New Poems by James I/The King and his Tutors

by James I

INTRODUCTION

I THE KING AND HIS TUTORS

" Quae tarn docta fuit, quamvis privata, juventus ? "

Grotius, Poemata, p. 64.

THE series of murders, tumults, and intrigues which finally left the infant James an orphan in the hands of his mother's enemies, gave the nobles and clergy of that faction a rare opportunity for educational experiment. The result was ironically unexpected, but even in the light of results one cannot criticize the earnestness or wisdom with which the experiment was undertaken. In August, I56Q, 1 when the King was but a little over three years old, four precep- tors were appointed to take charge of his moral and intel- lectual training. Two of these, David and Adam Erskine, lay Abbots respectively of Cambuskenneth and Dryburgh, obtained their posts as kinsmen of the Earl of Mar, the King's guardian. Both were of the royal household and allies of Morton in the troubles of i5y8, 2 and prominent among the plotters against the King in the Raid of Ruthven (1582) ; 3 but they are not mentioned as tutors in later acts of the Council, and it is not clear that they were ever closely associated with the King as instructors. The remaining two, George Buchanan and Peter Young, were confirmed

Dict. Nat. Biog., from a document among Lord Haddington's MSS. in the Advocates' Library. The tutors entered upon their duties early in the following year, "Admissus in clientalem regis, January 4,1569 [70]" (Young's Ephemeride, in Vita Quorundam Eruditissimorum & illustrium Virorum, Th. Smith, London, 1707, p. 23).

z Memoirs of Sir James Melville, Bann. Club, p. 236.

8 Papers relating to the Master of Gray, Bann. Club, p. 59. in their offices by two subsequent acts of the Privy Council, 1 following changes in the regency. The form in each case was the same; the King's education in "literature and religioun " was to continue under " Maisteris George Buchan- nane and Petir Young his present Pedagogis, or sic as salbe heireftir appointit . . . agreing in religioun with the saidis Maisteris." The characters of all four tutors and of the widow of the Earl of Mar, who was mistress of the household at Stirling, are succinctly indicated by a passage in Sir James Melville's Memoirs: " The tua abbotis wer wyse and modest; My Lady Mar was wyse and schairp, and held the King in gret aw ; and sa did Mester George Buchwen- nen. Mester Peter Yong was gentiller, and was laith till offend the King at any tym, and used him self wairly, as a man that had mynd of his awen weill, be keping of his Maies- teis favour. Bot Mester George was a stoik philosopher and loked not far before the hand. ... He was also of gud religion for a poet." 2

Buchanan and Young together were chiefly responsible for the King's training in morals and scholarship during the twelve quiet years he spent at Stirling Castle. The choice of the former was predetermined by his eminence not only in Scotland but in all Europe as a teacher, scholar, and writer. Though at the time of his appointment he had written nothing in the vernacular, he had a wide reputation as a poet and dramatist in Latin, 3 and as a leader of Protes- tant thought in politics and theology. His De Jure Regni apud Scotos gives a sufficient idea of the startling, though from a modern standpoint sound, political doctrines with which James's mind was fed during his credulous childhood. Written at the time of Mary's downfall, it asserts the ac- countability of a ruler to his subjects, justifies tyrannicide, and shows incidentally to what an extent radical political

1 Acts of the Privy Council of Scotland, January 28, 1572-1573, following the death of Mar; May 3, 1578, following the temporary fall of Morton.

2 Bannatyne Club edition, p. 262.

8 Cf. Du Bellay, Regrets, sonnet CLXXIX :

"Buchanan, qui d'un vers aux plus vieux comparable Le surnom de Sauvage ostes a 1'Ecossois." thought was in the air while the first Stuart king of England was still an infant. Much of this teaching James absorbed, and it appears later oddly mixed with his own natural and, in his situation, justifiable views of royal prerogative. In later years, James usually spoke of Buchanan with respect. He told ScaraveUi, the Venetian Secretary in England, of "the days . . . when my tutor, Buchanan, gave me in- struction in the excellence of that government [the Venetian Republic] " ; 1 and he ascribed the correctness of his Latin pronunciation to Buchanan, "who is well-known one of the best Latin scholars in all Europe."

To the same influence James, no doubt, owed the begin- ning of his ambition to become a scholar and writer ; some of his shorter poems, notably An Mnigme of Sleepe and A Sonnet on the Moneth of May, are similar in theme and treatment to Latin poems of his tutor, and it is quite pos- sible that many of the classical ornaments and allusions in his verse could be traced to the same source. Yet in the final fixing of his literary tastes and of his character in gen- eral, the older teacher probably did not have so large a share as is commonly supposed. A letter from Buchanan to Rodolph Gualter, July 24, I579, 2 refers to his increasing illness, and suggests that his relations with the King were already becoming strained: "I have now been from the court more than six weeks by reason of ill health ; but as soon as I return hither, I will endeavor that the King shall steal a few moments from his occupations to give you a testimony of his favorable regard . . . and should I not be able to accomplish this myself, I will take care that it shall be managed by my colleague the pious and learned Peter Young." Buchanan at this time was in his seventy- fourth year; he speaks again in the dedication to James of his History of Scotland (September, 1581) of the 'incurable illness which had prevented him from carrying on the duties of instruction.' It is clear, moreover, from the

Cal. S. P. Venetian, Vol. X, No. 78 (1603).

