GEORGE BUCHANAN

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY AND GENERAL

On the 21st July 1683, Lord William Russell was beheaded in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, because Charles II., F.D., who never said a foolish thing, and never did a wise one, thought it would help to keep alive the Stuart doctrine of the Divine right of kings. On the same day, the political writings of George Buchanan and one John Milton were, by decree of the learned and loyal University of Oxford, publicly burned in front of their Schools by the common hangman, because they were regarded as the most formidable and dangerous defences of the principles on account of which it had been considered judicious to kill Lord William Russell, and perhaps also in token that if Buchanan and Milton had not been dead they might have been burned too, along with their books. It is comforting to reflect that this same decree was subsequently burned with the same publicity—and by the same common hangman, one would hope.

At the time, however, the Oxford transaction, in view of the sycophancy, obscurantism, and other degrading characteristics of the then University, was the highest compliment that could have been paid to Buchanan and Milton, and especially to Buchanan. For Buchanan was substantially a century before Milton, who, like the rest of the Roundheads, was inspired by Buchanan’s principles and greatly assisted by his arguments. Dryden, indeed, declared that Milton stole his Defence of the People of England from Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos; but that was only ‘Glorious John’s’ inglorious way of making himself controversially disagreeable. Milton put his own genius and experience into Buchanan’s idea, and produced an essentially original work. But what although he had not? Milton was fighting a great battle, and was entitled, or rather bound, to use the best weapons, wherever he could get them. The anti-plagiarising spirit is often a mere form of vanity. If the Royal Artillery declined to plagiarise from Armstrong and Krupp, and insisted on making all their ammunition themselves, I should tremble for the defence of the country. Not the less, however, does Buchanan amply merit the title of ‘Father of Liberalism,’ since the principles which he successfully floated in unpropitious times undoubtedly produced the two great English, the American, and the first French Revolutions, with all their continuations and consequences.

Let it be noted that the distinction which Buchanan achieved in this matter was not merely that of the political philosopher and thinker. The publication of the De Jure, at the time and under the circumstances in which it appeared, was a blow of the utmost consequence, delivered in the great politico-theological struggle with which he was contemporary. It was like one of Knox’s famous sermons, which were not mere religious meditations, but political events of the most immense influence, present and future. The Reformation, particularly in Scotland, was, in its inception and establishment, a political, quite as much as a religious revolution, of which Buchanan was not simply an interested but recluse critic and dilettante spectator. He thought profoundly about what he saw going on, but he also threw his thoughts into the fight that was raging round him, with bombshell results, and the effects of what he thought and did upon the fortunes of the great struggle for popular liberty against usurping ascendency—a struggle not even yet concluded—prove him to have possessed qualities of far-sightedness and statesmanship of the highest order.

In a totally different walk of life he achieved almost equal distinction. He was a great scholar-poet and general writer; and when, in this connection, I use the words ‘almost equal,’ I am thinking of the question whether the director of human affairs or the artist in words and ideas of beauty or human interest is the greater. Of course, comparison of things or people generically distinct is scarcely possible. You can hardly compare a snuff-box and a policeman. But it seems less difficult to ask whether Cæsar or Shakespeare, Alfred the Great or Alfred Tennyson, was the greater man. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Buchanan rose to very great eminence as an intellectual artist, both in prose and verse. He enjoyed an unsurpassed European reputation among the Renaissance magnates of his day. Henri Estienne, for instance,—Buchanan’s Stephanus, our Stephens—said that he was poetarum nostri sæculi facile princeps, meaning thereby ‘easily the first poet of our time,’ which is sufficiently strong. Of course it may be said that Estienne or Stephens was only a printer. But there are printers and printers, and Stephanus belonged to the second class. Anybody who knows anything about the literary history of the time will understand that such praise from Estienne implied a very great deal.

Then there were the Scaligers, Julius Cæsar père, and Joseph fils, a greater man than his father, in the opinion of the best judges—himself included, probably. They were not men easy to please, the Scaligers. Even Erasmus was not good enough for Julius Cæsar, who used language truly awful about the glory of the priesthood and the shame. As for Joseph, there was but one man alive in his own line for whom he had a vestige of respect, and that was Casaubon; and he told him so, intimating that he might think a good deal of the compliment, as he, Joseph, was the only man in Europe who was capable of forming an opinion about him—a perfectly true if not absolutely humble observation. But however difficult to please in most cases, the Scaligers had a sincere and unbounded admiration of Buchanan—an admiration abundantly shown while he lived, and when he was gone, expressed, especially by the younger Scaliger, with a tenderness and beauty which stamp the tribute with authority and value. His epitaphium on Buchanan concluded thus:—