All we know of them is that in their early childhood he did not spare the rod; yet was grieved to see them weep. It would be strange if it were not a disappointment to him, if perhaps a relief as well, to find no sympathy in his sons for his own career. The daughters whom the young wife of his old age brought him lived to be like him; which it is said is the only good fortune in paternity likely to so great a man.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MORAY HOUSE, CANONGATE]
When Knox emerged out of the silence which here falls so strangely upon his life (broken but by one energetic protest and appeal to the community against the re-erection of the bishopric of St. Andrews, which is full of all his old force) he was a weakened and ailing man, not less ready in spirit to perform all his ancient offices as standard-bearer and champion, but sadly unable in body to bear the fatigues and excitement of such an agitated life. He reappeared in public for the first time when the infant James was crowned in Stirling, preaching the sermon which preceded that melancholy ceremony. He then returned to Edinburgh, where for a brief period he saw the accomplishment of all his desires under the Regent Murray"s government: the ma.s.s banished; the Kirk re-established; a provision, though still limited to a third of the old ecclesiastical property, securely settled for the maintenance of religion, and every precaution taken for the stability of the settlement. He was no longer able to take the part he had done in the affairs of the time and the guidance of the a.s.semblies, but he was still able to conduct, at least, the Sunday services at St. Giles"s, and to give his strenuous advice and help in all the difficulties of government. It must have seemed to him that the light which comes at eventide had been fully granted to his prayers. But the death of Murray changed all this like the end of a happy dream. His sermon in St.
Giles"s, after that terrible event, is a wail of impa.s.sioned lamentation. "He is at rest, O Lord! but we are left in extreme misery,"
he cries, his grief redoubled by the thought that it was he who had procured from Murray the pardon of the a.s.sa.s.sin. St. Giles"s was full of the sound of weeping when the old man, worn with labour and trouble, p.r.o.nounced those beautiful words which have breathed like the tone of the silver trumpets over so many a grave: "Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord." It was one of the last of his appearances in that great cathedral which he had made his own, and to which he had given the only compensation and adornment which could make up for its old sanct.i.ties and decoration sacrificed--the prodigious crowd of eager and sympathetic listeners, the great voice not without discords and broken notes, but full of natural eloquence and high religious feeling, of an orator and prophet.
A few months after Knox was prostrated by a fit of apoplexy, it is said; but it would rather seem of paralysis, since his speech was affected. He recovered and partially resumed preaching, but never was the same again; and the renewed troubles into which Scotland and Edinburgh were plunged found the old leader of the Church unequal to the task of making head against them. The curious complication of affairs which had already existed on several occasions in the capital when the castle and its garrison were hostile to the city at their feet, ready to discharge a gun into the midst of the crowded streets or threaten a sally from the gates which opened directly upon the very centre of the town, was now accentuated to the highest degree by the adoption of the Queen"s cause by its Captain, Kirkaldy of Grange. We cannot pause now to give any sketch of that misplaced hero and knight of romance, the Quixote of Scotland, who took up Mary"s quarrel when others deserted her, and for much the same reasons, because, if not guilty, she was at least supposed to be so, and at all events was tragically unfortunate and in circ.u.mstances wellnigh hopeless. These views brought him into desperate opposition to Knox, once his friend and leader; and though it is impossible to believe that a man so chivalrous and honourable would have injured the old Reformer, yet there were many partisans of less repute who would no doubt have willingly struck a blow at Knox under shelter of the Captain"s name. As was natural to him, however, the preacher in these circ.u.mstances redoubled his boldness, and the more dangerous it was to denounce Mary under the guns of the fortress held in her name, was the more anxious with his enfeebled voice to proclaim, over and over again, his opinion of her, and of the punishment which, had there been justice in the world or faith in Zion, she must have undergone. Knox"s failing life was a.s.sailed at this agitated period by a kind of persecution much more trying to him than anything he had undergone in the past. He was a.s.sailed by anonymous libels, placards affixed to the church doors, and thrown into the a.s.sembly, charging him over again with railing against the Queen, refusing to pray for her, seeking the support of England against his native country, and so forth. These accusations had no doubt a foundation of truth. But whatever one may think of the matter as a question of fact, there can be no doubt that the very air must have rung with the old man"s words when he got up under those lofty vaults of St. Giles"s, and, with his grey hair streaming and his deep eyes, deeper sunk with age and care than nature, blazing from under their s.h.a.ggy eyebrows, gave "the lie in his throat to him that either dare or will say that ever I sought support against my native country."
"What I have been to my country," he went on, with a courage and dignity that calls forth all our sympathies, "albeit this unthankful age will not know, yet the ages to come will be compelled to bear witness to the truth. And thus I cease, requiring of all men that have to oppose anything against me that he will do it so plainly as I make myself and all my doings manifest to the world; for to me it seems a thing most unreasonable that in my decrepit age I should be compelled to fight against shadows and howlets that dare not abide the light."
