Andrew Melville (1545-1622)

Writings, Reception, and Reputation

Steven J. Reid, Roger A. Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409426936
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317181170
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Andrew Melville is chiefly remembered today as a defiant leader of radical Protestantism in Scotland, John Knox's heir and successor, the architect of a distinctive Scottish Presbyterian kirk and a visionary reformer of the Scottish university system. While this view of Melville's contribution to the shaping of Protestant Scotland has been criticised and revised in recent scholarship, his broader contribution to the development of the neo-Latin culture of early modern Britain has never been given the attention it deserves. Yet, as this collection shows, Melville was much more than simply a religious reformer: he was an influential member of a pan-European humanist network that valued classical learning as much as Calvinist theology. Neglect of this critical aspect of Melville's intellectual outlook stems from the fact that almost all his surviving writings are in Latin - and much of it in verse. Melville did not pen any substantial prose treatise on theology, ecclesiology or political theory. His poetry, however, reveals his views on all these topics and offers new insights into his life and times. The main concerns of this volume, therefore, are to provide the first comprehensive listing of the range of poetry and prose attributed to Melville and to begin the process of elucidating these texts and the contexts in which they were written. While the volume contributes to an on-going process that has seen Melville's role as an ecclesiastical politician and educational reformer challenged and diminished, it also seeks to redress the balance by opening up other dimensions of Melville's career and intellectual life and shedding new light on the broader cultural context of Jacobean Scotland and Britain.

CHAPTER 1
How Andrew Melville Read His George Buchanan¹

Roger A. Mason

The purpose of this chapter is to explore how Andrew Melville read George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia and, in so doing, to highlight the potential importance to studies of Melville of examining what is a rather less orthodox source of information about his intellectual views and interests. This is made possible by the survival in St Andrews University Library of a copy of the first 1582 edition of Buchanan’s Historia, signed by Melville, and containing many annotations in his hand (Figure 1.1).² It is testimony to the importance Melville attached to Buchanan’s Historia that this is not the only copy known to have belonged to him. The National Library of Scotland has in its collections a copy of the second 1583 edition, also signed by Melville, which eventually came into the ownership of Thomas M’Crie.³ Unlike the first, the second and all subsequent editions of the Historia include the full text of Buchanan’s incendiary treatise on resistance to tyranny, De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (first published in 1579), and Melville added an apposite, albeit provocative, epigram to its title page:

Libera si dentur populo suffragii quis tam

Perditus ut dubitet Senecam praeferre Neroni.

The chances of the people being allowed to vote are zero:

We all know they’d vote for Seneca, not for Nero.⁴

In other respects, however, the NLS volume is fairly scantily annotated, most of the markings consisting of under-linings of the text and other non-verbal marginalia. In contrast, the St Andrews’ copy is heavily annotated in two distinct inks, indicating multiple readings, and offers unique insights into Melville’s view of Buchanan’s highly controversial version of the Scottish past. Given the extent and nature of the marginalia, what follows cannot hope to be comprehensive or definitive; it is intended rather to open up lines of inquiry into a hitherto neglected aspect of Melville’s intellectual world. Before proceeding further, however, it is as well to consider both the nature of the relationship between Melville and Buchanan and the contemporary significance of the Rerum Scoticarum Historia.

Melville and Buchanan

In so far as Melville was as much a humanist as he was a Calvinist, Buchanan’s importance to him as both inspiration and exemplar is hard to exaggerate. Buchanan (1506–1582) was undoubtedly the most renowned Scottish humanist of the sixteenth century, steeped in the literature of Greece as well as Rome, and from an early age recognized as a prodigiously talented neo-Latin poet and playwright.⁵ Educated at St Andrews and Paris, much of his life was spent on the Continent, briefly in Portugal where he fell foul of the Lisbon Inquisition and where he composed his celebrated Latin paraphrases of the Psalms, but mostly in France. It was there, in the 1550s, that he achieved social as well as intellectual acclaim, taking advantage of French interest in Mary Queen of Scots’ dynastic inheritance to establish himself as a leading poet at the Valois court, celebrating both Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin Francis in April 1558 and the couple’s succession to the French throne on the death of Henry II in July 1559. However, if this led him to contemplate a secure and comfortable future as an ornament of the French court, he was sorely disappointed by the death of Francis little more than a year later in December 1560.

