Historical Lectures and Essays Part 8

To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well as to save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the Scotch nation had taken measures against Mary which required explicit justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly confesses in the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chief authors of those measures had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly, to answer for their conduct to the Queen of England. Queen Elizabeth--a fact which was notorious enough then, though it has been forgotten till the last few years--was doing her utmost to s.h.i.+eld Mary. Buchanan was deputed, it seems, to speak out for the people of Scotland; and certainly never people had an abler apologist. If he spoke fiercely, savagely, it must be remembered that he spoke of a fierce and savage matter; if he used--and it may be abused--all the arts of oratory, it must be remembered that he was fighting for the honour, and it may be for the national life, of his country, and striking--as men in such cases have a right to strike--as hard as he could. If he makes no secret of his indignation, and even contempt, it must be remembered that indignation and contempt may well have been real with him, while they were real with the soundest part of his countrymen; with that reforming middle cla.s.s, comparatively untainted by French profligacy, comparatively undebauched by feudal subservience, which has been the leaven which has leavened the whole Scottish people in the last three centuries with the elements of their greatness. If, finally, he heaps up against the unhappy Queen charges which Mr. Burton thinks incredible, it must be remembered that, as he well says, these charges give the popular feeling about Queen Mary; and it must be remembered also, that that popular feeling need not have been altogether unfounded. Stories which are incredible, thank G.o.d, in these milder days, were credible enough then, because, alas! they were so often true.

Things more ugly than any related of poor Mary were possible enough--as no one knew better than Buchanan--in that very French court in which Mary had been brought up; things as ugly were possible in Scotland then, and for at least a century later; and while we may hope that Buchanan has overstated his case, we must not blame him too severely for yielding to a temptation common to all men of genius when their creative power is roused to its highest energy by a great cause and a great indignation.

And that the genius was there, no man can doubt; one cannot read that "hideously eloquent" description of Kirk o' Field, which Mr. Burton has well chosen as a specimen of Buchanan's style, without seeing that we are face to face with a genius of a very lofty order: not, indeed, of the loftiest--for there is always in Buchanan's work, it seems to me, a want of unconsciousness, and a want of tenderness--but still a genius worthy to be placed beside those ancient writers from whom he took his manner.

Whether or not we agree with his contemporaries, who say that he equalled Virgil in Latin poetry, we may place him fairly as a prose writer by the side of Demosthenes, Cicero, or Tacitus. And so I pa.s.s from this painful subject; only quoting--if I may be permitted to quote--Mr. Burton's wise and gentle verdict on the whole. "Buchanan," he says, "though a zealous Protestant, had a good deal of the Catholic and sceptical spirit of Erasmus, and an admiring eye for everything that was great and beautiful.

Like the rest of his countrymen, he bowed himself in presence of the l.u.s.tre that surrounded the early career of his mistress. More than once he expressed his pride and reverence in the inspiration of a genius deemed by his contemporaries to be worthy of the theme. There is not, perhaps, to be found elsewhere in literature so solemn a memorial of s.h.i.+pwrecked hopes, of a sunny opening and a stormy end, as one finds in turning the leaves of the volume which contains the beautiful epigram 'Nympha Caledoniae' in one part, the 'Detectio Mariae Reginae' in another; and this contrast is, no doubt, a faithful parallel of the reaction in the popular mind. This reaction seems to have been general, and not limited to the Protestant party; for the conditions under which it became almost a part of the creed of the Church of Rome to believe in her innocence had not arisen."