These flying accusations against him, to which, however, he was well accustomed, were followed, it is said, by more startling warnings, such as that of a musket ball which came through his window one evening, and had he been seated in his usual place would have killed him; a thing which might have been accidental, though no one believed so. He was persuaded at last to leave Edinburgh only by the representations of the citizens that were he attacked they were resolved to defend him, and their blood would consequently be on his head. On this argument he moved to St. Andrews, the scene of his first ministry, and always a place beloved; leaving Edinburgh at the darkest moment of her history, the Church silenced with him, and all the order and peace of ordinary life suspended. At this crisis of the struggle, when Kirkaldy"s garrison was reinforced by all the party of the Hamiltons, and the city lay, overawed and helpless, at the mercy of the fortress, the life of the Edinburgh citizens underwent an extraordinary change. The churches were closed, and all the pious habits of the time suspended: "neither was there any sound of bell heard in the town, except the ringing of the cannon." How strange this was among a population which had crowded daily to the sermon and found the chief excitement of its life in the orations of the preacher, it is scarcely necessary to point out.
The picture of Knox in St. Andrews, where he went in May 1571, after all these agitations, is wonderfully soothing and subdued. He was far from being without agitation even there. The new inst.i.tution of "Tulchan"
bishops--called so by the popular wit, men who bore the t.i.tle alone of their supposed bishopric, transferring the revenue to the lay patron, and who officiated, it would appear, much as pleased them, according to the old rule, or to the form of the Reformed service--had just been invented; and Knox was called upon to instal the nominal bishop of St.
Andrews, a thing which he refused to do. He was in consequence accused by some foolish person of himself desiring to have the bishopric (such as it was), an accusation of which it is extraordinary that he condescended to take any notice. But apart from these rags and remnants of familiar conflict, his life in the little city by the sea has a pleasant repose and calm. "He ever spoke but sparingly against the mock bishop, because he loved the man." This softer note is carried out in the two glimpses of him which appear to us chiefly through the recollections of the gentle James Melville, then a youth studying at St.
Andrews. The old man seems to have taken pleasure in the sight of the boys about, who were carrying on their education in the place where he himself had taught those "bairns," whom Wishart had sent him back to in his fervid manhood. "He would sometimes come in and repose him in our college yard, and call us scholars to him, and bless us and exhort us to know G.o.d and His work in our country, and stand by the good cause--to use our time well and learn the guid instructions and follow the guid examples of our maisters. Our haill college (St. Leonard"s) maister and scholars were sound and zealous for the good cause, the other two colleges not so." Nor did he disdain the amus.e.m.e.nts of the young men, for when one of the professors made a play at the marriage of Mr. John Colvin, it was performed in Mr. Knox"s presence. Alas! truth compels us to add that the subject of the play was grim and not so peaceful as the occasion, for it represented the imaginary siege and taking of the Castle of Edinburgh--then in full activity, and carrying fire and flame to the houses of the Edinburgh burghers--and "the Captain with ane or twa with him hanged in effigies." It would seem, however, that Knox loved the young scholars better than their instructors, for in one of his few letters written from St. Andrews, to the a.s.sembly meeting at Perth, he charges the brethren above all things "to preserve the Kirke from the bondage of Universities," neither to subject the pulpit to them, nor to exempt them from its jurisdiction.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PENDS, ST. ANDREWS]
Knox was lodged in the abbey of which there now remains nothing but a portion of the enclosing wall, and it was but an old man"s saunter in the sunny morning, with his staff and his servant"s arm, through the n.o.ble gateway of the Pends to where St. Leonard"s stood, looking away to the East Neuk over the ripening fields. St. Leonard"s, however, has shared the fate of the abbey and exists no more.
Still more characteristic is the description given by the same pen of Knox"s public appearances. It was young Melville"s greatest privilege, the best of all the benefits he received during that year, to hear "that maist notable prophet and apostle of our nation preach."
"I had my pen and my little book and took away such things as I could comprehend. In the opening of his text he was moderate for the s.p.a.ce of half an hour, but when he entered to application he made me so to grew and tremble that I could not hold a pen to write. In St.
Andrews he was very weak. I saw him every day of his doctrine go hulie and fear (hooley and fairly, gently and with caution), with a furring of martins about his neck, a staff in the ane hand, and gude G.o.dlie Richart Ballenden holding up the other oxter, from the Abbey to the Parish Kirk; and by the same Richart and another servant lifted up to the pulpit, where he behoved to lean at his first entry; but ere he had dome his sermon, he was sae active and vigorous that he was like to ding the pulpit in blads and flie out of it."
Melville says much, as indeed most of the narratives of the time do, of Knox"s prophecies, especially in respect to the Castle of Edinburgh, which he said would run like a sand-gla.s.s--a prediction supposed to be fulfilled by a shower of sand pouring from some portion of the rock; and its Captain, Kirkaldy, who was to escape over the walls, but to be taken and to hang against the sun. All of which things, and many more, occurred precisely as the seer said, after his death, striking great awe to the hearts of those to whom the predictions were made. The special prophecy in respect to Grange was softened by the announcement that "G.o.d a.s.sures me there is mercy for his soul." And it is at once pathetic and impressive to read of the consolation which this a.s.surance gave to the chivalrous Kirkaldy on the verge of the scaffold; and the awe-inspiring spectacle presented to the believers, who after his execution saw his body slowly turn and hang against the western sun, as it poured over the Churchyard of St. Giles"s, "west, about off the northward neuk of the steeple." But this was after the prophet himself had pa.s.sed into the unseen.