Francis’s sudden death left Mary Stewart in a highly precarious position in the Valois kingdom and some months later, in August 1561, she returned to her Scottish realm to rule it in person. Buchanan followed her home and quickly established himself at court as the queen’s unofficial poet laureate. At the same time, though the circumstances remain obscure, he converted to Protestantism and was soon acting on behalf of the new reformed Kirk, established only in 1560, and understandably apprehensive as to the intentions of their Catholic sovereign. For Buchanan, having a foot in both confessional camps proved unsustainable and, when Mary’s regime began to unravel in 1566–67, he jumped ship, becoming a client of Mary’s half-brother, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, a leading Protestant nobleman who as titular prior of St Andrews was able to appoint Buchanan principal of St Leonard’s College as a reward for his services. These services included writing theoretical works justifying tyrannicide in general and the deposition of Mary in particular, notably the De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus, published in 1579 though first written a decade earlier in 1567–68. With much more immediate effect, however, Buchanan also penned a portrait of Mary as a lascivious whore and vicious tyrant that, published in English in 1571 as Ane Detectioun of the Duinges of Marie Queene of Scottes, proved of immense and enduring influence. Finally, although Moray himself was assassinated in January 1570, for the next 10 years Buchanan remained a member of the regency government that ruled on behalf of Mary’s young son and successor, James VI, while also taking responsibility for the crucial task of educating the infant king as a learned and godly Protestant prince. It was during this time that he wrote his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, eventually published in 1582, the year of his death, and dedicated to his young royal charge.⁶

Figure 1.1 George Buchanan, Rerum Scoticarum Historia (Edinburgh, 1582), University of St Andrews Library, Buch DA775.B8B82, title page with Andrew Melville’s signature – ‘Andreas Melvinus’ – and an epigram in his hand in the upper margin. Courtesy of University of St Andrews Library, Department of Special Collections.

It is possible that Buchanan first met Melville, born in 1545 and thus some 40 years his junior, when the latter was a student at St Andrews in the early 1560s and Buchanan was involving himself in the General Assembly’s ambitious plans for the reform of higher education in Scotland.⁷ In 1564, however, Melville left Scotland to further his studies on the Continent and the first hard evidence of the two of them meeting is in Paris in the mid 1560s, when Buchanan in his sixtieth year was trying to consolidate his reputation as the prince of poets by publishing his collected poetic oeuvre, and Melville, now about 20, was beginning to establish his reputation as a precocious scholar of enormous promise. Some years later, in 1572, Melville recalled in a letter to Peter Young (Buchanan’s junior colleague in the education of James VI), how when he had been in Paris Buchanan:

had courteously explained to me the more difficult passages in his Psalm [Paraphrases] and epigrams: and having lovingly embraced me, as if I were his son [tanquam filium], he willingly admitted me to his rich companionship and to his learned talk. I have never once forgotten so much kindness: reading privately and commenting publicly in the schools on his splendid, almost divine work.⁸

It was a friendship that was renewed and deepened after Melville’s return to Scotland in 1574, initially as principal of Glasgow University, and from 1580 as principal of St Mary’s College St Andrews. Buchanan was by then settled at Stirling Castle, plagued by ill health, but dividing his time between tutoring the young James VI and working on his Historia.⁹ Although it is not clear how frequently they met, there is no doubt that the two men had much in common – both after all were university professors with a profound love of Greek and Roman literature – and that they held each other in high regard. In 1578 Buchanan was engaged in what were lengthy line-by-line discussions of the text of the (Second) Book of Discipline and, although Melville himself was not present at these meetings, they had evidently come to share a deep commitment to a presbyterian ecclesiastical polity as well as to a broadly humanist educational philosophy. Like Buchanan, Melville was a prodigiously talented linguist whose academic interests were initially more humanist than theological and who throughout his long life remained part of a wider Protestant literary culture that was as rooted in the classics as it was in Calvin. As with so many of his learned contemporaries, the writing of neo-Latin verse – the art at which Buchanan so excelled – was for Melville a common recreational activity. Not surprisingly, then, the young Melville held Buchanan in immense esteem as the doyen of Scottish humanists. Indeed, in 1581–82, as Buchanan’s health finally failed him, Melville had a hand in encouraging a nervous publisher to see the Historia into print.¹⁰