Zurich Letters, Parker Soc., 1845, Second Series, p. 310. Gualter had dedicated to James his Homilies on St. Paul (1576). statement of Melville already quoted and from numerous anecdotes, apocryphal or otherwise, that Buchanan, who as a member of the Lennox family had a special hatred for Queen Mary, extended his dislike to the "true bird of that bloody nest," l and that this feeling was reciprocal. Other evidence could be given, if it were necessary, to show that the influence of Buchanan ended with the ascendancy of d'Aubigny in the King's thirteenth year.

The remarks of Melville, favorable to Buchanan as they are, indicate that the King's second tutor, Peter Young, adopted a more tactful and possibly a wiser attitude. When he returned from Geneva to enter upon his duties, he was a young man of about twenty-five. Buchanan speaks of him as "adolescens probus et doctus" ; 2 and the testimony of the English representative Bowes, who in 1580 wrote that he would take no money for his influence over the King, 3 is in itself, considering the practices of the period, an ample certificate of character. Young was ap- pointed Master Almoner (October 25, 1577), Envoy to Den- mark (1585 and later), one of the "Octavians" in charge of the King's finances (1596), and tutor to Prince Charles and "chief overseer" of his household (i6o4). 4 To him fell perhaps the larger share of the King's instruction and entertainment in his boyhood.

Neither of the tutors could refrain from the temptation to turn his apt pupil into a prodigy of learning. He was "the sweitest sight in Europe that day," writes the diarist Melville, with an enthusiasm which cooled as the prodigy grew older, "for strange and extraordinar gifts of ingyne, judgement, memorie and language. I hard him discours, walking upe and doun in the auld Lady Marr's hand, of knawlage and ignorance, to my greit mervell and estonish- ment." 5 Killigrew, in another well-known passage written

1 Quoted from a remark attributed to Buchanan in D. Irving, Memoirs of the Life and Works of George Buchanan, London, 1807, p. 169.

2 Opera, ed. 1715, Vol. II ; Episiola, p. 12.

• Bowes' Correspondence, Surtees Soc., p. 28, June 3, 1580.

4 G. F. Warner, The Library of James VI, Scot. Hist. Soc., pp. xiii-xv.

1 Diary, Bann. Club, p. 38 (1574). just after the King's eighth birthday, wonders at his skill in translating any chapter of the Bible out of Latin into French, and out of French into English. He also danced for the envoy, and showed himself "sure a prince of great hope, if God send him life." 1 "They gar me speik Latin ar I could speik Scotis," 2 said James, with a touch of the humor and good sense he could display occasionally; but the effect of the drill is shown by the fact that in later life he could speak "Latin and French perfectly and Italian quite well," 3 and knew a great part of the Bible by heart, so that he could refer offhand to chapter and verse.^[1]

More exact information regarding the King's studies, evidently at a somewhat later period, may be gained from an undated schedule of his daily tasks, written by the tutor Young and included by Thomas Smith in his notice of Young's life. 5 "After prayers," according to this document, "a period was devoted to Greek, with reading from the New Testament, Isocrates, or Plutarch's Apothegms, and practice in Greek grammar. The rest of the forenoon was given to Livy, Justin, Cicero, or Scottish and other history, and the afternoon to exercises in composition, or, if time permitted, to the study of arithmetic, geography and astronomy, dialectic, or rhetoric." A bill of Gibson, the King's bookbinder, presented before 1580, includes in its list of books a number of school texts evidently worn with use, among them such works as Euclid's Elementa, the Questiones Logica and Questiones Physica of Freigius, Car- danus on the significance of eclipses, Orontius's De Fcetu Humano, Volphius's De Perseverantia, Cassiodorus's Dialec- tica, Beza's De Notis Ecclesia, and Hemmingsen's De Super- stitionibus Magicis. 6 The King's later writings show his

1 Letter to Walsingham, June 30, 1574. Quoted in Tytler's Hist, of Scot., Vol. II, p. 9.

2 Apothegmata Regis, in Young's MSS. Quoted by Warner, p. xiii. 1 Cal. S. P. Venetian, Vol. X, No. 22 (1603).

4

5 Vitae Quorundam Eruditissimorum &illustrium Virorum, London, 1707, p. 6.

Maitland Club Miscellany, Vol. I, p. 17. The payment of the bill is dated October i, 1580. training in dialectic, his wide reading in theology and the theory of government as revealed in history, and his special fondness for the magic, witchcraft, and pseudo-physiology of Pliny, Plutarch, and such contemporary writers as Hemmingsen and the physician Cardanus.^[2]