If Buchanan, as some of his detractors have thought, raised himself by subserviency to the intrigues of the Regent Murray, the best heads in Scotland seem to have been of a different opinion. The murder of Murray did not involve Buchanan's fall. He had avenged it, as far as pen could do it, by that "Admonition Direct to the Trew Lordis," in which he showed himself as great a master of Scottish, as he was of Latin prose. His satire of the "Chameleon," though its publication was stopped by Maitland, must have been read in ma.n.u.script by many of those same "True Lords;" and though there were n.o.bler instincts in Maitland than any Buchanan gave him credit for, the satire breathed an honest indignation against that wily turncoat's misgoings, which could not but recommend the author to all honest men. Therefore it was, I presume, and not because he was a rogue, and a hired literary spada.s.sin, that to the best heads in Scotland he seemed so useful, it may be so worthy, a man, that he be provided with continually increasing employment. As tutor to James I.; as director, for a short time, of the chancery; as keeper of the privy seal, and privy councillor; as one of the commissioners for codifying the laws, and again--for in the semi-anarchic state of Scotland, government had to do everything in the way of organisation--in the committee for promulgating a standard Latin grammar; in the committee for reforming the University of St. Andrew's: in all these Buchanan's talents were again and again called for; and always ready. The value of his work, especially that for the reform of St. Andrew's, must be judged by Scotsmen, rather than by an Englishman; but all that one knows of it justifies Melville's sentence in the well-known pa.s.sage in his memoirs, wherein he describes the tutors and household of the young king. "Mr.

George was a Stoic philosopher, who looked not far before him;" in plain words, a high-minded and right-minded man, bent on doing the duty which lay nearest him. The worst that can be said against him during these times is, that his name appears with the sum of 100 pounds against it, as one of those "who were to be entertained in Scotland by pensions out of England;" and Ruddiman, of course, comments on the fact by saying that Buchanan "was at length to act under the threefold character of malcontent, reformer, and pensioner:" but it gives no proof whatsoever that Buchanan ever received any such bribe; and in the very month, seemingly, in which that list was written--10th March, 1579--Buchanan had given a proof to the world that he was not likely to be bribed or bought, by publis.h.i.+ng a book, as offensive probably to Queen Elizabeth as it was to his own royal pupil; namely, his famous "De Jure Regni apud Scotos,"

the very primer, according to many great thinkers, of const.i.tutional liberty. He dedicates that book to King James, "not only as his monitor, but also as an importunate and bold exactor, which in these his tender and flexible years may conduct him in safety past the rocks of flattery."

He has complimented James already on his abhorrence of flattery, "his inclination far above his years for undertaking all heroical and n.o.ble attempts, his prompt.i.tude in obeying his instructors and governors, and all who give him sound admonition, and his judgment and diligence in examining affairs, so that no man's authority can have much weight with him unless it be confirmed by probable reasons." Buchanan may have thought that nine years of his stern rule had eradicated some of James's ill conditions; the petulance which made him kill the Master of Mar's sparrow, in trying to wrest it out of his hand; the carelessness with which--if the story told by Chytraeus, on the authority of Buchanan's nephew, be true--James signed away his crown to Buchanan for fifteen days, and only discovered his mistake by seeing Bachanan act in open court the character of King of Scots. Buchanan had at last made him a scholar; he may have fancied that he had made him likewise a manful man: yet he may have dreaded that, as James grew up, the old inclinations would return in stronger and uglier shapes, and that flattery might be, as it was after all, the cause of James's moral ruin. He at least will be no flatterer. He opens the dialogue which he sends to the king, with a calm but distinct a.s.sertion of his mother's guilt, and a justification of the conduct of men who were now most of them past helping Buchanan, for they were laid in their graves; and then goes on to argue fairly, but to lay down firmly, in a sort of Socratic dialogue, those very principles by loyalty to which the House of Hanover has reigned, and will reign, over these realms. So with his History of Scotland; later antiquarian researches have destroyed the value of the earlier portions of it: but they have surely increased the value of those later portions, in which Buchanan inserted so much which he had already spoken out in his Detection of Mary. In that book also _liberavit animam suam_; he spoke his mind fearless of consequences, in the face of a king who he must have known--for Buchanan was no dullard--regarded him with deep dislike, who might in a few years be able to work his ruin.

