xxvi
Alexander Montgomerie, author of The Cherrie and the Slae, and the only Scottish poet of importance who was writing in this period. In the next ten years his life connects itself closely with the King's, and affords the best approach to the latter's relations with Scottish literature. There is reason to suppose that he numbered among his companions the English poet Constable; he was the leader of the quasi-literary group of envoys and intelligencers who were about the court and hailed in sonnets the issues of the King's poems; and, as will appear later, he was the King's guide in his first ventures into verse and criticism.
The date of his birth is still uncertain, but the recently published researches of Mr. George Stevenson[1] make it clear that, while he was born not later than 1545, he belonged to a younger generation of the Hessilheid Montgomeries than the one with which he has hitherto been connected, and that his mother, who died after a long widowhood in 1583, was a great granddaughter of Sir John Stewart of Dernely, first Earl of Lennox, from whom James and d'Aubigny were also directly descended. The poet was thus a member of the Stewart clan, and his kinship with the King helps to explain the favor in which he stood at court. Of his early life little is known, but there is reason to believe that he was in the Low Countries at some time during the seventies,[2] and afterward about the court as a follower of
- ↑ Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, Supplementary Volume, Scottish Text Society, 1910.
- ↑ Cf. l. 591 of Polwart and Montgomeries Flyting:
"Syne forward to Flanders fast fled or he ceast."
A Captain Robert Montgomerie — whose friendship with the Hessilheid branch of the family is shown by the fact that his name appears, with the title added, as prolocutor for Hugh of Hessilheid in a lawsuit (Pitcairn's Crim. Trials, Vol. I, p. 62) was sent to Flanders in the spring of 1573 with a force of about three thousand horse and foot (Cal. S. P. For., 1572-1574, Nos. 460, 1114, 1163). The poet may have accompanied this expedition. Young, in his list of the King's books (Warner, pp. 1, lix), written before 1578, records two gifts, one "Gottin fra Capten Montgomery," and the other "Donnée par le Capitaine Robert Montgommery." The difference in the form of the entries may serve to distinguish between the two captains, and the gifts of books would indicate their return from abroad. Robert Hackett came back from Flanders the next year with at least a dozen (ibid., p. xxxix).
