George Buchanan (February,
1506 - 28 September
1582), was a Scottish
historian and humanist scholar. He was part of
the
Monarchomach movement.
Biography
His
father, a younger son of an old family, owned the farm of Moss, in
the parish of Killearn
, Stirling, but he died young, leaving
his widow and children in poverty. George's mother, Agnes
Heriot, was of the family of the Heriots of Trabroun, East Lothian
, of which George
Heriot, founder of Heriot's Hospital
, was also a member. Buchanan is said to have
attended Killearn school, but not much is known of his early
education.
In 1520 he was sent by his uncle, James
Heriot, to the University of Paris
, where, according to him, he devoted himself to the
writing of verses "partly by liking, partly by compulsion (that
being then the one task prescribed to youth)."
In 1522
his uncle died, and Buchanan was unable to continue longer in
Paris
; he returned
to Scotland. After recovering from a severe illness, he
joined the French auxiliaries who had been brought over by John Stewart, Duke of Albany,
and took part in an unsuccessful foray into England
.
In the
following year he entered the University of St Andrews
, where he graduated B.A. in 1525. He had
gone there chiefly for the purpose of attending the celebrated
John Mair's lectures on
logic; and when that teacher moved to Paris, Buchanan
followed him in 1526. In 1527 he graduated B.A., and in 1528 M.A.
at Paris. Next year he was appointed
regent,
or professor, in the
College of
Sainte-Barbe, and taught there for over three years. In 1529 he
was elected "Procurator of the German
Nation" in the University of Paris, and
was re-elected four times in four successive months. He resigned
his regentship in 1531, and in 1532 became tutor to
Gilbert Kennedy, 3rd Earl
of Cassilis, with whom he returned to Scotland early in
1537.
At this period Buchanan assumed the same attitude toward the
Roman Catholic Church as
Erasmus. He did not repudiate its doctrines,
but considered himself free to criticise its practice. Though he
listened with interest to the arguments of the
Reformers, he did not join their ranks until 1553.
His first production in Scotland, when he was in Lord Cassilis's
household in the west country, was the poem
Somnium, a
satirical attack on the
Franciscan friars and
monastic life generally. This assault on the
monks was not displeasing to
James
V, who engaged Buchanan as tutor to one of his natural sons,
Lord James Stewart (not the son who was afterwards regent), and
encouraged him in a more daring effort.
The poems
Palinodia and
Franciscanus et Fratres,
although they remained unpublished for many years, made the author
the object of bitter hatred to the Franciscan order, and put his
safety in jeopardy. In 1539 there was bitter persecution of the
Lutherans, and Buchanan among others was
arrested. He managed to effect his escape and with considerable
difficulty made his way to London and thence to Paris.
In Paris, however, he
found his enemy, Cardinal David Beaton,
who was there as ambassador, and on the invitation of André de Gouveia, proceeded to
Bordeaux
.
Gouveia was then principal of the newly founded
College of Guienne at Bordeaux, and by
his influence Buchanan was appointed professor of
Latin. During his residence here, several of his best
works, the translations of
Medea and
Alcestis, and the two dramas,
Jephthes (sive Votum) and
Baptistes (sive
Calumnia), were completed.
Michel de Montaigne was
Buchanan's pupil at Bordeaux and acted in his
tragedies. In the essay
Of Presumption he
classes Buchanan with
Aurat,
Theodore Beza,
Michel de l'Hôpital,
Montdore and
Turnebus, as
one of the foremost Latin poets of his time. Here also Buchanan
formed a lasting friendship with
Julius Caesar Scaliger; in later life
he won the admiration of
Joseph
Scaliger, who wrote an
epigram on
Buchanan which contains the
couplet, famous
in its day: "
Imperii fuerat Romani Scotia limes; Romani eloquii
Scotia limes erit?"
In 1542 or 1543 he returned to Paris, and in 1544 was appointed
regent in the college of
Cardinal le
Moine. Among his colleagues were the renowned
Muretus and
Adrianus
Turnebus.
In 1547 Buchanan joined the band of French and
Portuguese humanists who had been invited
by Gouveia to lecture in the Portuguese
University of Coimbra. The French
mathematician
Elie Vinet, and the
Portuguese historian,
Jerónimo
Osório, were among his colleagues; Gouveia, called by Montaigne
le plus grand principal de France, was rector of the
university, which had reached the summit of its prosperity under
the patronage of
King John III.
But the rectorship had been coveted by
Diogo de Gouveia, uncle of André and
formerly head of Sainte-Barbe. It is probable that before André's
death at the end of 1547 Diogo had urged the
Inquisition to attack him and his staff; up to
1906, when the records of the trial were first published in full,
Buchanan's biographers generally attributed the attack to the
influence of Cardinal Beaton, the
Franciscans, or the
Jesuits, and the whole history of Buchanan's
residence in Portugal was extremely obscure.
A commission of inquiry was appointed in October 1549 and reported
in June 1550. Buchanan and two Portuguese,
Diogo de Teive and
João da Costa (who had succeeded to the
rectorship), were committed for trial. Teive and Costa were found
guilty of various offences against public order, and the evidence
shows that there was ample reason for a judicial inquiry. Buchanan
was accused of
Lutheran and
Judaistic practices. He defended himself with
conspicuous ability, courage and frankness, admitting that some of
the charges were true.
About June 1551 he was sentenced to abjure his errors, and to be imprisoned in the
monastery of São Bento in Lisbon
. Here
he was compelled to listen to edifying discourses from the monks,
whom he found "not unkind but ignorant." In his leisure he began to
translate the
Psalms into Latin
verse.
