards, as a member of the new-born democratic General Assembly, knowing well enough that it was an institution that the Queen would have been happy to see strangled, even before it began to discuss the scandals of Rizzio and Darnley with the plain-spoken impudence of a rustic kirk-session and the arrogance of an infallible tribunal. Buchanan was one of the Commissioners that revised the _Book of Discipline_, and, along with Knox and others, was a member of a committee appointed to confer regarding the causes that fell, or that ought to fall, within the jurisdiction of the Kirk. In 1567, a few days after the beginning of Mary’s imprisonment in Lochleven, Buchanan filled the chair of the Moderator of the General Assembly, a position that for generations has not called for the worldly wisdom and terse, impatient talk of a layman, and seldom, if ever, so much required to be reminded of the limits of its power and jurisdiction as when Buchanan sat as its Moderator, and the head of the State was a captive.

In the previous year, Queen Mary’s half-brother, the Earl of Moray, commendator of the Priory of St. Andrews, and as such patron of the Principalship of St. Leonard’s College there, appointed Buchanan to that office, which he held for four years. During these years St. Leonard’s, which in the first year was studentless, became the best attended of the three St. Andrews colleges. But the fame of the ‘greatest poet of the age’ could not permanently revive the fortunes of St. Leonard’s, nor did the efforts of the Parliamentary Commission of 1579, of which Andrew Melville as well as Buchanan were members. By the time Dr. Johnson was on his way to the Hebrides, the College buildings were ruinous and forsaken, including St. Leonard’s Church, of which the Doctor could not see the inside, because of decent excuses exciting in his mind the hope that ‘Where there is still shame there may yet be virtue.’[8]

The Regent Moray, Buchanan’s patron and friend, to whom the _Franciscanus_ was dedicated, was a recognised mainstay of Protestantism, heartily hated by the allies of the Queen and of the Pope. He was assassinated in Linlithgow on 20th January 1570, partly to further their interests and partly to gratify private revenge. Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh was waiting for him in the house of his uncle, Archbishop Hamilton, with small-bore matchlock and lighted match, and the accident of a crowded street gave him the opportunity of a deliberate aim. His death was laid at the door of the Hamiltons, and it stirred the patriotism of Buchanan to write a political pamphlet, called an _Admonition to the Trew Lordes_, in the vernacular of Scotland, directed against the Hamiltons and their friends--a publication full of practical insight, good sense, and cogent argument, the work of a wise, earnest, sagacious man, who in the zeal for the good of his country forgot that he had the gift of poetic inspiration, in that respect very unlike his great successor Milton when he too became a political pamphleteer, more rhapsodical than relevant. He suspected the Hamiltons of a desire to secure the crown, and Buchanan very much preferred to them Queen Mary and her son, whose birth he had welcomed as a star of hope for his country. His birthday ode of welcome, ostensibly intended for the boy when he grew up, but positively in the meantime for the guidance and the warning of his mother, is in substance a serious homily on the duty of kings to God and the people, from whom their power came, and whose will and welfare alone justified its exercise. The essence of the _De Jure Regni_ underlies it, an essence never practically intelligible to the fated House of Stuart. Neither the beautiful, brilliant Mary nor her erratic but not stupid race could understand the teaching of Buchanan as an exposition of the law of the King of kings. The fate of that race, from her flight to England to the flight from Culloden, has helped the world to understand it. They were doomed to be born in and live through ages of ignorance, superstition, and falsehood, in which few men arose who could discover and recognise truth and publish it at their risk for the dark here and the darker hereafter, as was done by Buchanan. He may not have been infallible, but he had insight, veracity, and courage, the like of which will never be exhibited by his traducers to the end of time. Those who can believe him guilty of base ingratitude and malicious falsehood are incapable of discriminating the best from the worst in human nature and in human history.