But those few years were not given to Buchanan. He had all but done his work, and he hastened to get it over before the night should come wherein no man can work. One must be excused for telling--one would not tell it in a book intended to be read only by Scotsmen, who know or ought to know the tale already--how the two Melvilles and Buchanan's nephew Thomas went to see him in Edinburgh, in September, 1581, hearing that he was ill, and his History still in the press; and how they found the old sage, true to his schoolmaster's instincts, teaching the Hornbook to his servant-lad; and how he told them that doing that was "better than stealing sheep, or sitting idle, which was as bad," and showed them that dedication to James I., in which he holds up to his imitation as a hero whose equal was hardly to be found in history, that very King David whose liberality to the Romish Church provoked James's witticism that "David was a sair saint for the crown." Andrew Melville, so James Melville says, found fault with the style. Buchanan replied that he could do no more for thinking of another thing, which was to die. They then went to Arbuthnot's printing-house, and inspected the history, as far as that terrible pa.s.sage concerning Rizzio's burial, where Mary is represented as "laying the miscreant almost in the arms of Maud de Valois, the late queen."

Alarmed, and not without reason, at such plain speaking, they stopped the press, and went back to Buchanan's house. Buchanan was in bed. "He was going," he said, "the way of welfare." They asked him to soften the pa.s.sage; the king might prohibit the whole work. "Tell me, man," said Buchanan, "if I have told the truth." They could not, or would not, deny it. "Then I will abide his feud, and all his kin's; pray, pray to G.o.d for me, and let Him direct all." "So," says Melville, "before the printing of his chronicle was ended, this most learned, wise, and G.o.dly man ended his mortal life."

Camden has a hearsay story--written, it must be remembered, in James I.'s time--that Buchanan, on his death-bed, repented of his harsh words against Queen Mary; and an old Lady Rosyth is said to have said that when she was young a certain David Buchanan recollected hearing some such words from George Buchanan's own mouth. Those who will, may read what Ruddiman and Love have said, and oversaid, on both sides of the question: whatever conclusion they come to, it will probably not be that to which George Chalmers comes in his life of Ruddiman: that "Buchanan, like other liars, who, by the repet.i.tion of falsehoods are induced to consider the fiction as truth, had so often dwelt with complacency on the forgeries of his Detections, and the figments of his History, that he at length regarded his fictions and his forgeries as most authentic facts."

At all events his fictions and his forgeries had not paid him in that coin which base men generally consider the only coin worth having, namely, the good things of this life. He left nothing behind him--if at least Dr. Irving has rightly construed the "Testament Dative" which he gives in his appendix--save arrears to the sum of 100 pounds of his Crossraguel pension. We may believe as we choose the story in Mackenzie's "Scotch Writers" that when he felt himself dying, he asked his servant Young about the state of his funds, and finding he had not enough to bury himself withal, ordered what he had to be given to the poor, and said that if they did not choose to bury him they might let him lie where he was, or cast him in a ditch, the matter was very little to him. He was buried, it seems, at the expense of the city of Edinburgh, in the Greyfriars' Churchyard--one says in a plain turf grave--among the marble monuments which covered the bones of worse or meaner men; and whether or not the "Throughstone" which, "sunk under the ground in the Greyfriars," was raised and cleaned by the Council of Edinburgh in 1701, was really George Buchanan's, the reigning powers troubled themselves little for several generations where he lay.

For Buchanan's politics were too advanced for his age. Not only Catholic Scotsmen, like Blackwood, Winzet, and Ninian, but Protestants, like Sir Thomas Craig and Sir John Wemyss, could not stomach the "De Jure Regni."