The library gathered together for these pursuits was probably larger and more varied than any other in Scotland at the time.^[3] Many of Queen Mary's books were included, about a hundred and fifty of which had been left in Edinburgh Castle and the remainder in part handed over to James. This collection was rich in medieval romances and in the works of contemporary French poets. The King's own library contained over four hundred volumes, which, with other recorded acquisitions not mentioned by Young, bring the total to about six hundred books accessible to the King in 1578. Buchanan and Young were guided in their purchases by their own scholarly tastes and a solicitude for the edification rather than the entertainment of their pupil. More than half of the books in Young's list are, as one might expect, in Latin, perhaps one hundred and fifty in French, a few in Greek, Italian, and Spanish, and scarcely two score in English. The latter include Ascham's Toxophilus and The Schoolmaster, Elyot's Governour and The Institution of a Gentleman, Hoby's translation of Il Cortegiano, and almost nothing else of literary interest — though Gibson's list ends pleasantly with Lustie Juventus. In contrast with the absence of English verse, James had in French, either in his own collection or his mother's, the poems of Rcnsard nearly complete, Du Bellay's sEneid and L'Olive augmentêe, and volumes of Marot, Magny/Thyard, and Du Bartas; in Italian, Dante and Petrarch; and the classics in abundance both in the original and in translation.

One of the most interesting portions of Young's MS. is a list, later than the rest, of forty-six books taken from Stirling to Holyrood House, November n, 1583, presumably chosen by the King himself, who was then in his eighteenth year, and at a time coincident with his first essays in verse under Montgomerie.^[4] Aside from a dozen or more volumes of the classics, and political treatises such as Cheke's Hurt of Sedition, The True Religion and Popery, and Buchanan's De Jure Regni, the list includes Daneau's Geographica Poetica, Ronsard's La Françiade and two volumes of his Poémes,^[5] and Du Bellay's Musagnaemachie and L'Olive augmentee. The latter items may indicate the King's preparatory reading for the sonnets and the treatise on the art of poesy in The Essayes of a Prentise. Aside from the influence of older native poetry, the poetic theory and practice of both James and Montgomerie were based chiefly on French models.

Nothing very serious, one might think, could be wrong with a young gentleman who would undertake so profitable a course of reading as the one just outlined. James, indeed, emerged or escaped from the hands of his guardians a mixture of curious and not wholly unlikable qualities. Whatever he was willing to pretend or call himself for political purposes, it must be admitted that his religious convictions were reasonably founded and sincere. From the worst vices of his family and nation he was free; he did not drink to excess, and he was so continent that he excited the anxiety of the court; and he was reasonably observant of the rest of the commandments, if one excepts the third, fourth, fifth, and perhaps the ninth. It should be remembered that James's middle course in politics and religion exposed him to the attack of both extremes, and especially to the abuse of writers such as Wilson, Osborne, and Welden, who, like Prynne, fed the ears of credulous Puritans with the dregs of court scandal. Curiosity hunters in the eighteenth century and later found the accounts of these "caper-witted" writers, as Bishop Hackett calls them, more attractive reading than those of soberer annalists, and even the James of The Fortunes of Nigel, vivid as it is, is an effective caricature and not a truthful portrait. Its influence, however, is not easily counteracted by the soberer judgments of Von Ranke, Gardiner, Pattison, Spedding, Tytler, and the majority of later historians. Most of the King's faults can be traced to love of pleasure and lack of self-control, which were inherited traits ; his lavishness of expense, devotion to favorites, dislike of business, impatience at prolonged mental exertion or even tedious entertainment, all are manifestations of common Stuart failings. Though he had the intelligence and wit of his family, he had no great share of its dignity. His fits of tears, his absurd displays of affection, his coarseness, though this is not in his writings and perhaps did not so much trouble old courtiers of Elizabeth like Sir John Harington,^[6] made it hard for him to command the respect even of his friends.

1. Cal. S. P. Spanish, 1586-1595, p. 250.
2. Cf. notes, especially to poems XVII, XVIII, LIV, and LVI.
3. Lists of the books left by Mary at Holyrood and Edinburgh Castle were published by the Bannatyne Club in the Inventaires de la Royne Descosse, 1863, and carefully annotated in Julian Sharman's monograph, The Library of Mary Queen of Scots, London, 1889. The Edinburgh Castle list, together with Gibson's bill and an earlier bill for thirty-one books purchased for James, had previously been printed in the Maitland Club Miscellany cited above. The King's books are given in G. F. Warner's Library of James VI, 1573-1583, Scot. Hist. Soc., 1893, from a MS. in the hand of Peter Young, with introduction and notes, to which the reader is referred for more detailed study.
4. Warner, pp. xxvii, xxxv. That the King selected the books may be surmised chiefly from the fact that they were in line with his activities in the following winter.
5. In the 1567 edition of Ronsard the third volume, entitled Poemes, contained his Abrege de l'Art Potique franqois. The books James took were in quarto, and this was the only edition of Ronsard of that size. Both this treatise and Du Bellay's Defense el Illustration de la Langue franqaise were among the books of Mary.
6. Author of The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596). His Nugæ Antiquæ (ed. Th. Park, 1804) is one of the chief sources for court gossip of the first ten years of James's reign in England. Portions of it, however, should be taken in the light of his earlier performance.