Buchanan’s truthfulness and resolute desire to be impartial can be best inferred in our time from his _History of Scotland_, at which he had written for years, and for which he had collected materials from his boyhood. The style of it appears to be an eclectic adaptation of available and appropriate elements from the styles of Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus. It wants the special charm of ‘Livy’s pictured page,’ for Scottish places, deeds, heroes, and tastes did not for Buchanan’s earnest, realistic, dialectical, judicial mind present inducements to poetic word-painting--indeed, it was after his day, before the fascinations of the picturesque dawned upon the mind of Scotland, unless it may have been to some semi-mythical, mist-inspired member of the tribe of Ossian. The speeches of his _History_ are the most tersely expressed, forcibly reasoned specimens of ancient Scottish oratory, assuming, of course, that they ought to have been delivered, but that they never were. They want the terse, pregnant suggestiveness of the orations of Tacitus; but they may probably appear to be not less skilfully adapted for the dramatic surroundings in which they are supposed to have been delivered. Young students of Latin, especially in the Aberdeen region, have found it to be for their interest to read and re-read Buchanan’s _History_, and it is in the original that the literary art and linguistic skill of its author can be best seen. But it is still worth reading, and is often read in Dr. Watkins’ translation, which as a translation reflects a good deal more credit upon its author than his old-womanly, newspapery but not dishonest attempt at original historical composition shown in his bringing down of Buchanan’s masterly story to the culmination or extinction of Scottish history in the visit of George IV. to Edinburgh. The babes and sucklings of the school of Dry-as-dust assert that Buchanan is superseded as an historian; but a man of Buchanan’s powers and opportunities can never be superseded as a narrator of the history of his own time.

Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his _History_ had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day’s work was done.

His death took place in Kennedy’s Close, the second close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by ‘George Paton, Antiquary,’ upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.

His last lodging was in ‘the first house in the turnpike above the tavern,’ and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry, part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie’s vanished tavern, in which during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with select friends.

The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property except £100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis), which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His ‘Inventar’ exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ‘first person of celebrity’ buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt, though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where it is believed to be--a tribute of hero-worship like to that in Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.

It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town Council of Edinburgh for bread, but it is believed that they gave him a stone--without any inscription, however, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 1701 it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed to be one of the lawful and sacred possessions of the Edinburgh University. If genuine, it may be a phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used it at a lecture which was listened to and approved of by Thomas Carlyle. Sir William demonstrated to Carlyle’s satisfaction that the said skull, supposed to be Buchanan’s, was according to phrenological dogmas far inferior to that of some ‘Malay cut-throat’ or other unredeemed ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact--and my authority for believing it is a letter of Carlyle published in Veitch’s _Life_ of Sir W. Hamilton--I am surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were not converted to phrenology. But for my part, believing in the universal but mostly untranslatable symbolism of Nature, from the ‘flower in the crannied wall’ to the human face and form divine, and believing only to a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side of physiognomy that is open to touch rather than to sight, I should hold that the skull which was inferior to a Malay’s in any respect except thickness could never be the skull of Buchanan; and it would not alter my conviction to feel sure that George Combe was present at Sir William Hamilton’s lecture, and for the first and only time in their career of phrenological disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever Buchanan’s head and face may have been like--and his portraits impute to him either sleepy, benevolent dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit--it is not believable that his head or face could have ever resembled that of a Malay or any other kind of savage. So acute a logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to have doubted one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive it possible that the resetters of dead men’s skulls may be sometimes the victims of outside, as well as inside, deception.

EPILOGISTIC

The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan’s ideas, more especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the race, touching the ‘rights of man.’

Few men of any country have had such versatility of talent, and have in life found tasks so varied as George Buchanan and Robert Wallace. No other Scotsman known to me, through credible report or in the flesh, has had the personal experience that would enable him so well to understand and interpret the personal experience of George Buchanan. Both were pre-eminent in the university learning of their respective eras, which had little in common except Latin; scholastic logic and metaphysic being the dominating study of Buchanan’s days, as inductive positive science is of ours. Both were wandering scholars seeking for fortune, or at least for bread; each acting as tutor, schoolmaster, university professor, man of letters, theologian, politician, and teacher of public men who were too ignorant or too neglectful of honest rational principle to be fit to rule in mercy and in justice; both were doomed by circumstances or by conscience to poverty and the discrediting influences of poverty, though fit to furnish invaluable light and guidance to their fellow-men. Methinks the pre-Reformation church was a kinder, less harsh nursing-mother to the inquiring, doubting, hesitating, satirical Protestant, than the dry-as-dust nurses of ultra-Protestantism, agnosticism, atheism, and sincere worship of nothing except Mammon’s golden calf were to the learned literary man of our day who, afflicted with distracting doubts himself, and many sorrows, could still give reasons for his faith in a supreme Creator and an administrator of the universe according to fixed law and unswerving right, and could help to lift the mind of his age out of a darkness deeper than Popery--the blackness of atheistic despair. Both knew about politics as revealed in the wrangling of churches or religious sects, and the strife of factions intriguing and fighting for power to govern or to misgovern. The politics familiar to Buchanan included the ethics that prompted and the arts that effected the murders of Cardinal Beaton, Rizzio, Darnley, Regent Moray, and Queen Mary, and that often imperilled his own life. Nevertheless, worn out by his years and assiduous labours, he died in his bed when his work was done, a fortnight after his _History_ of his country was published, and before his old pupil the Scottish Solomon had time to discover all the treason it contained; ordered his servant to give his few last coins to a beggar, and left the care of his funeral to all whom it might concern on Christian, natural, civic, and sanitary grounds, ending his long, busy, chequered tenure of time with that courage and hope which gilds the last sunset of those who have striven to do right and never doubted that God is just.

