Wikisource

New Poems by James I/Other Poets in the Scottish Court, 1584-1603

< New Poems by James I
←
New Poems
by James I
III. Other Poets in the Scottish Court, 1584-1603 by Allan Ferguson Westcott
→
3667064New Poems — III. Other Poets in the Scottish Court, 1584-1603 by Allan Ferguson WestcottJames I
​

III

OTHER POETS IN THE SCOTTISH COURT,
1584-1603

"Quique poetas claros sodales suos vulgo vocari voluit." ⁠
—Dempster. ⁠

The publication of The Essayes of a Prentise in 1584 was followed, it would seem, by some slackening of the King's interest in poetry. In the winter of 1587 he was occupied "in commenting of the Apocalypse and in setting out of sermontes thereupon against the Papistes and Spainyards," though, as Melville adds, "by a piece of grait oversight, the Papists practised never mair busselie in this land. . . ."[1] In the commentary, or Paraphrase upon the Revelation[2] the author by a scarcely prosaic flight of fancy connects the Pope with Anti-Christ and Catholicism with St. John's vision of the beast with seven heads and ten horns. Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun on Revelation xx. 7-10 appeared in 1588, and Ane Meditatioun on 1 Chronicles xv. 25-29 in 1589.[3]

These pursuits were pleasantly interrupted, however, by the arrival, in May, 1587,[4] of the French poet Du Bartas, whom the King in a letter of extravagant flattery had invited to Scotland for the summer. Du Bartas's popularity among devout Protestants was due primarily to the highly commendable character of his subject-matter, drawn as it was so largely from the Bible,— ​

"That is a home of plenty well repleat:
That is a storehouse riche, a learning seat,
An Ocean hudge, both lacking shore and ground,
Of heauenly eloquence a spring profound.
·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·⁠·
Let not your art so rare then be defylde,
In singing Venus, and her fethered chylde."[5]

But his fame must have been greatly increased by the influence of James, who was one of his earliest admirers in Scotland or England. The first portion of his masterpiece, La Semaine, ou Creation du Monde (Paris, 1579), was presented to James by his former nurse within a year or two of its issue,[6] and in 1584 we find him discussing the possibility of an adequate translation. The following passage is from the Epistle Dedicatorie of Thomas Hudson's translation of Judith:[7]—

"As your Maiestie, Sir, after your accustomed and vertuous manner was sometime discoursing at Table with such your Domestiques as chaunced to be attendants; It pleased your Highnesse not only to esteeme the peerless stile of the Greeke Homer, and the Latin Virgil to be inimitable to us (whose tongue is barbarous and corrupted): But also to alledge (partly throu delite your Majesty tooke in the Hautie stile of those most famous Writers, and partly to sounde the opinion of others) that also the loftie Phrase, the grave incitement, the facound termes of the French Salust (for the like resemblance) could not be followed, nor sufficiently expressed in our rude and unpolished english language, . . . whereupon, it pleased your Maiestie (among the rest of his workes) to assign me, The Historie of Judith, as an agreeable Subject to your Highnesse, to be turned by me into English verse."

During his stay in Scotland, Du Bartas and the King ​visited the University of St. Andrews, where James had the temerity to request a lecture from the Principal, Andrew Melville—the minister who later twitched his sovereign by the arm and reminded him that he as only "God's silliew vassal." Melville spoke offhand "of the right government of Chryst, and in effect refuted the haill Actes of Parliament maid against the discipline thairof, to the grait instruction of his auditor, except the king allean, who was verie angrie all that night." The next day he had so far recovered as to partake of "a bankett of wett and dry confections. . . . wherat His Maiestie camped verie merrelie a guid whyll."[8] On his guest's departure in September, James gave him "a chaine of 1000 crowns, made him knight, and accompanied him to the sea side, where he made him promise to return again."[9] The French poet repaid these honors by a translation of the King's Lepanto, with a fulsome preface and dedicatory sonnet. This is printed with the original and the King's translation of Du Bartas's Furies in the Exercises at vacant houres.[10]

