This is not the stage at which to describe the books themselves—it is their prefaces that make them relevant at present,—but a word to indicate their general character is necessary. The Baptistes was written (1540-41) when Buchanan was comparatively a young man, thirty-four or thirty-five, and was ‘regenting’ in a great secondary school or gymnasium at Bordeaux, called the Collège de Guyenne, organised and presided over by one André de Gouvéa, a famous Portuguese Humanist and educator of the day. This Baptistes was simply a dramatic reproduction of the story of John the Baptist and his tragic end, the dramatis personæ being King Herod, Queen Herodias, the latter’s dancing daughter, Malchus the high priest, Gamaliel, and the unlucky John himself. It was composed, Buchanan tells us in the dedicatory preface and in his autobiography (1574), in accordance with the rules of the college, and intended by him to win the students, who acted it, from the silly ‘mysteries’ of the monks to the imitation of classic antiquity, and the rising study of religion in its original documents. But there was something more intended. It is scarcely necessary to read ‘between the lines’ to find a complete condemnation of absolutist tyranny, and a picture of the misery which it brings on the tyrant himself as well as on his victims. This was not the kind of writing to please monarchs of the period. Nevertheless Buchanan dedicates it (1576) to the boy-king, as ‘having a peculiar appositeness to his position,’ warning him of ‘the agonisings and wretchedness which await tyrants, even when they seem to be most flourishing outwardly.’
This lesson, he goes on to say, he thinks ‘not only useful, but absolutely essential,’ for his royal pupil to learn now, so that he may ‘early begin to hate’ a fault which ‘he ought always to shun.’ Moreover, he ‘wishes to place it on record, for the information of posterity, that if the king should in the future, at the instigation of evil advisers, or by allowing the lust of power to overcome the principles of his education, act contrary to the warnings now given him, the blame must be laid, not on his teachers, but on himself, in not having listened to those who gave him good counsel.’ This was not the language of flattery; and though James was only ten when he was thus addressed, the precocity of his intelligence would enable him to understand its import. He was destined, in a very few years, to be king in fact as he was now in name, and Buchanan knew that if his charge turned out other than he was trying to make him—what actually happened—his own plain speaking would not be to his advantage. Knowing this, he did his duty, and had his sovereign for his enemy when the latter got used to being his own master. The fact reveals an elevation of character in Buchanan which cannot be justly forgotten in judging of him in other connections. It is not surprising that the agents in Scotland of Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s great minister, when on the look-out for ‘Biencontents,’ as they were called, who might be dealt with in the way of bribery with a view to forming a strong Elizabethan party in Scotland, should have secretly reported (1579, King’s age thirteen) Buchanan as ‘a singular man,’ while of ‘Mester Peter Young’ they say that he was ‘specially well affected, and ready to persuade the king to be in favour of her majestye.’
Three years after dedicating the Baptistes to James in the style we have seen, he dedicated the De Jure to him (1579). This was a still bolder and more independent proceeding. Without entering, for the present, into the details of its argument, it may be enough to remember that, with its doctrine of Sovereignty as originating from the People, existing for their benefit, and not autocratic, but bounded by laws to which the People have consented, the De Jure must have appeared to Absolutist and ‘Divine right people’ generally, revolutionary rubbish of the most pernicious description; and accordingly, in 1584, when Buchanan had been dead two years, they had it condemned and its publication and circulation forbidden by express Statute of the Scots Parliament—the King, of course, assenting, if not inciting; while, as we have already seen, the University of Oxford, later on, paid it the compliment of having it publicly burned. Buchanan must have, in a general way, foreseen the possibility of something like this, and the risk he ran if the King should, in his riper age, turn upon him and seek to rend him. This, however, did not deter him from pressing his democratic treatise on the attention and study of his royal pupil.