There was no man in Scotland or in Europe that could have been of so much service to Scotland in guiding it through the troubles and storms, political, moral, and religious, of the Reformation as Buchanan, if the people of Scotland, more especially the feudal lords of Scotland, had been fit to follow the dictates of the broadest, most complete worldly wisdom, and of the clear conscience of one who had spent his years in study and in poverty, who had lived the life of a stranger to the entanglements of foolish pleasure and the illusions of earthly hope, who had the most of his possible life behind him and eternity in no distant prospect, and who had no conceivable motive to applaud murder or to tell lies. Sceptical by innate constitution, and educated to doubt in the schools of adversity and experience, personal and historical, he was not the man to commit himself hastily to faith in dark dogmas and half-explored truths; he was the man to be a cautious, judicious reformer, not the man to be an impetuous, frantic destroyer, too rash and unrestrained to discriminate between the entirely and partially unsound, too just to plunder churchmen, some of them profligate, in order to enrich feudal lords skilled in few arts except the arts of war and theft. Like Erasmus and Beza, he saw that the old order of society was dissolving; but, like all wise men, he preferred slow and gradual to revolutionary change.

John Knox, in point of culture and of pure intellect and reason, was a small man--a rash, daring, half-educated schoolboy, compared with Buchanan. Knowledge and reason are conservative forces, and Knox could not have been great had he not been a destroyer. His most indelible historical records are the ruins of cathedrals and other religious houses, ‘rooks’ nests’ requiring to be pulled down only in the judgment of blind superstition and rabid fanaticism. For the ignorance and savagery of the people of Scotland the Church of Rome was primarily to blame. That Church required reformation, moral and intellectual; but no spiritual entity, however corrupt, can be miraculously reformed by the destruction of Gothic or any other architecture which took its form under the sincere art and piety of buried generations. Cardinal Beaton’s mode of burning good true men to support and preserve the divine truth that had vitalised his Church for centuries was irrational and infernal; but it was not very much worse than the mad, destructive fury inspired by John Knox’s ‘excellent’ sermons, which, whatever their merits, can scarcely have emanated from a mind that had any clear comprehension of the processes by which spiritual truth makes its way and holds its power effectively among mankind. Beaton and Knox were both powerful in their age and characteristic of it, but they would have found no conspicuous function in an age that was not in the course of emerging from the mire of savagery, with all its tendencies to violence and to vice. Both alike were uncompromising enemies of individual freedom, and equally bent upon the suppression of all conscientious opinions that did not concur with their own. Both were patriots, and of signal service to Scotland; but the evil they did so nearly counterbalances all the good they did (which might, and would, in time have been done by less unscrupulous, ungentle instruments), that it might have been well had Scotland been liberated by Providence from the piebald burden of both of them.[9]