Two years later, a second political visitor arrived in Scotland, just at the time when the King, alone at Craigmillar Castle, was eagerly awaiting the arrival of his bride from Denmark, and easing his restless mind by penning songs and sonnets.[11] This was the English poet Henry Constable, whose appearance in Scotland at this time is indicated by evidence both in his own poems and in contemporary documents. On October 20, 1589, T. Fowler wrote Burleigh that "Roger Dalton [Aston?] is exceeding great with young Constable and hath brought him to secret conference sundry times with Victor [James]. He hath commission from Ernestus [Essex] and from Rialta and Richardo [Lady and Lord Riche]."[12] His errand in Scotland, as the letter states, was to secure the King's ​friendship for Lady Arabella Stuart, and no doubt had some connection also with the royal marriage, which had been arranged for September 29, and for which a masque and masquers had been sent to Scotland by Elizabeth.[13] It may be remembered that, from 1584 on, Constable was an active Catholic messenger both at home and abroad. By November 2, he was back again in London, where he was addressed by Robert Douglas in a friendly letter of that date from Edinburgh referring to the King's regard for him and to a manuscript of his poems.[14]

Among Constable's sonnets are a series of four addressed to James, the first "to the King of Scots, whome as yet he has not seen," the second "touching the subject of his poems, dedicated wholie to heavenly matters," the third "upon occasion of a Sonnet the King wrote in complaint of a contrarie [wind] which hindred the arrivall of the Queene out of Denmark," and the fourth "upon occasion of his long stay in Denmark, by reason of the coldnesse of the winter, and freezing of the sea."[15] The dates of these compositions are fixed by the fact that the news of the storm and Anne's delay reached Scotland September 15, 1589, and the king left on October 22, to seek his betrothed in person.

If the Constable mentioned in Montgomerie's sonnet (p. xxviii) was the poet, one may suppose the meeting of the two writers to have taken place at this time, or perhaps earlier during Montgomerie's stay in London. The possibility of their friendship is increased by the fact that Constable's sonnet beginning,—

"Thine eye, the glasse where I behold my heart,"

appears in slightly altered form among the Drummond MS. poems of Montgomerie.[16] ​Constable's later visits to Scotland are more fully recorded in the state papers of the period, and have in part been noted by his biographers. In December, 1595, the Earl of Errol gave a book to the King, at which the King was offended, and which Quin, an Irish poet in the court, ascribed to Constable.[17] Colville refers to it as a seditious book in favor of Spain. In March, 1599, Constable himself arrived in Scotland and offered his services to the King, but was refused an audience and forced to account for himself before the Lords of the Session.[18] Later he is described as an agent of the Pope accompanying the Lord of Boniton, and on September 22 about to return to France.[19] In April, 1600, he sent the King news from Aragon, apparently as his paid correspondent, and in July of the same year a book which he had written, but which at this late date could hardly have been, as Mr. Sidney Lee infers, [20] a copy of Diana. After the death of Elizabeth he ventured to return from the Continent to England, and April 28, 1604, was "a few days ago imprisoned" for writing to the Papal Nuncio in France stating that "the King had no religion at all and that everything he did was governed by political expediency."[21] In August following, the Venetian Secretary wrote that Constable had been released from the Tower and confined to his own house.[22] Little is known of his career from this time until his death abroad in 1613.

Both Constable and Montgomerie contributed laudatory sonnets to the first editions of the King's poems, the former to the Exercises at vacant houres of 1591, and the latter to the Essayes of a Prentise. Other more or less literary figures who enjoyed the King's favor were permitted similar ​distinction. Their names are indicated in the Essayes by the subscribed initials T. H., R. H., M. W., M. W. F., and A. M., which have been identified, the first two with the brothers Thomas and Robert Hudson, the fourth with Master William Fowler, and the last with Montgomerie. The third initials, M. W., may indicate Master William (Fowler), or possibly, by transposition, William Murray, one of the King's four valets of the chamber, whom Montgomerie addresses as "belovit brother"[23] in a friendly sonnet from London. The poems of 1591 are greeted by Fowler, Constable, and Henry Lok (or Locke), and in Greek and Lathi verses by Hadrian Damman. Locke and Constable were Englishmen, the one of Puritan sympathies and the other a Catholic, and Damman was a native of Flanders.

