George Buchanan(1506–1582)

George Buchanan was born at The Moss near Killearn in southern Stirlingshire on the first of February 1506, fifth of the eight children of a small Stirlingshire laird's family. His father died young and his uncle James Heriot paid for him to read arts at Paris from 1520 to 1522. He returned to Scotland on his uncle's death, served in the auld-alliance Scots forces in the Borders campaign of 1523, took his BA at St Andrews under John Mair in 1525, and crossed back to France in 1526 to teach at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe in Paris and then at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux from 1539, where one of his pupils was the boy Michel de Montaigne.

He built his European reputation as a Latinist on the four Latin tragedies he wrote at Bordeaux in the 1540s (Jephthes, Baptistes, Medea and Alcestis), and on the Latin verse paraphrase of the Psalms, the Psalmorum Davidis Paraphrasis Poetica, published in Paris in 1565, which ran through some hundred and twenty editions across Europe by 1700 and was on every Latin grammar-school curriculum from Bergen to Naples for the next two centuries. Henri Estienne the Paris Hellenist judged him the leading Latin poet of the age.

He returned to Scotland in 1561 in his fifty-fifth year on the personal request of Mary Queen of Scots, who appointed him classical tutor to her court and named him Principal of St Leonard's College, St Andrews, in 1566. After the political crisis of 1567 he took the Reformer side, served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland in 1567, was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal in 1570, and from 1570 to 1578 was the personal tutor of the boy King James VI at Stirling Castle, conducting him through the entire Latin classical syllabus from Aesop to Tacitus. The discipline was severe (James said in adulthood that the trembling Buchanan put into him at Stirling never left him) and the education was the most rigorous given to any sixteenth-century European prince; James VI's later command of Latin was the basis of the cultural prestige of the Stuart court at London after 1603.

In 1579, in his seventy-third year, he published the political treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos, the dialogue on the constitutional rights of the Scottish kingdom, in which he set out the doctrine that the king of Scots held his authority from the consent of the political community and that the community retained the right to depose a tyrant. The doctrine was the foundational text of Scottish and English constitutional resistance theory for the next century; the work was placed on the Roman Index in 1584 and burnt at Oxford in 1683 by order of Charles II, both of which extended its reputation. He completed his Rerum Scoticarum Historia, the great Latin history of Scotland, on his death-bed and died at Edinburgh on the twenty-eighth of September 1582 in his seventy-seventh year. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The Buchanan name in modern Scottish letters carries the weight of the European-Latinist Renaissance reputation and the Stirling tutorship that made James VI the most learned king of his century.