Buchanan as a scholar was a very large inheritor of the wisdom of many ages, the largest inheritor of that rare kind of wealth of all the Scotsmen of his day. He was by nature somewhat of a sceptic, the teacher in Latin--and who can tell what beside?--of Montaigne--most candid and sincere of sceptics--by necessity a doubter, as true seekers of truth, especially in dark, troubled, fermenting ages, cannot help being. He was a philosopher--a Stoic probably, as most impecunious philosophers are compelled to be more or less, capable of bearing the inevitable with patience, and of waiting to solve difficulties by skill and cautious experiment rather than by violence or deceit! What his worldly wisdom and great intellectual power might have done for the good of his country opens up a wide field of conjecture touching the solution of most of the big problems of his age. Why should the clever, beautiful Queen Mary not have trusted him as an adviser rather than Scotch rakes and traitors and Italian fiddlers? Why should her race, more gifted than most royal races, have hugged a delusion about the Divine right of kings along the precipices overhanging death and ruin? Why should the Reformers, who had the means of ascertaining that among them he was a veritable Saul among the prophets, and neither a fanatic nor a hypocrite, not have utilised his wisdom and his inspiration of the beautiful and the true to direct the course and shape the limits of the Reformation, without proclaiming a barbarian, everlasting divorce between the power of truth and the beauty of holiness? Why should the spiritual force and illumination of every great man who did not wear fine raiment and fare sumptuously every day, of the prophets of Judæa and the sages of Greece and Rome, have been lost upon their contemporaries and left to find its way and its expanding efficacy in the slow course of centuries? Buchanan’s lot was the common lot of unendowed, and therefore unappreciated, genius. The greatest scholar and writer of his own country in his own time, one of the most potent of the intellectual aristocracy of Europe for all time, he was a rustic in dress, a plain, unpretentious, non-assertive inhabitant of the European villages called cities, known to him as St. Andrews and Edinburgh; a man pure of life in a vicious, half-decent age; loyal to truth so far as it was possible for him to discover it among contemporaries prone to falsehood and ready for the perpetration of it by forgery or any other effective and not unpracticable mode, he was esteemed a stranger in his native land, and not a Solon or a seer except by the more cultured of his own unlettered generation; to subsequent vulgar generations he was so unknown or so forgotten as to fill, in their rude Temple of Fame, the niche of a mythical court-jester and coarse wit or witling; nevertheless he holds a title to lasting remembrance as sure as the story of the Reformation and the era of the never-to-be-forgotten Mary Stuart can give; also the unique distinction of being the greatest master of the Latin language since it died as a vernacular, and became the immortal medium of intercommunication for the wide, high, and cold republic of scholars and thinkers, scattered through realms of ether and cloudland, and lit by volcanic fire and spiritual aurora fitfully lifting the night from peaks of rock and ice.

FOOTNOTES

[1] When I first heard from one of my early schoolmasters the mediæval chestnut, _Quid distat inter sotum et Scotum?--Mensa tantum._ (‘What divides a sot (fool) from a Scot?--Only the table’)--the reply was credited to Buchanan.

[2] He was Buchanan’s assistant, and called the king’s ‘Pedagogue,’ Buchanan being called ‘Master.’

[3] Certain emoluments arising to the feudal superior (in this case the king); which, as they depend on uncertain events, are termed casualties.

[4] This covers the meaning more accurately than ‘Physicians.’

[5] Burns appears to have afterwards written it down thus:--

‘The Solemn League and Covenant
Now brings a smile, now brings a tear;
But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:
If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.’

The form may be improved, the sentiment could not be.

[6] My authority is Herkless’s _Cardinal Beaton_, p. 153.

[7] My non-forensic sympathy, but not my full conviction, goes with Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton in their chivalrous but too unmeasured defence of Mary. My verdict in regard to her being ‘art and part’ in putting an end to that traitor in heart and deed, the good-for-nothing, faithless fool Darnley, is a hesitant ‘Not Proven’; but if otherwise, then a distinct non-hesitant ‘served him right.’ Skelton’s clever, interesting book upon Maitland of Lethington, Mary’s most faithful and capable minister, does not throw much, if any, light upon Buchanan. In it he is treated as an opposition pleader, capable rather than scrupulous, who did not know all the facts, and who was instructed by men who had other purposes to serve than telling the whole truth, and who probably did not know it themselves so well as Skelton had opportunities to come to know it, _e.g._ in regard to the ‘Casket Letters’--documents that could be satisfactory to no modern tribunal except a Dreyfus court-martial. Buchanan’s attack, in a pamphlet written in Scotch, upon Skelton’s hero Maitland, entitled _The Chameleon_, Skelton sneers at as a ‘Dawb’--not entirely an inaccurate criticism, for _The Chameleon_ is a caricature, and that, of course, means an exaggeration of all faults, actual or presumable. But when a ‘chameleon’ like Disraeli or Maitland, both of whom have found in John Skelton an ingenious and eloquent hero-worshipper, is assailed by satirists in _Punch_ or elsewhere, the only effective condemnatory judgment worth stating is that the caricature is not recognisable by an honest enemy or a free and easy friend. For my part, I believe that the unvarnished truth, though perhaps not the whole of it, can be better inferred from Buchanan than from Skelton.