The lives of these gentlemen are less worthy of note for their own sake than as an indication of the King's literary intercourse and the culture of his Scottish court. The Hudsons belonged to a family of four brothers, of English descent,[24] who were musicians to the King in his earliest childhood. They are mentioned in the first Establishment of the Household,[25] in March, 1567, as "Violaris: Mekill Thomas Hudsoun, Robert Hudsoun, James Hudsoun,[26] William Hudsoun"; and in the reorganized household of 1591 they hold the same offices, with the privilege of a table to themselves at meals.[27] Thomas was appointed Master of the Chapel Royal, June 5, 1586, and was continued in the position by acts of Parliament in 1587 and again in I592.[28] In Allott's England's Parnassus (1600), he ​was honored, together with his royal master, by a surprisingly large number of selections, forty-seven in all and amounting to 392 lines, taken from his translation of Judith. He is also included, with the King and Locke, in the list of forty or more contributors to Bodenham's Belvedére, or The Garden of the Muses, published in the same year. The first of these collections contains some distinguished verse, but Hudson's, it must be admitted, is of a type to warrant the disparaging remarks about "crows and kestrels" in The Return from Parnassus of 1602. In this satire, both he and Locke are advised to sleep quiet "among the shavings of the press, and let your books lie in some old nooks among old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my censure."[29] The verse of his which has survived consists of an epitaph on Sir Richard Maitland[30] (d. 1586), prefatory sonnets for James's poems and for Fowler's Triumphs of Petrarch, and The History of Judith[31] translated from Du Bartas and published in Edinburgh, 1584. Robert Hudson wrote sonnets on the same themes as his brother, and is addressed by Montgomerie in a series of four sonnets (XXV-XXIX) which are really a single poem seeking his assistance at court.

Fowler's Triumphs of Petrarch, just mentioned, was written, like Hudson's Judith, at the request of the King, and is preserved in manuscript, with a sonnet sequence entitled The Tarantula of Love, in the Edinburgh University Library.[32] The title "P. of Hawicke," which is given Fowler in the MS., is explained by an entry in the Records of the Burgh of Edinburgh, May 29, 1589, to the effect that "William Fowler, persoun of Hawick" had been appointed ​by the Council to accompany the Ambassador Peter Young to Denmark—perhaps to discover the true religion of the Princess Anne, or to watch the expenditure of the ten thousand pounds borrowed from the city for the journey. The term parson is used in contemporary documents to indicate a layman appointed to a religious benefice; and since Fowler's name does not occur elsewhere in church records, it is to be supposed that he held the living merely for its revenue.

A William Fowler, who may have been either the poet or a son of Thomas Fowler,[33] acted as an agent of Walsingham's in 1582 and 1583, and in this capacity accompanied the Duke of Lennox (d'Aubigny) on his departure from Scotland. In a letter of Fowler's, d'Aubigny is quoted as saying that "your mother's house was the first I entered, on coming to Scotland, and the last I quitted on leaving the country."[34] This statement is explained, perhaps, by the fact that a Fowler is mentioned as a servant of the Lennox family as early as 1565, and by evidence that their house in Edinburgh was sometimes used for banquets[35] or for the entertainment of noble guests. William later became secretary to Queen Anne, and as assistant to Sir Patrick Lesley was chief contriver of the celebration at Prince Henry's baptism[36] (July 16, 1594), an account of which he afterward published. He went to England in the Queen's service, and held his secretaryship until 1612, when he was succeeded by Sir Robert Aytoun.[37] The mother of William Drummond of Hawthornden was Fowler's sister, and his father was also of the court as one of the King's gentlemen ushers.[38] In Scotland, and later in England, the young poet must have ​seen much of his uncle, and may have been led to the pursuit of literature by his influence. Fowler's verse,[39] together with the shorter poems of Montgomerie, came into the possession of Drummond and was preserved in his library.

Henry Locke, the last of the prefatory sonneteers, was a poet of slightly greater prominence. Bodenham, for his quotations from Locke in Belvedére, probably used the volume of friendly and devotional sonnets "by H. L. Gentleman" 2 which was licensed for publication in 1593, and issued again in 1597 with a number of scriptural paraphrases under the title of "Ecclesiastes, otherwise called The Preacher — Whereunto are annexed sundrie sonets of a feeling conscience of the same authors." Dr. Grosart, in his reprint of a part of this volume, 3 includes the sonnet printed in the Exercises at vacant houres (wrongly referred to as The Essayes of a Prentise) and if in his introductory biography he had followed up this clue, he might have shown that the greater part of Locke's life was spent as an envoy or political intelligencer. He was engaged in this service as early as i58i, 4 but it was not until ten years later 5 that he was sent to Scotland to help carry out Elizabeth's ingenious and persistent policy of setting Scottish lords against their king. His letters show that his activities continued intermittently until 1602. His intrigues

2 In Bodenham's list of contributors (cf. p. Ivi), Locke, Constable, and Churchyard are the only ones distinguished by the title " Esq."

8 Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies' Library, 1871, Vol. II. The article on Locke in Diet. Nat. Biog. is based chiefly on Grosart's introduction.

  • Cat. S. P. For., 1580-1581.