They may have had some reason on their side. In the then anarchic state of Scotland, organisation and unity under a common head may have been more important than the a.s.sertion of popular rights. Be that as it may, in 1584, only two years after his death, the Scots Parliament condemned his Dialogue and History as untrue, and commanded all possessors of copies to deliver them up, that they might be purged of "the offensive and extraordinary matters" which they contained. The "De Jure Regni" was again prohibited in Scotland, in 1664, even in ma.n.u.script; and in 1683, the whole of Buchanan's political works had the honour of being burned by the University of Oxford, in company with those of Milton, Languet, and others, as "pernicious books, and d.a.m.nable doctrines, destructive to the sacred persons of Princes, their state and government, and of all human society." And thus the seed which Buchanan had sown, and Milton had watered--for the allegation that Milton borrowed from Buchanan is probably true, and equally honourable to both--lay trampled into the earth, and seemingly lifeless, till it tillered out, and blossomed, and bore fruit to a good purpose, in the Revolution of 1688.

To Buchanan's clear head and stout heart, Scotland owes, as England owes likewise, much of her modern liberty. But Scotland's debt to him, it seems to me, is even greater on the count of morality, public and private. What the morality of the Scotch upper cla.s.ses was like, in Buchanan's early days, is too notorious; and there remains proof enough--in the writings, for instance, of Sir David Lindsay--that the morality of the populace, which looked up to the n.o.bles as its example and its guide, was not a whit better. As anarchy increased, immorality was likely to increase likewise; and Scotland was in serious danger of falling into such a state as that into which Poland fell, to its ruin, within a hundred and fifty years after; in which the savagery of feudalism, without its order or its chivalry, would be varnished over by a thin coating of French "civilisation," and, as in the case of Bothwell, the vices of the court of Paris should be added to those of the Northern freebooter. To deliver Scotland from that ruin, it was needed that she should be united into one people, strong, not in mere political, but in moral ideas; strong by the clear sense of right and wrong, by the belief in the government and the judgments of a living G.o.d. And the tone which Buchanan, like Knox, adopted concerning the great crimes of their day, helped notably that national salvation. It gathered together, organised, strengthened, the scattered and wavering elements of public morality. It a.s.sured the hearts of all men who loved the right and hated the wrong; and taught a whole nation to call acts by their just names, whoever might be the doers of them. It appealed to the common conscience of men. It proclaimed a universal and G.o.d-given morality, a bar at which all, from the lowest to the highest, must alike be judged.

The tone was stern: but there was need of sternness. Moral life and death were in the balance. If the Scots people were to be told that the crimes which roused their indignation were excusable, or beyond punishment, or to be hushed up and slipped over in any way, there was an end of morality among them. Every man, from the greatest to the least, would go and do likewise, according to his powers of evil. That method was being tried in France, and in Spain likewise, during those very years. Notorious crimes were hushed up under pretence of loyalty; excused as political necessities; smiled away as natural and pardonable weaknesses. The result was the utter demoralisation, both of France and Spain. Knox and Buchanan, the one from the standpoint of an old Hebrew prophet, the other rather from that of a Juvenal or a Tacitus, tried the other method, and called acts by their just names, appealing alike to conscience and to G.o.d. The result was virtue and piety, and that manly independence of soul which is thought compatible with hearty loyalty, in a country labouring under heavy disadvantages, long divided almost into two hostile camps, two rival races.