[8] Sir David Brewster, when Principal of the United College of St. Leonard and St. Salvador, had a residence close to St. Leonard’s roofless church. In 1853, Sir David told to a breakfast-party of students, which included Dr. Wallace and the writer, that his house embraced all that existed of Buchanan’s old dwelling-house, and pointed out one particular part of the ancient outer wall thick enough to resist the artillery of Buchanan’s day. Dr. Johnson’s general contempt for Scotland, which did not keep silence in St. Andrews, could not resist the inspiration of the _genius loci_ of St. Leonard’s so far as to prevent his generously recognising Buchanan’s claim to immortality as being as fair as modern Latinity can give, and ‘perhaps fairer than the instability of vernacular languages admit.’

[9] Carlyle’s estimate of Knox I accept and credit as the estimate of as penetrating an insight and as true a conscience as ever uttered the verdicts of history; but it is the estimate of a mind that could discover more to approve in the storm than in the sunshine, and who too readily infers noble motives from splendid results. I believe all the good he imputes to Knox and his life-battle for truth, and I don’t believe sufficiently in the vileness of human nature to believe in any of the charges of immorality which rival ecclesiastics have persisted in relating against him. But for all that, I am not blind to his human imperfections. I am far from thinking him to be a perfect man, much less a perfect Christian. His wild joy and unbridled merriment over the dying miseries of Cardinal Beaton and of Mary of Guise would be scarcely in harmony with the budding benevolence of a half-reformed cannibal. His virtues were genuine, and not hypocritical, but they were essentially Pagan virtues--gifts of nature, tested and strengthened, but not acquired, through his experiences as a notary and an ecclesiastic.

INDEX

_Admonition to Trew Lords_, the, 130.
Æschylus, 15.
_Agamemnon_, 15.
Arius, 91.
Ascham, Roger, 81.
Atonement, the, 90.
Augustine, 99.
Aurelius, Marcus, 100.

_Baptistes_, the, 57, 58.
Beaton, Cardinal, 122, 139.
Begging letter-writer, 31.
Beza, 81.
Boëtius, 66, 100.
Bordeaux, 58.
Brahe, Tycho, 44, 81.
Brissac, Marshal of, 51.
Brewster, Sir D., 129.
Brown, P. Hume, 18.
BUCHANAN, GEORGE--
Writings burned by hangman, 9.
Milton and Buchanan’s _De Jure_, 10.
Effect of the _De Jure_, 11.
Relations to the Scaligers, 13.
Wordsworth on Buchanan, 14.
Porson and Buchanan, 15.
Milton’s opinion of him, 15.
Hallam’s estimate of him, 16.
Froude’s opinion of him, 16.
Buchanan’s scholarship, 17.
His _Detectio Mariæ Reginæ_, 18.
The Marians and Buchanan, 20.
The chapbook Buchanan, 21.
His humour, 22.
Interview with Melvilles, 23.
The Countess of Mar and, 25.
Division of his life into periods of preparation and
performance, 27.
Why he became a Protestant, 28.
Joseph Scaliger’s elegy on, 31.
Begging letter-writer, 31.
Letters to Mary, Queen of Scots, 32.
Letters to Earl of Moray, 32.
Comparison between Erasmus and, 35.
Hospitality of Roman Catholic days, 36.
His influence on cultured Europe, 38.
Parallel between his conduct and that of to-day, 39.
No loss of self-respect, 40.
No notoriety hunter, 41.
No money grabber, 43.
Did not seek power, 48.
Dates and aims of his works, 50.
Moderator of General Assembly, 51.
Various appointments held, 51.
Aids in drawing up _First Book of Discipline_, 51.
Appointed Principal of St. Leonard’s College, 51.
Secretary to the Scots Commission _re_ Mary, 51.
Opinion of Sir James Melville of, 52.
Not to be blamed for James VI.’s pedantry, 57.
Dedicates his three great works to the king--_Baptistes_, _De Jure_,
and the _History_, 57.
Examination of the Prefaces to these, 58-65.
Resembled a Scots Stoic philosopher, 66.
His courtly manners, 70.
Alleged vindictiveness towards Morton disproved, 72.
His policy regarding Scots affairs, 76.
Further disproof of Sir J. Melville’s remarks, 80.
His religious views, 83.
The Scots Reformation position, 83-88.
His relations to Calvinism, 89-96.
Not a zealot, 90.
His views of Evangelium, 90.
His pension, 92.
His dirge upon Calvin, 93.
His period of doubt, 98.
Why he never took orders, 101.
Is Conformity allowable? 104.
Renaissance morals, 106.
Buchanan’s amorist poetry, 107.
Biographical facts, 111.
The Roman Catholic Church and education, 112.
Lords of the Congregation and education, 114.
His early years of education, 116.
Enlists as a volunteer to invade England, 118.
Life at St. Andrews University, 119.
Proceeds to St. Barbe, 119.
Friendship with Earl of Cassilis, 119.
James V. invites him to write _Franciscanus_, 121.
Leaves him to the vengeance of Beaton, 122.
Escapes from prison to the Continent, 122.
Migrates to Portugal: seized by the Inquisition, 123.
Imprisoned in a monastery, where he translates the Psalms, 123.
Returns to Scotland and declares for Protestantism, 124.
Relations between Mary and Buchanan, 125.
Accused of ingratitude towards her, 126.
The multifariousness of his work, 128.
Writes _Admonition to the Trew Lords_, 130.
Characteristics of his _History of Scotland_, 132.
Buchanan’s last days, 133.
His burial-place and property, 135.
Legend of his skull, 135.
Characteristics, 136.
Final summing up, 137-145.
Parallel drawn between Dr. Wallace and Buchanan, 138.
Burns, 107, 116.