Knox returned to Edinburgh in 1572, in August, the horrors of the struggle between the Queen"s party and the King"s, as it was called, or Regent"s, being for the moment quieted, and the banished citizens returning, although no permanent pacification had yet taken place. He had but a few months remaining of life, and was very weary of the long struggle and longing for rest. "Weary of the world, and daily looking for the resolution of this my earthly tabernacle," he says. And in his last publication dated from St. Andrews, whither the printer Lekprevik had followed him, he heartily salutes and takes good-night of all the faithful, earnestly desiring the a.s.sistance of their prayers, "that without any notable scandal to the evangel of Jesus Christ I may end my battle: for," he adds, "as the world is weary of me, so am I of it." He lived long enough to welcome his successor in St. Giles"s, to whom, to hasten his arrival, he wrote the following touching letter, one of the last compositions of his life:--
"All worldlie strength, yea even in things spiritual, decayes, and yet shall never the work of G.o.d decay. Belovit brother, seeing that G.o.d of His mercy, far above my expectation, has callit me over again to Edinburgh, and yet that I feel nature so decayed, and daylie to decay, that I look not for a long continuance of my battle, I would gladly ance discharge my conscience into your bosom, and into the bosom of others in whom I think the fear of G.o.d remains. Gif I had the abilitie of bodie, I suld not have put you to the pain to the whilk I now requyre you, that is, ance to visit me that we may confer together on heavenly things; for into earth there is no stability except the Kirk of Jesus Christ, ever fighting under the cross; to whose myghtie protection I heartilie commit you. Of Edinburgh the VII. of September 1572.
JHONE KNOX.
"Haist lest ye come too lait."
He lived to induct this successor, and to hear the terrible news of that ma.s.sacre in France, which horrified all Christendom, but was of signal good to Scotland by procuring the almost instantaneous collapse of the party which fought for the Queen, and held the restoration of Roman Catholic worship to be still possible. That hope died out with the first sound of the terrible news which proved so abundantly Knox"s old a.s.sertion that in the hands of the Papists there was no safety for his life, or the life of any who believed with him. Almost, however, before this grain of good in the midst of so much evil became apparent the prophet had taken his departure from this world. After the simple ceremonial at which he had officiated, of his successor"s installation, John Knox returned home in the light of the brief November day, as Melville had seen him, supported by the arm of his faithful servant. The crowd which had filled St. Giles"s hurrying out before him lined the street, and watched the old man as he crept along down the hill to his house, with many a shaken head and many a murmured blessing. In this last scene all were unanimous; there was no one to cast a gibe or an unkindly look upon that slow aged progress from the scene of his greatest labours to the death-bed which awaited him. When the spectators saw him disappear within his own door, they all knew that it was for the last time. He lay for about a fortnight dying, seeing everybody, leaving a charge with one, a prophecy with another, with a certain dignified consciousness that his death should not be merely as other men"s, and that to show the reverential company of friends who went and came how to die was the one part of his mission which had yet to be accomplished. He ended his career on the 24th November 1572, having thus held a sort of court of death in his chamber and said everything he had to say--dying a teacher and prophet to men, as he had lived.
[Ill.u.s.tration: INTERIOR OF ST. GILES"S]
No man has been more splendidly applauded, and none more bitterly dispraised. It is in one sense the misfortune of our age that it is little able to do either. If steadfast adherence to what he thought the perfect way, if the most earnest purpose, the most unwearying labour, the profoundest devotion to his G.o.d and his country are enough to const.i.tute greatness, John Knox is great. He was at the same time a man all faults, bristling with prejudices, violent in speech, often merciless in judgment, narrow, dogmatic, fiercely intolerant. He was incapable of that crowning grace of the imagination and heart which enables a man to put himself in another"s place and do as he would be done by. But even this we must take with a qualification; for Knox would no doubt have replied to such an objection that had he been a miserable idolater, as he considered the upholders of the ma.s.s to be, he could not but have been grateful to any man who had dragged him by whatever means from that superst.i.tion. He was so strong in the certainty of being right that he was incapable even of considering the possibility that he might be wrong. And there was in him none of those reluctances to give pain, none of those softening expedients of charity which veil such a harsh conviction and make men hesitate to condemn. He knew not what hesitation was, and scorned a compromise as if it had been a lie, nor would he suffer that others should do what was impossible to himself. His determination to have his own way was indeed justified by the conviction that it was the way of G.o.d, but his incapability of waiting or having patience, or considering the wishes and convictions of others, or contenting himself with a gradual advance and progression, have no such excuse.
