Buchanan's De Sphaera 163 himself again on its hospitable soil. 'Buchanan,' says de Thou, 'was born by the banks of the Blane in the country of the Lennox, but he was of us by adoption,' and, in the glowing tributes he pays in these lines to the French and their country, Buchanan fully justified the statement. To the same period, also, belong his odes on the capture of Calais from the English and of Metz from Germany, in which he speaks with all the fervour and pride of a Frenchman in his country's triumph. In 1555, Buchanan had been appointed tutor to Timoleon du Cossé, son of Charles du Cossé, comte de Brissac, one of the marshals of France, and the connection gave occasion to the most elaborate of all his poems-the poem entitled De Sphaera. All Buchanan's more serious productions are informed by a strenuous didactic purpose, and it was primarily for the instruction of his pupil that De Sphaera was undertaken. Its theme is the exposition of the Ptolemaic cosmogony in opposition to the system which had recently been promulgated by Copernicus, and which, with few exceptions, had been rejected by learned and unlearned as impious and irrational. The poem was intended as its author's greatest stroke for durable fame, and in its execution he has lavished all his learning and all the poetic art at his command. As we have it, it consists of five books, the last two of which are unfinished; and it remains as a curious memorial of a literary ambition which strangely mistook the course of the world's thought, equally regarding its theme and the language in which it is written. Towards the year 1560, there came a change in Buchanan's opinions which divides his life in twain. Hitherto, though he had spoken freely of monks and priests, he had remained a member of the church of Rome, but, from a special study of the Bible, as he tells us, he now became convinced that the truth was to be found in protestant teaching. As Scotland adopted protestantism as its national religion in 1560, after an exile of more than twenty years he returned to his native country. Now, as always, his new associations prompted him to renewed production. During the first six years after his return to Scotland, it was queen Mary who was the chief inspirer of his muse. Before he left France, he had already celebrated her marriage with Francis I in an Epithalamium containing the famous description of his countrymen beginning Illa pharetratis est propria gloria Scotis, which are among the best known lines he has written. To Mary, also, he now dedicated the second edition of his translation of the Psalms in the most admired of all his shorter poems, the epigram beginning Nympha, Caledoniae quae nunc feliciter orae Till 1567, he remained in close connection with the court, reading the classics with Mary in her leisure hours, composing a masque on the occasion of her marriage with Darnley, and celebrating the birth of her son, afterwards James VI, in a Genethliacon in which he did not conceal his opinions regarding the duties of rulers to their subjects. The murder of Darnley, the head, be it noted, of Buchanan's own clan, converted him into a bitter enemy of Mary, as, like all protestants, he believed that she was accessory to the crime. Henceforward, therefore, he identified himself with the political and religious party which drove her from the throne, and it was in the interests of that party that his subsequent writings were mainly produced. In his Detectio, written at the request of the protestant lords, he has presented their case against Mary with a vehemence of statement which can only be understood and justified by comparison with the polemical writings of contemporary scholars. In the service of the same cause, he produced the only two pieces which he wrote in vernacular Scots-Chamaeleon, a satire on Maitland of Lethington, and the Admonition to the trew Lordis, a warning to the protestant lords themselves regarding their past and future policy. What is noteworthy in these two pamphlets is that Buchanan shows the same mastery of the Scottish language as he does of Latin, and their periodic sentences are an exact reproduction of his Latin models. But Buchanan's greatest literary achievement of this period was his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, published in 1582, the year of his death, in which he related the history of Scotland from its origin till the death of the regent Lennox in 1571. Dedicated to James VI, with whose education he had been entrusted, the underlying object of the book is the inculcation of those principles of political and religious liberty of which Buchanan had been the consistent champion throughout his career. By the leading scholars of Europe it was adjudged to be a work of transcendent merit, and even in the eighteenth century it was seriously debated whether Caesar, Livy, or Sallust had been his model. In this History, which for fully two centuries kept its place as a standard authority, Buchanan's De Jure Regni 165 Buchanan had appealed both to scholars and protestant theologians, and in another work, De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579), he made a still wider appeal on questions which were then agitating every country in Christendom. Written in the form of a dialogue (between Thomas Maitland and Buchanan) this treatise is, virtually, an apology for the Scottish reformation, and, as a classic exposition of protestant political theory, it found wide acceptance both in Britain and on the continent-Dryden in the following century even accusing Milton of having embodied it in his Defence of the People of England. 