Calvin, J., 82, 89, 90, 92, 94, 100.
Cameron, 115.
Cargill, 115.
Carlyle, T., 34, 143.
Casaubon, 13.
Cassilis, Lord, 51, 119, 134.
Catullus, 66.
_Chameleon_, the, 50, 126.
Chapbooks on Buchanan, 21.
Charles II., 9.
Cicero, 67.
Coimbra, college of, 51, 98.
Collége de Guyenne, 58.
Congregation, Lords of, 114, 115.
Covenanters, 115.

Darnley, 128, 134, 139.
Dawes, Canon, 15.
_Detectio Mariæ Reginæ_, 18, 50.
Diogenes, 69.
Dionysius, Lambinus, 67.
_Dirge_, the, 92.
_Discipline, Book of_, 112.
Divine right, 9, 11, 50, 57.
Dryden, John, 10.
Dunbar, William, 121.

Education in Catholic days, 113.
Election, doctrine of, 90.
Elizabeth, Queen, 127.
England, invasion of, 118.
Erasmus, 13, 34, 96, 99, 100.
Eucharistic controversy, 99.
Evangelicals, the, 89.

France, 124.
_Franciscanus_, the, 50, 90, 98, 106, 121.

Gamaliel, 58.
General Assembly of Church of Scotland, 51.
_Genethliacon_, the, 56.
Gibbon, 67, 118.
Gouvéa, André de, 58, 122, 123.

Hackney, the, 75.
Hamilton, Sir W., 135.
Hebrew Psalms, 43, 123.
Henry VIII., 127.
Heriot, J., 116.
Herod, King, 58.
Herodias, 58.
_History of Scotland_, 50, 57, 63, 132.
Horace, 66.
Hosack, 20.
Humanists, 27, 28, 43, 58, 83, 84, 126.

Incarnation, the, 90.
Indulgences, 90.
Inquisition, the, 43, 98.

James IV., 112.
James V., 50, 120.
James VI., 46, 52, 56, 76.
Johnson, S., 15, 129.
Justification by Faith, 86, 90.

Killearn, 111.
Knox, J., 11, 37, 40, 75, 76, 81, 85, 92, 101, 102, 114, 115, 141.

Latin Style, 17, 27, 132.
‘Lena’ poetry, the, 106.
Lennox, Earl of, 33, 37.
Leo X., 84.
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 9.
Livy, 31, 51, 132.
Luther, 84.
Lyndsay, Sir D., 50, 121.

Macauslan, 111.
Major, John, 65.
Mar, Countess of, 24, 81.
Mary, Queen of Scots, 19, 31, 37, 40, 51, 64, 75, 92, 120, 127,
128, 139.
Mary of Guise, 102.
Melville, Andrew and James, 23, 40, 81, 102, 115.
Melville, Sir James, 52, 80.

Milton, John, 9, 10.
Moderator of Assembly, 51, 128.
Montaigne, 119.
Moray, Earl of, 32, 33, 37, 51, 81, 92, 121, 129, 130, 139.
Morton, Earl of, 73, 74, 75, 79.

_Neæra_ pieces, 108.
Nicene Dogmas, 86.

Oxford University, 9.

Panætius, 67.
Paris, University of, 116.
Paten, Guy, 16.
Pension, 92.
Petrus, Victorinus, 67.
Porson, 15.
Portugal, 43, 51, 98, 123.
Predestinarianism, 86.
Principal of St. Leonard’s, 51.
Private judgment, 86.