He praises him, not in the fulsome and fawning language of the Dedication literature of the time, but with evident sincerity and honest, hearty admiration for the brightness of his abilities, his intellectual interests, his independence of judgment while inquiring into the truth of things and opinions. He congratulates him, too, on his present aversion to flattery, that ‘nurse of Tyranny, and deadliest of plagues to genuine kingship’—tyrannidis nutricula, et legitimi regni gravissima pestis,—and rejoices that he seems ‘instinctively to detest’—naturæ quodam instinctu oderis—‘the courtly solecisms and barbarisms’—solæcismos et barbarismos aulicos—affected by those self-chosen ‘arbiters of elegance’—elegantiæ censores—who ‘spice their conversation’—velut sermonis condimenta—with ‘profuse employment of “Your Majesty,” “Your Lordship,” “Your Illustrious Highness,” and any other still more sickening title they can find’—passim Majestates, Dominationes, Illustritates, et si qua alia magis sunt putida, adspergant. Was there any latent reference here to ‘Mester Peter Young’ and his courtier ways? Anyhow, Buchanan plainly owns that he has doubts and fears for James’s future. He tells him of the dangers of evil companionship, and invites him to the study of the essay thus dedicated to him, not only as an instructor that will show him the right and wrong of the subject, but as a Mentor that may ‘keep at him’ in importunate and even audacious fashion, as it may seem for the moment. If he is faithful to the principles commended to him, there will be peace in the present for him and his, and lasting glory in the future. James subsequently thought he could do better, and threw off his early training; but, notwithstanding, or in consequence, he failed alike to achieve a peaceful career or to transmit a glorious memory. The citation from the chorus in the Thyestes of Seneca—who also was tutor to a royal failure, although James must, of course, be admitted to have been a brilliant success compared with Nero—in which the great but ill-starred Roman delineates the Stoic king, appended to Buchanan’s dedication, no doubt expresses his own view of what James might and should have been: beginning with—
‘Regem non faciunt opes
Non vestis Tyriæ color,’ etc.
‘It is not wealth nor the purple robe that makes a king,’ etc.
and ending—
‘Rex est, qui metuit nihil,
Rex est, qui cupiet nihil.
Hoc regnum sibi quisque dat.’
‘He is a king who has conquered Fear and Desire. Such a kingship every man may give himself, and none else.’
It is in the same spirit that he dedicates his History to the King (1582, James sixteen). He knows perfectly well how his book is likely to be taken. Writing (1577) to Sir Thomas Randolph, Queen Elizabeth’s representative at the Scottish court, and Buchanan’s quondam pupil at Paris, he says: ‘I am occupiit in wryting of our historie, being assurit to content few, and to displease many thairthrow.’ Among the many ‘displeased,’ he could not but foresee that possibly the young King might be found, on account of the unfavourable view which, in common with most historians, he felt himself obliged to take of the character and career of the King’s own mother, Queen Mary. He must have felt too that, unless James were all the more magnanimous, he might take deep offence—as he did, death alone saving Buchanan from criminal proceedings on account of his ‘seditious’ writings—at his now nominal preceptor’s contention that by the Constitution of Scotland the monarchy had, as an historical fact as well as by a true philosophy, been all along a derivative and limited, even very limited, one, and anything but a divinely authorised Absolutism, as maintained by courtly authorities. Buchanan, however, prefers to assume that James had enough of the king and the public man in him to sink private feeling in public duty and accept truth, however unpleasant; and accordingly he dedicates his History to him, urging him to follow the example of his good predecessors and eschew that of the bad ones, and more particularly commending to his notice and imitation the career of the saintly David I., the ‘sair saunt for the crown’ of one of his successors and descendants, as a ruler who, according to his lights—some of which, however, especially those that led to his profuse and corrupting liberality to the Church, Buchanan, herein endorsing John Major, his early St. Andrews ‘regent’ in Logic, emphatically decries—devoted himself not to pleasure, or the strengthening of his prerogative, but to what seemed to him to be the true welfare of his people. In all this, some of Buchanan’s critics have thought him too stern, and that gentler methods might have won over James to better thoughts. But truth must always be stern to those who dislike or fear it. Yet those only are the real friends of these latter who give them the chance of profiting by it; and in so acting by James, come what might of himself and his personal fortunes, Buchanan will be thought by most admirers of a high morale to have stamped himself as a wholly high-minded and even heroic character.