As this suggests, Buchanan’s Historia, like the De Iure Regni and the Detectioun, was a highly partisan piece of work. Originally Buchanan may have intended simply to replace the standard Latin history of Scotland, Hector Boece’s colourful Scotorum Historia of 1527, with a more erudite as well as more eloquent version of the Scottish past. If so, he was overtaken by events: as the Historia took shape in the 1570s, its overriding concern came to be to set the revolutionary changes of the late 1550s and 1560s – the Protestant Reformation of 1559–60 and the deposition of Mary Stewart in 1567 – in a sweeping historical context that would lend legitimacy to the overthrow of Catholic tyranny. Thus the 20 books of his Historia trace the history of the Scots from the alleged foundation of the kingdom by Fergus I in 330 BCE through the reigns of over 100 of his successors, climaxing with that of Mary and the regency and assassination of Buchanan’s own patron and friend, the Earl of Moray, before petering out at the beginning of the Earl of Mar’s regency in September 1571. The main thesis of the Historia, however, is established in Book IV where Buchanan describes the reign of the kingdom’s mythical founder, Fergus I, and the equally fictional reigns of the 38 monarchs who were said to have succeeded him until the accession of Fergus II in 403 CE. These seven centuries were replete with examples of the Scottish nobility holding tyrannical rulers to account, and Buchanan discerned in the foundation and early development of the Scottish kingdom an ancient constitution that enshrined the fundamental law – the ius regni apud Scotos – of elective monarchy and legitimate resistance to tyranny on which the virtuous and civic-minded nobility had acted in overthrowing Mary Stewart.

As we shall see, although this was a theme of the Historia in which Melville took a keen interest, there were other aspects of Buchanan’s text – notably, his views on the kingdom’s ecclesiastical history, but also, and less predictably, the description of Scotland that precedes the historical narrative proper – that also attracted his attention. Before examining these, however, it is worth noting some of the physical characteristics as well as the provenance of Melville’s annotated copy of the book. The first edition of the Historia extends to 268 folio leaves (about 540 pages and perhaps 250,000 words) and, although Melville did not mark up every page, the marginalia are nonetheless considerable, and are present on roughly three out of every four pages of the volume.¹¹ All the more surprising then that the book has attracted so little serious attention. It is not certain when or how it came into the possession of St Andrews University Library, but its existence has been well known since at least the early eighteenth century when it was owned by William Scott, a professor of Greek at Edinburgh University, whose signature along with Melville’s is on the title page.¹² Scott evidently shared it with Thomas Ruddiman, the distinguished grammarian and classicist of the early eighteenth century, who produced a remarkable edition of Buchanan’s complete works in 1715, and who in his preface referred rather dismissively to Melville’s annotations as being little more than aides-mémoires with a few playful epigrams thrown in for good measure.¹³ Ruddiman was an episcopalian Jacobite who, while he recognized the quality of Buchanan’s Latinity (and possibly that of Melville too), had little sympathy with the view of the Scottish past Buchanan propagated in his Historia and was clearly not disposed to take Melville’s annotations too seriously.¹⁴

There is some truth in Ruddiman’s view in so far as much of what Melville writes in the margins is ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 How Andrew Melville Read His George Buchanan
• 2 Andrew Melville and the Law of Kingship
• 3 Empire and Anti-Empire: Andrew Melville and British Political Ideology, 1589–1605
• 4 Melville, Rollock and Boyd on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans
• 5 Melville’s Anti-Episcopal Poetry: The Andreae Melvini Musae
• 6 Andrew Melville and the Gunpowder Plot, 1605–1609
• 7 The Poet and his Art: Andrew Melville and Latin Literature
• 8 ‘Sone and Servant’: Andrew Melville and his Nephew, James (1556–1614)
• 9 The Making of Andrew Melville
• Appendix 1: Andrew Melville’s Conjuratio Pulverea (1605), Edited from the Text in Melvini Musae and Poems printed in the 1609 Edition of Frances Herring’s Pietas Pontificia
• Appendix 2: Andrew Melville: A Bibliography
• Index of First Lines of Melville’s Poems
• Index