Buchanan died on the 28th September 1582, a few days or weeks after his History had been published. He had striven, in spite of old age, ill-health, and poverty, to accomplish this long-meditated patriotic task; and when he had corrected the proofs and given it to the world, he felt that his last slender tie to life was broken, and his long, chequered, poorly-paid day’s work was done.
His death took place in Kennedy’s Close, the second close off the High Street of Edinburgh above the Tron Church, as recorded by ‘George Paton, Antiquary,’ upon the rather reliable authority of an ancient Lord Advocate, Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees.
His last lodging was in ‘the first house in the turnpike above the tavern,’ and occupied some few cubic feet of space, probably about twelve feet above the existing causeway blocks of Hunter Square, an entirely vanished pile of tall, substantial, over-populated masonry, part of the crest of the High Street once, standing within a quarter of a mile of the vanished garden in which Darnley was found dead in his shirt without mark of violence, still nearer to the site of the vanished house in which Walter Scott was born, and to the vacant air-space once filled by Johnny Dowie’s vanished tavern, in which during his Edinburgh sojourn Robert Burns was wont to make merry with select friends.
The records of the Commissary Court show that Buchanan left no property except £100 of his Crossraguel pension (gifted by Queen Mary, and withheld as often and as long as he could by the Earl of Cassilis), which had been in arrear from the previous Whitsunday. His ‘Inventar’ exhibits him in his true character of an ancient philosopher, whether Stoic or not. The civic authorities of Edinburgh, who from time immemorial have been ready and willing to bury scholars, buried his body the day after his death at the public expense. The ground of Greyfriars, one of the spoils of the Reformation, was then being turned into a burying-ground, and Buchanan was the ‘first person of celebrity’ buried in it. The exact spot of his sepulture is, however, in doubt, though a small tablet was put up by a humble blacksmith to mark where it is believed to be—a tribute of hero-worship like to that in Parliament Square which is supposed to mark the burial-place of Knox.
It is not likely that Buchanan ever asked the Town Council of Edinburgh for bread, but it is believed that they gave him a stone—without any inscription, however, to show for whom it was intended, so that by 1701 it was lost or stolen. His skull also is believed to be one of the lawful and sacred possessions of the Edinburgh University. If genuine, it may be a phrenological curiosity. Sir W. Hamilton once used it at a lecture which was listened to and approved of by Thomas Carlyle. Sir William demonstrated to Carlyle’s satisfaction that the said skull, supposed to be Buchanan’s, was according to phrenological dogmas far inferior to that of some ‘Malay cut-throat’ or other unredeemed ruffian. Assuming this to be the fact—and my authority for believing it is a letter of Carlyle published in Veitch’s Life of Sir W. Hamilton—I am surprised that Mr. Hosack and Sir John Skelton were not converted to phrenology. But for my part, believing in the universal but mostly untranslatable symbolism of Nature, from the ‘flower in the crannied wall’ to the human face and form divine, and believing only to a limited extent in phrenology as the dark side of physiognomy that is open to touch rather than to sight, I should hold that the skull which was inferior to a Malay’s in any respect except thickness could never be the skull of Buchanan; and it would not alter my conviction to feel sure that George Combe was present at Sir William Hamilton’s lecture, and for the first and only time in their career of phrenological disputation expressly agreed with him. Whatever Buchanan’s head and face may have been like—and his portraits impute to him either sleepy, benevolent dulness, or ferrety, peevish conceit—it is not believable that his head or face could have ever resembled that of a Malay or any other kind of savage. So acute a logician as Sir W. Hamilton ought to have doubted one of his premises at least, and been able to conceive it possible that the resetters of dead men’s skulls may be sometimes the victims of outside, as well as inside, deception.
EPILOGISTIC
The sudden and untimely death of Dr. Wallace has left this volume incomplete, and incapable of being completed as he would have done it. Detailed facts are in part awanting, but they are awanting in every biography and autobiography, and after the oblivion of centuries has passed over them, they tend to be unintelligible and uninteresting as lying remote from everyday experience. These, however, the inquiring reader, to his reasonable satisfaction, can find elsewhere; what he will never find elsewhere are Dr. Wallace’s ultimate, deliberate, critical estimates of the life and work of Buchanan. His book, as it grew under his nimble pen, grew, probably unconsciously, to be not so much an articulation of the bare bones of fact as a narrative of the genesis, evolution, growth, and vitality of Buchanan’s ideas, more especially his ideas affecting social democratic development, and in particular his capital heresy, dangerous for himself, but vital for the race, touching the ‘rights of man.’