These were, however, of the very essence of his character. A perfectly dauntless nature fearing nothing, the self-confidence of an inspired prophet, the high tyrannical impulse of a swift and fiery genius impatient of lesser spirits, were all in him, making of him the imperative, absolute, arrogant autocrat he was; but yet no higher ambition, no more n.o.ble purpose, ever inspired a man. He desired for his countrymen that they should be a chosen people like those of old whom G.o.d had selected to receive His revelation; his ambition was to make Scotland the most pure, the most G.o.dlike, of all countries of the earth.
In many things he was intolerable, in some he was wrong and self-deceived. He was too eager, too restless, too intent upon doing everything, forcing the wheels of the great universe and clutching at his aim whatever conditions of nature might oppose--to be wholly heroic.
Yet there are none of the smoother or even more lovable figures of history whom it would be less possible to strike from off the list of heroes. The impression which he left upon the religion and character of Scotland remains to this day; and if we think, as many have done during all these ages, that that development of national life is the highest that could be aimed at, John Knox was one of the greatest of men. But if he transmitted many great qualities to his country, he also transmitted the defects of these qualities. He cut Scotland adrift in many respects from the community of Christendom. He cut her off from her ancestors and from those hallowing traditions of many ages which are the inheritance of the universal Church. He taught her to exult in that disruption, not to regret it; and he left an almost ineradicable conviction of self-superiority to a world lying in wickedness, in the innermost heart of the nation. It is a wonderful testimony to a man that he should have thus been able to imprint his own characteristics upon his race: and no doubt it is because he was himself of the very quintessence of its national character to start with, that he has maintained this prodigious power through these three hundred years.
[Ill.u.s.tration: KNOX"S PULPIT. In the Antiquarian Society"s Museum, Edinburgh.]
He lies, it is thought, if not within the walls of St. Giles"s under the flags between the Cathedral and the Parliament House, with all the busy life of modern Edinburgh, the feet of generations of men treading out the hours and years over his head; a more appropriate bed for him than green mound or marble monument. That stony square is consecrated ground blessed near a thousand years ago by ancient priests who cared little more for Rome than do their modern successors now. But little heeded Knox for priestly blessing or consecrated soil. "The earth is the Lord"s and the fulness thereof" was the only consecration of which he thought.
CHAPTER IV
THE SCHOLAR OF THE REFORMATION
The age of Mary Stewart is in many ways the climax of Scottish national history, as well as one of the most interesting and exciting chapters in the history of the world. The Stewarts of Scotland had been up to this point a native race entirely Scots in training as in birth, and bent above all things upon the progress and consolidation of their own ancient kingdom, the poor but proud; a speck all but lost in the distance of the seas, yet known all over Christendom wherever errant squires or chivalrous pretensions were known. But the new sovereign of Scotland was one whose heart and pride were elsewhere, whose favourite ambitions were directed beyond the limits of that ancient kingdom with which she had none of the a.s.sociations of youth, and to which she came a stranger from another Court far more dazzling and splendid, with hopes and prospects incapable of being concentrated within the boundary of the Tweed. There is no indication that the much-contested history of Mary Stewart has lost any of its interest during the progress of the intermediate centuries; on the contrary, some of its questions are almost more hotly contested now than they were at the moment when they arose. Her chivalrous defenders are more bold than once they were, and though the tone of her a.s.sailants is subdued, it is from a natural softening of sentiment towards the past, and still more from the fashion of our time, which finds an absorbing interest in the manifestations of individual character and the discussion of individual motives, rather than from any change of opinion. I do not venture to enter into that long-continued conflict, or to attempt to decide for the hundredth time whether a woman so gifted and unfortunate was more or less guilty. Both parties have gone, and still go, too far in that discussion; and Mary would not have thanked (I imagine) those partisans who would prove her innocence at the cost of all those vigorous and splendid qualities which made her remarkable. She could scarcely be at once an unoffending victim and one of the ablest women of her time.