And the good influence was soon manifest, not only in those who sided with Buchanan and his friends, but in those who most opposed them. The Roman Catholic preachers, who at first a.s.serted Mary's right to impurity while they allowed her guilt, grew silent for shame, and set themselves to a.s.sert her entire innocence; while the Scots who have followed their example have, to their honour, taken up the same ground. They have fought Buchanan on the ground of fact, not on the ground of morality: they have alleged--as they had a fair right to do--the probability of intrigue and forgery in an age so profligate: the improbability that a Queen so gifted by nature and by fortune, and confessedly for a long while so strong and so spotless, should as it were by a sudden insanity have proved so untrue to herself. Their n.o.blest and purest sympathies have been enlisted--and who can blame them?--in loyalty to a Queen, chivalry to a woman, pity for the unfortunate and--as they conceived--the innocent; but whether they have been right or wrong in their view of facts, the Scotch partisans of Mary have always--as far as I know--been right in their view of morals; they have never deigned to admit Mary's guilt, and then to palliate it by those sentimental, or rather sensual, theories of human nature, too common in a certain school of French literature, too common, alas! in a certain school of modern English novels. They have not said, "She did it; but after all, was the deed so very inexcusable?" They have said, "The deed was inexcusable: but she did not do it." And so the Scotch admirers of Mary, who have numbered among them many a pure and n.o.ble, as well as many a gifted spirit, have kept at least themselves unstained; and have shown, whether consciously or not, that they too share in that st.u.r.dy Scotch moral sense which has been so much strengthened--as I believe by the plain speech of good old George Buchanan.

FOOTNOTES

{1} This lecture was delivered in America in 1874.

{2} Black, translator of Mallett's "Northern Antiquities," Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn's "Antiquitates Americanae."

{3} On the Fiftieth Birthday of Aga.s.siz.

{4} This lecture was given in America in 1874.

{5} This lecture was given in America in 1874.

{6} This lecture and the two preceding ones, being published after the author's death, have not had the benefit of his corrections.

{7} A Life of Rondelet, by his pupil Laurent Joubert, is to be found appended to his works; and with an account of his illness and death, by his cousin, Claude Formy, which is well worth the perusal of any man, wise or foolish. Many interesting details beside, I owe to the courtesy of Professor Planchon, of Montpellier, author of a discourse on "Rondelet et vies Disciples," which appeared, with a learned and curious Appendix, in the "Montpellier Medical" for 1866.

{8} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869.

{9} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869.

{10} I owe this account of Bloet's--which appears to me the only one trustworthy--to the courtesy and erudition of Professor Henry Morley, who finds it quoted from Bloet's "Acroama," in the "Observationum Medicarum Rariorum," lib. vii., of John Theodore Schenk. Those who wish to know several curious pa.s.sages of Vesalius's life, which I have not inserted in this article, would do well to consult one by Professor Morley, "Anatomy in Long Clothes," in "Fraser's Magazine" for November, 1853. May I express a hope, which I am sure will be shared by all who have read Professor Morley's biographies of Jerome Carden and of Cornelius Agrippa, that he will find leisure to return to the study of Vesalius's life; and will do for him what he has done for the two just-mentioned writers?

{11} Olivarez's "Relacion" is to be found in the Granvelle State Papers.

For the general account of Don Carlos's illness, and of the miraculous agencies by which his cure was said to have been effected, the general reader should consult Miss Frere's "Biography of Elizabeth of Valois,"

vol. i. pp. 307-19.

{12} In justice to poor Doctor Olivarez, it must be said that, while he allows all force to the intercession of the Virgin and of Fray Diego, and of "many just persons," he cannot allow that there was any "miracle properly so called," because the prince was cured according to "natural order," and by "experimental remedies" of the physicians.

{13} This lecture was given at Cambridge in 1869, and has not had the benefit of the author's corrections for the press.

{14} Delrio's book, a famous one in its day, was published about 1612.

{15} For a true estimate of Paracelsus you must read "Fur Philippus Aureolus Theophrarstus von Hohenheim," by that great German physician and savant, Professor Marx, of Gottiingen; also a valuable article founded on Dr. Marx's views in the "Nouveau Biographie Universelle;" and also--which is within the reach of all--Professor Maurice's article on Paracelsus in Vol. II. of his history of "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy." But the best key to Paracelsus is to be found in his own works.

{16} So says Dr. Irving, writing in 1817. I have, however, tried in vain to get a sight of this book. I need not tell Scotch scholars how much I am indebted throughout this article to Mr. David Irving's erudite second edition of Buchanan's Life.

{17} From the quaint old translation of 1721, by "A Person of Honour of the Kingdom of Scotland."