5 Cal. Hatfield MSS., Pt. IV, p. in, R. Douglas to A. Douglas, May 18, 1591 : Locke "has been in these parts . . . half a year and more . . . and his majesty and the queen have conceived no little opinion of his honest behavior, so that they would willingly employ him in their service." Cf. Cal. S. P. Sco., for Locke's correspondence between May, 1591, and February, 1602. ​with Bothwell and with the latter's fellow-plotter, John Colville—who nearly always addresses Locke as "beloved brother"—sufficiently explain his loss of employment after 1603, and his vain appeals to Cecil from Gatehouse and the Clink.

It is not perhaps too much to assume that the men whose lives have been outlined—at least Montgomerie, Fowler, and the Hudsons—were among the King's most intimate companions in his youth. He matured early, and was busy in statecraft and intrigue before most young noblemen of his age were free from their tutors and about the court. The nobility who surrounded him were not only older, but raw and reckless, involved in feuds among themselves and in "bands" against the crown. Scarcely one of them could be fully trusted. But the members of his household he had known from childhood, and while they were his servants and likely to treat him with deference, James was not one who let rank stand in the way of familiarity. Though The Essayes of a Prentise appeared without his name on the title-page, its authorship was obvious, and we should expect it to have been welcomed by a more impressive array of sonneteers, if James could have found noblemen willing to humor his literary bent or capable of penning a sonnet, and if he had not wished to give his fellow-experimenters an opportunity to see themselves in print.

Not much, to be sure, can be said for the characters of these literary friends. Most of them were capable of playing a double part and turning their friendship to profit. But they were men of culture and travel, who could bring the King in touch with England and the Continent. Several of them were envoys either of the King or of foreign powers, and the circumstance helps to explain the rapidity with which literary tendencies passed from one country to another in this period. It is clear, also, that scholarship was considered a key to royal favor. Foreign governments recognized this in their choice of representatives; such men as Du Bartas, Sir Edward and Sir Henry Wotton, Sir Robert Sidney, Constable, and Locke, all of whom visited Scotland, ​may well have been selected with an eye to the King's tastes. The King's Scottish favorites were men of culture. Lennox, the earliest, was a courtier of polish and address. The Maitlands, father and sons, were possessed of literary talents rare enough in the Scotland of that day. Sir James, the Chancellor, "had intellect," writes Mr. Lang, "which [to the nobles] was intolerable."[40] The Master of Gray was a Latin poet and friend of Sidney. Even Arran, whom the King liked though he did not trust, was a scholar and man of parts, though a rascal. "Avec du grec," wrote Hunsdon, "on ne peut gâter rien."[41]

The King's time in these years, according to Colville, was divided between hunting and poetry, "in one or both of which he commonly spendeth the day." 3 One can imagine far less profitable occupations in rainy weather and on winter nights around the fire. James, it is true, was not much of a poet, nor could he have been if he had had friends who were more capable of leading the way, but he had at least the quick and fertile mind of a good talker. At his meals, writes Walton later, there were "deep discourses" and "friendly disputes." 4 Sir John Harington pleased him as "a merry blade," but also for his fund of "learned discourse." 5 When James left Scotland in the hands of the Presbyterian clergy, the beginnings of the new poetry were soon lost in the concentration of interest in a sincere but unlovely religion, and verse was left for recluses such as Drummond or Scotsmen in the English court. The throne of the latter country might have been ascended, on the death of Glorianna, by a monarch less auspicious for literature than James I. And if, as Dr. McCrie has somewhere suggested, a proper fate would have been to force the King to live by his sonnets, he would have fared very badly in seventeenth-century Scotland.

Letters, Bann. Club, p. 316.

Life of Donne, ed. 1901, p. 207. Nugæ Antiquæ, ed. Park, p. 391.

