Clan Buchanan · 1579
George Buchanan, tutor to James VI
From 1570 until 1578 the most distinguished Latinist in northern Europe, George Buchanan of Killearn, in his sixties, scholar of St Andrews and Bordeaux and Coimbra, formerly Principal of St Leonard's College, formerly Moderator of the General Assembly, formerly tutor to Mary Queen of Scots when she was a French princess, was the daily tutor of King James VI of Scotland in the schoolroom at Stirling Castle, where the boy-king (orphaned, abdicated for, four years old at the start of the lessons) was being raised under the regents Lennox, Mar and Morton. Buchanan beat the boy. He drilled him in Cicero, Livy, Horace and Plutarch. He drilled him in Greek. He drilled him in the *De Officiis*. And in 1579, when James was thirteen and the lessons were drawing to a close, Buchanan published the political treatise *De Jure Regni apud Scotos*, on the law of kingship among the Scots, in dialogue form, which argued that kings were created by their people and accountable to them and could be deposed by them in extremity. He dedicated the book to his pupil. James spent the rest of his life writing answers to it. The dedication was, by every careful Scottish biographer of either man, the deliberate ground-laying of an argument the boy was meant to have to live with.
It is the late afternoon of an unrecorded day in the spring of 1579, in the upper schoolroom of the King's Old Building at Stirling Castle, in low light through the north window. He is seventy-three years old. He is George Buchanan of Killearn, honoratissimus of the University of Coimbra, Principal Emeritus of St Leonard's College, formerly tutor to Mary Stewart in the French court of 1547, presently the tutor of the boy-king of Scots, James VI, who is sitting at the oak desk three feet from him with a Latin grammar open and his fourteenth Cicero translation of the week underneath.
On the lectern in front of Buchanan is the corrected proof of De Jure Regni apud Scotos. The book is in Latin, in dialogue between Buchananus and Maitland, on the right of resistance to a king. The argument runs to seven thousand words. The dedication, on the front page in roman capitals, is to Iacobo Sexto, Scotorum Regi, James the Sixth, King of Scots.
James, who is thirteen and has been in tears twice this week under Buchanan's hand for not having committed Pro Murena to memory, is kneeling on the bench of the desk and looking at the proof.
He thinks: the boy will, in this generation, take the throne of England as well as the throne of Scotland. The English crown is at the end of his life what the Scottish crown is at the beginning.
He thinks: the English crown is held by an absolutist queen. The Scottish crown will be held by a boy who has been told by his court that the king is the body of God on earth. The boy will, on the day he is told this, be answerable to no court except the heavenly.
He thinks: the only person who is going to put it to him that he is not in fact answerable to no court is me, and the only window in which I am going to be able to put it to him is the next two years before the regents send me home to Killearn to die.
He thinks: I will dedicate the book to the boy. The book will go to him on his accession at fifteen. The book will go to every Scottish lord and Edinburgh advocate. The boy will spend the rest of his life answering it.
He thinks: I am not asking the boy to agree. I am asking the boy to know that the argument is in the field.
He turns the proof to the dedication page. He reads it aloud, in Latin, in his unbeating teacher's voice: Iacobo Sexto, Scotorum Regi, oeuvre paedagogi sui, Georgi Buchanani, dedicatum. He puts a ink-tick at the bottom of the dedication. He sends the proof down to the printer in Edinburgh by the evening post.
De Jure Regni apud Scotos was published at Edinburgh by Robert Lekprevik in October 1579, dedicated to James VI. The treatise was an immediate political shock-text in Calvinist Europe. The Catholic League used it; the Huguenots used it; the Dutch used it. The English Parliament used it sixty years later, in 1648, in the run-up to the trial of Charles I; the leading regicide, Bradshaw, quoted Buchanan twice in his closing argument. The book was placed on the Index by the Vatican in 1584 and remained there for three centuries. James VI, who became James I of England in 1603, wrote his own treatise on kingship, The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), in direct counter-argument to Buchanan's. The two books were, for the next century, the contesting Scottish texts on the political philosophy of monarchy. By the tradition of the Edinburgh advocate generation that followed, James told a young Scots advocate at his English court in 1607: I had Buchanan for a master and I have not got him out of my head yet.
Buchanan died at his lodging in Edinburgh on the twenty-eighth of September 1582, three years after the publication of De Jure Regni. He was, at his death, by the testimony of his servant, almost destitute; the lodging-keeper paid for the burial. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The first edition of De Jure Regni apud Scotos, in the bookplated copy that James VI is believed to have owned at Stirling Castle, was the property of the National Library of Scotland from its foundation in 1925; in 2014, on a routine catalogue cross-check, a marginal note in James's hand was identified on page 47, in Latin: non sequitur. The note is, by the careful judgement of two Latinists, in the king's hand at about the age of eighteen. The argument the tutor had set was being answered.