As this is the most interesting of all the epochs of Scottish history--and that not for Mary"s sake alone, but for the wonderful conflict going on apart from her, and in which her tragic career is but an episode--so it is the most exciting and picturesque period in the records of Edinburgh, which was then in its fullest splendour of architectural beauty and social life; its n.o.ble streets more crowded, more gay, more tumultuous and tragical; its inhabitants more characteristic and individual; the scenes taking place within it more dramatic and exciting than at any other part of its history. Fine foreign amba.s.sadors, grave English diplomates trained in the school of the great Cecil, and bound to the subtle and tortuous policy of the powerful Elizabeth; besides a new unusual crowd of lighter import but not less difficult governance, the foreign artists, musicians, courtiers of all kinds, who hung about the palace, had come in to add a hundred complicating interests and pursuits to the simpler if fiercer contentions of feudal lords and protesting citizens: not to speak of the greatest change of all, the subst.i.tution for the ambitious Churchman of old, with a coat of mail under his rochet, of the absolute and impracticable preacher who gave no dispensations or indulgences, and permitted no compromise. All these new elements, complicated by the tremendous question of the English succession, and the introduction of many problems of foreign politics into a crisis bristling with difficulties of its own, made the epoch extraordinary; while the very streets were continually filled by exciting spectacles, by processions, by sudden fights and deadly struggles, by pageants and splendours, one succeeding another, in which the whole population had their share. The decree of the town council that "lang weapons," spears, lances, and Jedburgh axes, should be provided in every shop--so that when the town bell rang every man might be ready to throw down his tools or his merchandise and grip the ready weapon--affords the most striking suggestion of those sudden tumults which might rise in a moment, and which were too common to demand any special record, but kept the town in perpetual agitation and excitement--an agitation, it is true, by no means peculiar to Edinburgh. No painter has ever done justice to the scene which must have been common as the day, when the beautiful young Queen, so little accustomed to the restraints and comparative poverty of her northern kingdom, and able to surround herself with the splendour she loved out of her French dowry, rode out in all her bravery up the Canongate, where every outside stair and high window would be crowded with spectators, and through the turreted and battlemented gate to the grim fortress on the crown of the hill, making everything splendid with the glitter of her cortege and her own smiles and unrivalled charm.
Sadder spectacles that same beautiful Queen provided too--miserable journeys up and down from the unhappy palace, sometimes through a stern suppressed tumult of hostile faces, sometimes stealthily under cover of night which alone could protect her. Everything in Edinburgh is a.s.sociated more or less with Mary"s name. There is scarcely an old house existing, with any authentic traces of antiquity, in which she is not reported to have taken refuge in her trouble or visited in her pleasure.
The more vulgar enthusiasts of the causeways are content to abolish all the other a.s.sociations of old Edinburgh for Mary"s name.
But I will not attempt to revive those pageants either of joy or sorrow.
There are other recollections which may be evoked with less historical responsibility and at least a little more freshness and novelty. No figure can be introduced out of that age who has not some connection one way or other with the Queen; and the great scholar, whose reputation has remained unique in Scotland, had some share in her earlier and happier life, as well as a link, supposed of treachery, with her later career.
George Buchanan was the Queen"s reader and master in her studies when all was well with her. He is considered by some of her defenders to be the forger of the wonderful letters which, if true, are the most undeniable proof of her guilt. But these things were but incidents in his career, and he is in himself one of the most ill.u.s.trious and memorable figures among the throngs that surrounded her in that brief period of sovereignty which has taken more hold of the imagination of Scotland, and indeed of the world, than many a longer and, in point of fact, more important reign.
It is difficult to understand how it is that in later days, and when established peace and tranquillity of living might have been supposed to give greater encouragement to study, accurate and fine scholarship should have ceased to be prized or cultivated in Scotland. Perhaps, however, the very advantages upon which we have plumed ourselves so long, the general diffusion of education and higher standard of knowledge, is one of the causes of this failure--not only the poverty of Scotch universities and want of endowments, but the broader and simpler scale on which our educational systems were founded, and which have made it more important to train men for the practical uses of teaching than permit to them the waywardness and independence of a scholar. These results show the "_defauts de nos qualites_," though we are not very willing to admit the fact. But in the earlier centuries no such reproach rested upon us. Although perhaps, then as now, the Scotch intelligence had a special leaning towards philosophy, there was still many a learned Scot whose reputation was in all the universities, whose Latinity was unexceptionable, and his erudition immense, and to whom verses were addressed and books dedicated in every centre of letters. One of the most distinguished of these scholars was George Buchanan, and there could be no better type of the man of letters of his time, in whom the liberality of the cosmopolitan was united with the exclusiveness of the member of a very strait and limited caste. He had his correspondents in all the cities of the Continent, and at home his closest a.s.sociates were among the highest in his own land. Yet he was the son of a very poor man, born almost a peasant and dying nearly as poor as he was born. From wandering scholar and pedagogue he became the preceptor of a King and the a.s.sociate of princes; but he was not less independent, and he was scarcely more rich in the one position than the other. His pride was not in the high consultations he shared or the national movements in which he had his part, but in his fine Latinity and the elegant turn of those cla.s.sical lines which all his learned compeers admired and applauded.
The part that he played in history has been made to look odious by skilled critics; and the great book in which he recorded the deeds of his contemporaries and predecessors has been a.s.sailed violently and bitterly as prejudiced, partial, and untrue. But n.o.body has been able to attack his Latin or impair the renown of his scholarship; and perhaps had he himself chosen the foundation on which to build his fame, this is what he would have preferred above all. History may come and politics go, and the principles of both may change with the generations, but Latin verse goes on for ever: no false ingenuity of criticism can pick holes in the deathless structure of an art with which living principles have had nothing to do for a thousand years and more.
Buchanan was born in a farmhouse, "a lowly cottage thatched with straw,"
in the year 1506, in Killearn in the county of Stirling; but not without gentle blood in his veins, the gentility so much prized in Scotland, which makes a traceable descent even from the roughest of country lairds a matter of distinction. His mother was a Heriot, and one wonders whether there might not be some connection between the great scholar and the worthy goldsmith of the next generation, who did so much for the boys of Edinburgh. Buchanan"s best and most trustworthy biographer, Dr.
