Scottish people and their leaders before the public opinion of Europe for having, after the murder of Darnley, brought Mary’s career as sovereign to a close, as being not only a public danger, but a public scandal. That the vigour of the brochure itself, backed up by Buchanan’s immense reputation, went far to make Mary an impossible factor in European politics, is beyond question. To the same extent he made himself the bête noire of Mary’s friends and apologists, and very brutal and very black they certainly made him out to be. In more recent times a school of sentimental historians has arisen, who refuse to see in Mary either fault or flaw, and recognise in her a sort of spotless goddess, of irresistible charm, thrown away upon an unworthy age. Not content with pity—it would be inhuman not to feel it in any case—they show how true it is that pity is akin to love, and falling victims in some degree to the spell which ruined the unhappy and love-maddened Chastelard, they conduct a necessarily Platonic flirtation with their idol’s romantic and fascinating memory, across the separating interval of three hundred years. Had Mary been ugly, or even plain, she would have had fewer champions.

In vituperation of Buchanan they are not a whit behind his contemporary assailants. Mr. Hosack, for instance, one of the most ingenious of Mary’s modern defenders, calmly says, ‘Buchanan was without doubt the most venal and unscrupulous of men.’ His usual way of alluding to the Detectio is ‘Buchanan’s famous libel,’ varied occasionally by ‘the highly coloured narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the subsequently invented slanders of Buchanan,’ or ‘the slanderous narrative of Buchanan,’ or ‘the atrocious libel of Buchanan.’ Sir John Skelton, whose treatment of the subject is distinguished by a literary grace which cannot be claimed for Mr. Hosack, is on a level with him when he reaches Buchanan. ‘Buchanan’s atrocious libel’ is common form with the Marians, and Sir John has it. Perhaps his gentlest reference is when he speaks of ‘the industrious animosity of the man who had been her pensioner,’ and when he desires to be specially severe, he speaks of ‘grotesque adventures invented, or at least adapted, by Buchanan, whose virulent animosities were utterly unscrupulous, and whose clumsy invective was as bitter as it was pedantic.’ The present is not the place to inquire into the truth or falsehood of these statements. They are adduced merely as a tribute to Buchanan’s power. ‘Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you,’ does not logically justify the counter statement, ‘Good for you when all men shall speak ill of you’; but when a controversialist has been abused by his opponents as Buchanan has been, it is at least a proof that he has been found a formidable antagonist, either for his ability or veracity, or both, and that in the direct ratio of the violence with which they attack him.

One other aspect of Buchanan’s varied power seems to call for some mention. Up to the middle of this century, a chapbook usually entitled The Witty and Entertaining Exploits of George Buchanan, sometimes adding The King’s Jester, ran through many editions original and revised, and had a certain vogue all over Scotland among a considerable class—not the most refined, certainly—of the population. It is an ignorant, coarse, and indecent production, and can be read only by the historical student for the purpose of investigating the popular taste of its time. Its description of Buchanan as the ‘Fule’ instead of the tutor of King James, and its placing him at the English court of James, who did not ascend the throne of England until Buchanan had been twenty-one years dead, are sufficient commentary on its historical accuracy. At first sight one might imagine that it had been put together by an enemy of Buchanan, but its brutish zeal in holding up Buchanan as a desperately clever fellow who was continually turning the tables and raising the laugh against people who wished to take him off, and who were generally English, and often English nobles, bishops or other clergy, show that it was earnest in its admiration according to its dim and dirty lights.

Buchanan was a humorist, and saw the ludicrous side of existence with a depth and keenness and enjoyment very different from the barbarian faculty which produced the ‘merry bourds’ of Knox and certain of his iconoclastic cronies. Even the prospect of having soon to leave the world could not make him utterly solemn, although the circumstances lend a grim aspect to the humour which may make it distasteful to wooden seriousness. ‘Tell the people who sent you,’ he said to the macer of the Court of Session, who came to summon him for something objectionable in some of his writings, ‘tell them I am summoned before a higher tribunal.’ When good John Davidson called on him and reminded him of the usual evangelical consolations, he repaid him with some original causticity à propos of the Romish doctrine of the Mass, which would no doubt delight that worthy man. He never had much money at any time, and less than usual at the close; and when, on counting it up with his attendant, he found that there was not enough to bury him, he directed it to be given to the poor. But ‘what about the funeral?’ naturally asked the servitor. ‘Well,’ Buchanan said, ‘he was very indifferent about that,’ as he meditated on the dilemma in which he saw he was placing the people of Edinburgh, who had not been over kind to the greatest scholar of the age. ‘If they will not bury me,’ he said, ‘they can let me lie where I am, or throw my body where they like.’ Of course, as he knew, they had to bury him, so he could enjoy his posthumous triumph of wit; but they had their repartee, denying him a gravestone for a generation or two.

There is a weird humour in the famous interview between himself on the one hand and the Melvilles, Andrew and James, on the other, who had crossed from St. Andrews to Edinburgh to see him shortly before he passed away. They found him teaching his young attendant his a b, ab. Andrew Melville, amused by the spectacle of the greatest scholar in Europe engaged in so disproportionate a task, made a suitable observation. ‘Better this than stealing sheep,’ quoth Buchanan, or ‘than being idill,’ he added, which latter he maintained to be as bad as the stealing of sheep. Then the conversation wandered to his History, which was by this time in the hands of the printer. The Melvilles noticed in the proofs the well-known and ugly story of Mary’s having got Rizzio’s body removed to the tomb of James V. They suggested that the king might take offence at this reflection on his mother’s memory, and that the publication might be stopped. ‘Tell me,’ said the dying historian, ‘if it is true.’ They said they thought so. ‘Then I will bide his feud, and all his kin’s,’ was the answer. There was, no doubt, a dash of the heroic in this, but there was a chuckle in it too, as the speaker reflected that the king who had neglected him, and whom he had flogged for persistent boyish insolence, according to the pedagogic fashion of the time, would once more have his pride humbled at his hands when he was gone.