'No man,' says archbishop Spottiswoode, 'did better merit of his nation for learning, nor thereby did bring it to more glory,' and this is Buchanan's specific and pre-eminent claim to the regard of his countrymen. Read as classics by all educated Scotsmen, his works, prose and verse, perpetuated the study of Latin, which, to the comparative neglect of Greek, remained a rooted tradition in the curriculum of a learned education in Scotland. Scotland, as has already been said, owing to conditions peculiar to itself, was more powerfully affected by the reformation than by the renascence, yet, through the work of Buchanan, and of others of kindred tastes, though less distinguished than himself, one result, at least, was secured from both movements: religion has ever been associated with learning in the mind of the Scottish people. CHAPTER VIII THE NEW ENGLISH POETRY THE reign of Henry VIII was not, as students of history know a period of unbroken internal peace. Nevertheless, when the wars of the Roses were over and a feeling of security had been induced by the establishment of a strong dynasty, a social and intellectual life became possible in England which the trouble: of the reigns of Henry VIII and his two successors were sufficien to check but not to destroy. More important still, England, having more or less settled her internal troubles by a judicious application of the balancing system, became a power to be reckoned with it European politics. This brought her into touch with the kingdom: of the continent, and so, for the first time in a more than incidenta way, submitted her intellectual life to the influences of the renascence. The inspiration of the new poetry, we shall find, was almost entirely foreign. It was upon French, and, especially, upor Italian, models that the courtiers of Henry VIII founded the poems which now began to be written in large numbers. The extent to which the practice of versifying prevailed cannot nov be gauged; but modern investigation shows it to have been very wide. To make poems was one of the recognised accomplishments of the knight as conceived in the last phase of chivalry, the day with which we are, for the moment, concerned; and it is not perhaps, too much to say that every educated man made poems which, if approved, were copied out by his friends and circulated in manuscript, or included in song-books. It was not, however, til 1557 that some few were, for the first time, put into print by Richard Tottel, in the volume, Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey and other, commonly known as Tottel's Miscellany. This volume tends to prove that the movement had one pioneer and two leaders. The pioneer was Sir Thomas Wyatt, who was joined in the leadership by Henry Howard, known as earl of Surrey. A sketch of their lives, especially of that of the former Sir Thomas Wyatt 167 may be of interest as helping to show the extent to which England was brought into touch with European influences. Thomas Wyatt was born in or about 1503, and was educated at Cambridge, possibly, also, at Oxford. In 1511, his father was joint constable with Sir Thomas Boleyn of Norwich Castle, and, as a boy, he made the acquaintance of a lady-Sir Thomas's daughter Anne-with whose name report was to link his own very closely. In 1525, after holding certain offices about the person of the king, Thomas Wyatt accompanied Sir Thomas Cheney on a diplomatic mission to France. In 1526-7, he was sent with Sir John Russell, the English ambassador, to the papal court; and visited Venice, Ferrara, Bologna and Florence. On his return, he was captured by the imperial forces under the constable of Bourbon, but escaped. In 1529-30, he was high marshal at Calais. In 1537, he went as ambassador to the emperor, and remained abroad, mainly in Spain, till 1539; in the April of that year he was recalled, in consequence of the intrigues of his fellow-ambassador, Bonner. At the end of the same year he was despatched to Flanders to see the emperor and followed him to Paris, returning in 1540. On the fall of Cromwell, who had supported Wyatt, Bonner succeeded in obtaining Wyatt's imprisonment in the Tower; whence, having either denied the accusation or pleaded for mercy, he was afterwards released. He retired to his house at Allington, in Kent, and employed his leisure in writing his satires and his paraphrase of the penitential psalms. In 1542, we find him knight of the shire for Kent; and, in the summer of that year, hastening in ill health on a mission to conduct the imperial ambassador to London, he caught a fever, and died on the road, at Sherborne, on 11 October. One other episode of his life remains to be mentioned. He was commonly regarded as, in youth, the lover of Anne Boleyn; and it was reported that, when the king wished to make that lady his wife, Wyatt informed him of his previous relations with her. Whatever the truth of an obscure matter, Wyatt was chief ewerer at the coronation of Henry's second queen in 1533; and, though we find him committed to the Tower in May 1536, the period of her downfall, it was probably only as a witness. One of his sonnets, Whoso list to hunt, has clear reference to Anne Boleyn, ending, as it does, with the line: 'Noli me tangere; for Caesar's I am'; for, though it is imitated from Romanello' or Petrarch (157, Una candida cerva), it may yet be of personal application. There is also an epigram 1 According to Nott, p. 571. |