Irving,[5] pictures to his readers the st.u.r.dy young rustic trudging two miles in all weathers to the parish school, with his "piece" in his pocket, and already the sonorous harmonies of the great cla.s.sic tongues beginning to sound in his ears--a familiar picture which so many country lads born to a more modest fame have emulated. In the parish school of Killearn, in that ancient far-away Scotland before the Reformation, which it is hard to realise, so different must it have been from the characteristic Scotch school of all our traditions, the foundations of Buchanan"s great scholarship and power were laid. His father died while he was still a mere child, and the future man of letters had plenty of rough rustic work, helping his mother about the farm on the holidays, which must have been more frequent while all the saints of the calendar were still honoured. Trees of his planting, his biographer says, writing in the beginning of this century, still grow upon the banks of the little stream which runs by the beautiful ruins of Dunblane, and which watered his mother"s fields. When he had reached the age of fourteen an uncle Heriot seeing his apt.i.tude for study sent him off, it would seem alone, in all his rusticity and homeliness, to Paris--a curious sign of the close connection between Scotland and France--where he carried on his studies or, a phrase more appropriate to his age, learned his lessons amid the throngs of the French schools. Before he was sixteen, however, his uncle died, leaving him desolate and unprovided for amongst strangers; and the boy had to make his way home as best he could, half begging, half working his pa.s.sage, stopping perhaps here and there to help a schoolboy or to write a letter for the unlearned, and earning a bed and a meal as poor scholars were used to do. He remained a year in his mother"s house, but probably was no longer wanted for the uses of the farm, since his next move was to the wars. He himself informs us in the sketch of his life which he wrote in his old age that he was "moved with a desire to study military matters," a desire by no means unusual at seventeen. These were the days when the fantastic French Albany was at the head of affairs in Scotland, during the childhood of James V, and the country was in great disorder, torn with private quarrels and dissensions. It is evident that, the kind uncle being dead and affairs in general so little propitious, there would be little chance in the resources of the farm of securing further university training for the boy who had his own way to make somehow in the world; and perhaps his experience of Paris and possession of the French language (no inconsiderable advantage when there were so many French adventurers and hangers on about the Court) might be expected to give him chances of promotion; while his service perhaps exempted an elder brother, of more use than he upon the farm, from needful service, when his feudal lord called out his men on the summons of the Regent.
[5] I must explain that this chapter was written before the publication of the recent, and I believe excellent, biography of Buchanan by Mr. P.
Hume.
[Ill.u.s.tration: NORTH DOORWAY, HERIOT"S HOSPITAL]
George Buchanan accordingly followed the Laird"s flag upon one of the wildest and most fruitless of Albany"s expeditions to the Border, for the siege of Wark. The great Border stronghold, the size and wonderful proportions of which astonished the Scots army, stands forth again, clear as when it first struck his boyish imagination, in the description which Buchanan gives of it nearly half a century later in his history of that time--where the reader can still see the discomfited army with its distracted captains and councils, and futile leader, straggling back through the deep snow, each gloomy band finding its way as best it could to its own district. Buchanan would seem to have had enough of fighting; and perhaps he had succeeded in proving to his relatives that neither arms nor agriculture were his vocation; for we next find him on his way to St. Andrews, "to hear John Major who was then teaching dialectics or rather sophistry." Here he would seem to have studied for two years; taking his degree in 1525 at the age of nineteen. After this he followed Major to France, whether for love of his master, or with the idea that Major"s interest as a doctor of the Sorbonne might help him to find employment in Paris, we are not told. One of the many stories to his prejudice which were current in his after-career describes Buchanan as dependent on Major and ungrateful to him, repaying with a cruel epigram the kindness shown him. But there seems absolutely no foundation for this accusation which was probably suggested to after-detractors anxious for evidence that ingrat.i.tude, as one of them says, "was the great and unpardonable blemish of his life"--by the epigram in question, in which he distinguishes his professor as "solo cognomine Major." It might very well be, however, that Buchanan expected a kind recommendation from his St. Andrews master, such as the habit of the kindly Scots was apt to give, and some help perhaps in procuring employment, and that the failure of any aid of this description betrayed the youth into the national tendency to harshness of speech and the bitter jeer at one who was great only in his name.
A stranger with nothing but his learning and his Latin epigrams (though these last were a more marketable commodity then than now) would no doubt be forlorn enough, struggling to find himself standing-ground and a living, subsisting hardly on what chance employment might fall in his way, and reflecting, as most adventurers are apt to do, how easy it would be for his prosperous countryman to befriend him. Paris, always full of stir and commotion, had at this moment a new source of agitation in the rising force of the Reformation principles or, as Buchanan calls it, "the Lutheran controversy, which was already spreading far and wide," and into the midst of which he fell on his return. Whether his interest in the new creed did him harm in his search for an establishment we are not told: and probably the "struggle with adverse fortune for about two years" which he records was merely the difficulty in making himself known which affects every young man. At the end of that time he got an appointment in the College of St. Barbe as Professor of Grammar, and was henceforward exempted at least from the heart-sickening conflict with absolute poverty.