After seven months he was released, on
condition that he remained in Lisbon; and on
28 February 1552
this restriction was lifted. Buchanan at once sailed for England, but soon
made his way to Paris, where in 1553 he was appointed regent in the
College of Boncourt. He
remained in that post for two years, and then accepted the office
of tutor to the son of the
Maréchal de Brissac. It was almost
certainly during this last stay in France, where
Protestantism was being repressed with great
severity by King
Francis I, that
Buchanan took the side of
Calvinism.
In 1560 or 1561 he returned to Scotland, and by April 1562 was
installed as tutor to the young Queen
Mary I of Scotland, who read
Livy with him daily.
Buchanan now openly joined the
Protestant, or Reformed Church, and in
1566 was appointed by the earl of Murray principal of
St Leonard's College, St Andrews
. Two years before he had received from the
queen the valuable gift of the revenues of Crossraguel
Abbey
. He was thus in good circumstances, and his
fame was steadily increasing.
So great, indeed, was his reputation for
learning and administrative capacity that, though a layman, he was made Moderator
of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland
in 1567. He had sat in the assemblies from
1563. He was the last
lay person to be
elected Moderator until
Alison Elliot
in 2004, the first female Moderator.
Buchanan
accompanied the regent Murray into England, and his
Detectio (published in 1572) was produced to the
commissioners at Westminster
. In 1570, after the
assassination of Murray, he was appointed one
of the
preceptors of the young king, and
it was through his
tuition that
James VI acquired his
scholarship. While discharging the functions of
royal tutor he also held other important offices. He was for a
short time
director of
chancery, and then became
Keeper of the Privy Seal of
Scotland, a post which entitled him to a seat in the
parliament. He appears to have
continued in this office for some years, at least till 1579.
His last years had been occupied with completion and publication of
two of his most important works,
De Jure Regni apud Scotos
(1579) and
Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582).
He died in Edinburgh
in 1582 and is buried in Greyfriars
Kirkyard
(rather ironically, considering that his old foes
had been the greyfriars).
Works
For mastery of the
Latin language, Buchanan
has seldom been surpassed by any modern writer. His style is not
rigidly modelled on that of any classical author, but has a
freshness and elasticity of its own. Hugh Trevor-Roper called him
"by universal consent, the greatest Latin writer, whether in prose
or in verse, in sixteenth century Europe." He wrote Latin as if it
were his
mother tongue. Buchanan also
had a rich vein of poetical feeling, and much originality of
thought. His translations of the
Psalms and of the Greek
plays are more than mere versions; his two tragedies,
Baptistes and
Jephthes, enjoyed a
European reputation for academic excellence.
In addition to these works, Buchanan wrote in prose
Chamaeleon, a
satire
in
Scots against
Maitland of Lethington, first printed
in 1711; a Latin translation of
Linacre's
Grammar (Paris, 1533);
Libellus de Prosodia (Edinburgh, 1640); and
Vita ab
ipso scripta biennio ante mortem (1608), edited by
R. Sibbald (1702). His
other poems are
Fratres Fraterrimi,
Elegiae,
Silvae, two sets of verses entitled
Hendecasyllabon
Liber and
Iambon Liber; three books of
Epigrammata; a book of miscellaneous
verse;
De Sphaera (in five books), suggested
by the poem
De sphaera
mundi of
Joannes de
Sacrobosco, and intended as a defence of the
Ptolemaic theory against the new
Copernican view.
There are two early editions of Buchanan's works: (a)
Georgii
Buchanani Scoti, Poetarum sui seculi facile principis, Opera
Omnia, in two vols. fol. edited by
Thomas Ruddiman (Edinburgh, Freebairn,
folio, 1715): (b) edited by
Burman, quarto
1725.
The Vernacular Writings.
The first of his important late works was the treatise
De Jure
Regni apud Scotos, published in 1579. In this famous work,
composed in the form of a
dialogue, and
evidently intended to instil sound
political principles into the mind of his pupil,
Buchanan lays down the doctrine that the source of all political
power is the people, that the king is bound by those conditions
under which the supreme power was first committed to his hands, and
that it is lawful to resist, even to punish,
tyrants. The importance of the work is proved by the
persistent efforts of the
legislature to
suppress it during the century following its publication.
It was
condemned by act of parliament in
1584, and again in 1664; and in 1683 it was burned by the University
of Oxford
.
The second of his larger works is the
History of Scotland,
Rerum
Scoticarum Historia, completed shortly before his death
(1579), and published in 1582. It is of great value for the period
personally known to the author, which occupies the greater portion
of the book. The earlier part is based, to a considerable extent,
on the legendary history of
Boece. Buchanan's
purpose was to "purge" the national history
"of sum Inglis lyis
and Scottis vanite" (Letter to Randolph). He said that it
would "content few and displease many".
Modern publications and influence
Polygon Books have published the poet
Robert Crawford's selection of
Buchanan's verse in
Apollos of the North: Selected Poems of
George Buchanan and Arthur
Johnston (ISBN 1-904598-81-1) in 2006, the 500th
anniversary of Buchanan's birth.
In the
lead-up to the anniversary Professor Roger Mason of the University of
St Andrews has published A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship
among the Scots, a critical edition and translation of George
Buchanan's 'De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (ISBN
1-85928-408-6).
The
Stirling Smith Museum and Art
Gallery
is hosting an exhibition and event programme over
winter 2006-7 to commemorate the anniversary, including
performances of musical settings of Buchanan's psalms, due to be
published in 2007.
References
- Baptistes sive Calumnia (written before 1544, not
published until 1577)
- Jephthes sive Votum, tragoedia, 1544
- The Sphera of George Buchanan, by James Naiden,
1951.
See also
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