  1. ↑ Diary, p. 174.
  2. ↑ 1616 Folio, pp. 1-79.
  3. ↑ For full titles, dates, etc., cf. Dickson and Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing, Cambridge, 1890.
  4. ↑ Du Bartas was in London, May 7, and arrived in Scotland about the 25th (Cal. Hatfield MSS., Pt. Ill, pp. 253, 260).
  5. ↑ James's translation of L'Uranie, ou Muse Celeste of Du Bartas, Il. 116-130 (Essayes of a Prentise).
  6. ↑ Warner, Library of James VI, p. xliii.
  7. ↑ Hudson's translation was published at Edinburgh in 1584. It is included also in the 1608 and later editions of Sylvester.
  8. ↑ J. Melville's Diary, p. 170.
  9. ↑ Extracts from the Despatches of M. Courcelles, Bann. Club, p. 80.
  10. ↑ Printed also as a separate leaflet of 14 pages, La Lepanthe de Jaques I, Walde-grave, Edinburgh, 1591.
  11. ↑ Cf. note on the Amatoria, pp. 69-71.
  12. ↑ Col. Hatfield MSS., Pt. Ill, p. 438.
  13. ↑ Collier, Annals of the Stage, Vol. I, p. 290.
  14. ↑ Cal. Hatfield MSS., Pt. III, p. 442.
  15. ↑ Diana: Sonnets and other Poems of Henry Constable, ed. W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1859, pp. 33-35.
  16. ↑ The original authorship of the sonnet must be conceded to Constable, since it is an integral part of the series of nine "arguments" of seven sonnets each into which the Diana sequence is divided, and since it occurs in the Todd MS. of 1590 and among the twenty-three sonnets of the first edition of 1592. Montgomerie's version is a re-working of Constable's in the Scottish dialect, with the object, perhaps, as Brotanek suggests, of avoiding the rhyme-in-terms (come-become) which the Reulis and cautelis condemns, and which occurs but once in Montgomerie's poems. Cf. Brotanek's study of Montgomerie, Wiener Beiträge, Vol. III.
  17. ↑ Cal. S. P. Sco., p. 702.
  18. ↑ Ibid., pp. 773, 776.
  19. ↑ Ibid., pp. 781, 784.
  20. ↑ Dict. Nat. Biog., under Constable.
  21. ↑ Cal. S. P. Venetian, 1603-1605, No. 213.
  22. ↑ Ibid., No. 259.
  23. ↑ Sonnet LXV, S. T. S. edition. Cf. also James's "William Mow," LI, 112, and note.
  24. ↑ For evidence of their nationality, cf. XXVI, 4, and note.
  25. ↑ G. Chalmers, Life of Mary Queen of Scots, Philadelphia, 1822, p. 135.
  26. ↑ James Hudson was recommended to Elizabeth by the King in a letter dated April 24, 1583 (S. P. Sco.), and from this time on was employed as an agent and correspondent either of James or Cecil. The Venetian Secretary speaks of him as the King's "Envoy in Ordinary" in London. (S. P. Ven., April 24, 1603). He was afterward appointed a groom of the chamber with a pension of 120 (Record Office, Docquets, April 1, 1604).
  27. ↑ Papers relative to the Marriage of King James, Bann. Club, App. II, p. 33.
  28. ↑ Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, Vol. III, pp. 489, 563.
  29. ↑ Temple Dramatists edition, London, 1905, I, ii, ll. 56, 147-155. The editor follows W. C. Hazlitt in describing Locke and Hudson as "satirists of the time ... the Bavius and Mævius of that age." They were poetæ minimi, but not satirists.
  30. ↑ This, with Robert's epitaph and other sonnets probably of the same authorship, is in Pinkerton's Ancient Scottish Poems, Vol. II, p. 350 ff.
  31. ↑ "At your owne commandement enterprised, corrected by your Maiest. owne hande, and dedicated to your owne Highnesse."—Epistle dedicatorie.
  32. ↑ For a description of the MS., cf. XXLX, note.
  33. ↑ Cf. p. xxxi, note.
  34. ↑ Tytler, History of Scotland, ed. 1866, Vol. VIII, p. 127.
  35. ↑ Cal. S. P. Sco., May 22, 1589.
  36. ↑ Letters of Colville, Bann. Club, p. 112. For reference to the description of the ceremonies, cf. LIV, 48, note.
  37. ↑ Cf. p. Ixxiv. According to Masson (William Drummond of Hawthornden, London, 1873, p. 31), Fowler died in 1614. For the attempts of Donne to secure the reversion of his office, cf. p. lxv.
  38. ↑ Nichols, Progresses of James, Vol. II, p. 263, inserts an order on the town of Southampton for royal guards, presented by Sir John Drummond, Gentleman Usher, August 4, 1609.
  39. ↑ Two sonnets by Fowler and a number of his letters are found in Nichols, Progresses, Vol. I, pp. 251, 261, etc. The verses have the headings, Sonnet uppon a Horloge of the Clock at Sir George More's, 1603, and To Lady Arabella Stuart. Fowler's letters to the Earl and Lady Shrewsbury indicate continued devotion to the Lennox family and a hand in the Lady Arabella's match-making, but not, as Disraeli (quoted by Nichols) supposes, a desire to present himself to the King's cousin as a suitor.
  40. ↑ History of Scotland, Vol. II, p. 345.
  41. ↑ Letter to Burleigh, ibid., p. 309.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=New_Poems_by_James_I/Other_Poets_in_the_Scottish_Court,_1584-1603&oldid=13052672"