Buchanan would seem to have had already high ambitions and a certainty that he was fit for something better than the post of schoolmaster in a French college--for notwithstanding his eagerness to get this post we soon find him lamenting, in the abstract indeed, but in a manner too particular to be without special meaning, the small profit of intellectual labour and the weariness of a continual toil which was so little rewarded. His plaint of the long night"s work, the burning of the midnight oil, the hunt through dusty and rotting ma.n.u.scripts, seems touched with a tone of bitterness unusual in the student"s murmurs over a lot which after all brings him as much pleasure as weariness. The ambitious lad was already, it is evident, longing for more brilliant scenes.
"Pervigil in lucem lecta atque relecta revolves Et putri excuties scripta sepulta situ: Saepe caput scalpes, et vivos roseris ungues, Irata feries pulpita saepe manu."
At St. Barbe, however, he secured a n.o.ble young pupil of his own country, the future Earl of Ca.s.silis, who opened to him a brighter way, and finally led him back to his own country and for a time to higher fortune. When young King James came to Paris to meet Magdalen of France--with the sudden pathetic result of a hasty romantic marriage soon followed by the poor young lady"s death--young Ca.s.silis was still there with his tutor, who was himself but little advanced in life beyond his patron. And it was presumably in the train of the royal pair that the young men returned home. In that case Buchanan must have witnessed the touching scene that took place at the poor young Queen"s disembarkation when she kissed the soil of her new country, the land which was to afford her only a grave. Whether dreams of Court favour and advancement were beginning to germinate in the young scholar"s brain as he was thus suddenly swept into the train of royalty there is nothing to say; but at all events he observed everything with keen attentive eyes, unconsciously collecting the best materials for the history he was yet to write. And it is clear that this accidental connection with the King bore after-fruit. Buchanan went to Ayrshire with his young patron who had come of age, and whose studies were over it is to be supposed: and in the leisure of that relaxation from former duties amused himself with compositions of various sorts, and in particular with the _Somnium_, a lively poetical satire upon the Franciscans. The monks, who had been the favourite b.u.t.t of all the ages, were more than ever open to the a.s.saults of the wits now that the general sentiment had turned so strongly against them, and Buchanan said no more than Dunbar with full permission, before any controversy arose, had said, nor half so much as David Lindsay was privileged to say. And Lord Ca.s.silis" tutor had all the freedom of a private individual responsible to no one while he lingered at his young patron"s castle, pleased to make as many as comprehended his Latin laugh, though probably there were few capable of appreciating its cla.s.sical beauty. This, however, was but a pastime, and his mind again began to turn towards Paris, where alone perhaps there was to be found the kind of work for which he was most fit and the literary applause and emulation which were dear to his soul.
He was about to set out when the King, who doubtless had owed some entertainment to Buchanan on the lingering homeward journey, and who must have been well aware of his character and gifts, made him pause by offering him the tutorship of his illegitimate son, one among several for whom James, so young as he was, not more than twenty-five, was already responsible, another James Stewart, though not the notable James who was afterwards the Regent Murray. This appointment brought Buchanan at once within the charmed circle of the Court, and probably prepared the way for all his after-honours. But his career in Edinburgh at this moment was not especially glorious. Delighted by the _Somnium_, which had been read to him and applauded by all the obsequious audience round, James, who though a good Catholic liked a clever a.s.sault upon the priests as much as any one, recommended the new member of his household to resume the subject. It is supposed that the Grey Friars from their great lodgment so near the Court had found fault with the appointment of Buchanan and a.s.sailed himself as a profane and scoffing heretic. It was certainly strange that a man who had adopted the heresies of Luther should be appointed to the care of the son of a Catholic King, but Buchanan it is probable kept his religious opinions to himself, and it was not necessary to be a Protestant to give vent to the broadest satires against the monks and friars who had been for so long the least defensible portion of the Catholic establishment. Buchanan, however, was not bold enough to fall upon his enemies as Sir David Lindsay did. A poor man and a dependant, had he the highest spirit in the world, must still bear traces of the yoke to which circ.u.mstances have accustomed him, and a scholar is not necessarily brave. He shrank from encountering the great and powerful community of the Grey Friars in the eye of day, and instead of the lively a.s.sault expected from him, temporised and wrote something which was neither satisfactory to the King who wanted a laugh at the expense of the monks, nor to the monks who were more enraged by the covert character of a satire which could be read both ways, than they would have been by straightforward abuse. The dissatisfaction of James moved Buchanan to bolder measures, and after his halfhearted attempt to compromise himself as little as possible, he was goaded into the most virulent use of his pen, and cut down his adversaries with the sharp shafts of his _Francisca.n.u.s_ with a vigour and malice which left nothing to be desired. The Court had its laugh which was resounding and long, but neither King nor courtiers had any penalty to pay for the pranks which the cla.s.sical Samson wrought for their pleasure.
Though they were thus mocked in high places, the Churchmen, however, had lost none of their power, and even the protection of the royal household did not avail the audacious poet. In the raid upon heretics which was made in the beginning of the year 1539 Buchanan"s name was included among the guilty. He himself tells us that "Cardinal Beatoun bought his life from the King with money": making it probably the price of some concession that this audacious a.s.sailant should be delivered into the hands of the Church. At all events the terrified scholar had no confidence in the power or will of his Sovereign to protect him, and, scared by the flames of various burnings which had taken place throughout the kingdom, directed his best wits to finding a way of safety. He escaped through a window while his keepers were asleep, some say from the Castle of St. Andrews, some from that of Edinburgh. His own account is more simple and goes into no detail. "He made his way into England, eluding the guards set for him." But England was not more secure than Scotland. The quick-witted fugitive found Henry VIII impartially burning victims from both sides, on the same day at the same stake, and considered this sublime indifference as still more dangerous than the strife of Scotch affairs. "His old familiarity with the French, and the singular hospitality of that nation," led him back to the city which was then the favourite resort of all the Muses. When, however, Buchanan arrived in Paris he found that his special enemy, Cardinal Beatoun, had preceded him there as amba.s.sador from King James, and, alarmed by so dangerous a vicinity, he accepted at once an offer made to him by Andrew Govra, one of his colleagues of former times, who had been appointed to the charge of a college in Bordeaux, and removed thither with the greatest expedition before his foe could be made aware of his presence in Paris.
This was in the end of the year 1539, when Buchanan had attained the age of thirty-three. His residence in the capital of the famous province of Gascony seems to have been active and happy. He was Professor of Latin in the college; perhaps the terms would be more just if we said he was Latin master in one of the most flourishing and successful of French schools; but our neighbours still prefer the more high-sounding nomenclature. The great Garonne was not full of ships and trade at that period as it is now; but Bordeaux was one of the old capital cities of France, possessing a rank which now belongs to no French provincial town, and had its own characteristic society, its scholars and provincial statesmen. But the most important and notable human being of all whom Buchanan found in his new sphere was a certain small seigneur of Gascony, six years old, and already an accomplished Latinist, having learned no other language from his cradle, bearing the name of Michel de Montaigne and already a little philosopher as well as scholar. The great essayist speaks afterwards of "George Buchanan, the celebrated Scotch poet," as one of his masters, but he does not say whether Buchanan was the enlightened pedagogue who connived at his endless reading and let him off as much as was possible from other less congenial studies.
Buchanan, however, must have found the cheerful southern city, with its Parliament and its colleges, and all the teeming life and restless energies of the Gascon race, not unlike a kind of warmer and more brilliant Scotland, full of national brag and gallantry, a congenial sphere. He had been for a long time shedding complimentary verses, sonnets, dedications, about him after the manner of the time, serving out to everybody who was kind to him a little immortality in the shape of cla.s.sic thanks or compliment: but in Bordeaux he began to produce works of more apparent importance, "four tragedies" intended primarily for the use of his college, where it was the custom to represent yearly a play, generally of an allegorical character--one of the fantastical miracle plays which delighted the time, and which were often as profane in reality as they were religious in pretence. The great cla.s.sicist considered his boys to be wasting their faculties in representing such inferior performances, but humoured the prevailing taste so much as to choose two Scriptural subjects, Jephthah and John the Baptist, alternately with the Medea and Alcestis. He "was successful beyond his hopes," he says, in these efforts. In all of the plays the little Montaigne was one of the chief performers. "Before a fit age, _Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus_," says that great writer, "I sustained the first parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, which were played in our College de Guienne, with dignity." The little scene is pleasant to think of, not too long out of date to recall the scholastic pastimes of to-day, though there is no Buchanan to produce plays for Eton or Harrow, and probably no young Montaigne to play the hero. The learned Scot, with his peasant breeding no doubt making him still more conscious of the strain of gentle blood in his veins, a little rough, irascible, and impatient in nature, notwithstanding the elegance of his Latin speech, and the little n.o.ble, gentilhomme to his fingers" end, half respectful, half contemptuous of the pedagogue, make a picturesque contrast.
Buchanan, however, did not feel himself safe even in Bordeaux, where he remained only three years. It is said that Cardinal Beatoun wrote to the Archbishop recommending his arrest, and the Franciscan community in the Gascon city, which had heard from their brethren of his offences against the Order, kept an unfriendly eye upon him, ready to take advantage of any hostile opportunity. He therefore returned to Paris, where in a similar but apparently more obscure position he spent some years. In 1547 he was very glad to accompany Govra, who had brought him to Bordeaux, and whom Montaigne describes as "beyond comparison the greatest Princ.i.p.al in France," to his native country Portugal, whither his King had summoned him in order that his talents might be of use to his own nation as the head of the new University of Coimbra. It would seem that Govra carried his whole staff along with him to Portugal.