George Buchanan, tutor to James VI

A tutor's revenge on power is rarely loud. It is not the rod laid across the royal palm, nor the cold Latin correction in front of the household. It is the book the tutor writes while the pupil is still a boy, dedicates to him in roman capitals, and sends out into the world so that the argument waits on every shelf the king will ever stand near. The tutor knows he will not live to see the reign. He writes for the reign anyway.

THE OLD HUMANIST AT STIRLING

George Buchanan of Killearn came to the schoolroom of King James VI in his sixties and stayed until the boy was thirteen. By then he had been almost everything a Latinist could be in northern Europe. Student at St Andrews, regent at Sainte-Barbe in Paris, tried by the Inquisition at Coimbra, Principal of St Leonard's College, Moderator of the General Assembly of the Kirk, tutor in Latin verse to Mary Stewart when she was a French dauphine learning to scan Horace. He had outlived his protectors and his enemies in roughly equal numbers. He had seen one queen abdicate, one regent shot down at Linlithgow, two more buried, and a fourth, Morton, beginning his slow descent toward the Maiden. None of it had altered his conviction that a kingdom was a thing held in trust, and that the trustee could be called to account. He had been writing the proof of that conviction, in dialogue, for twelve years.

THE SCHOOLROOM IN THE KING'S OLD BUILDING

The light in the upper room of the King's Old Building came in late from the north, thin and grey across the oak desk. It was the spring of 1579. The boy at the desk was thirteen, small for his age, with the long Stewart face and a slight tremor in the left hand that Buchanan had noted in his ledger and never mentioned. The week's exercises lay stacked: fourteen passages of Cicero turned out of Latin and back into it, the Pro Murena set for memory and twice failed, a page of Plutarch in Greek with the accents corrected in the tutor's hand. On the lectern, separate from the boy's work, lay the corrected proof of De Jure Regni apud Scotos, six quires bound loosely in vellum, the dedication page uppermost. Outside the window the wind moved over the carse. Below in the courtyard a groom was leading a horse across the cobbles and the iron of the shoes carried up.

A SECOND OF TIME IN THE SCHOOLROOM

Buchanan stood at the lectern with the proof under his hand and considered the dedication. He was seventy-three. The regents would send him home to Killearn within the year and he would be dead inside three. The boy, by the arithmetic any Scot at court could do in his head, would in this generation inherit the throne of England as well as the throne of Scotland; the English crown was at the end of his life what the Scottish crown was at the beginning, and the woman who held it now had been told from infancy that a prince answers to no court but the heavenly. The boy at the desk would be told the same as soon as the schoolroom door closed behind his tutor for the last time. The court of Lennox and the court of Arran were already framing the doctrine in the boy's hearing, in softer Latin than Buchanan's, with no rod and no failed Pro Murena. There was, in the whole apparatus surrounding the king of Scots, one man left to put the contrary case, and a window of perhaps two years in which to put it. He could publish the dialogue without the dedication and let it find its own readers in Geneva and Heidelberg and the Low Countries. He could publish it with a dedication to one of the Hamiltons, or to Knox's heirs, and keep the boy out of it. Or he could put the boy's name on the front, in roman capitals, and bind the argument to him for life. He was not asking the boy to agree. He was asking the boy to know that the argument was in the field, and that every absolutist clerk who came to court for the next forty years would have to step over it to reach the throne. He took the quill, dipped it, and put a tick at the foot of the dedication page.

THE BOOK GOES DOWN TO EDINBURGH

The proof went by the evening post to John Davidson's press at Edinburgh. De Jure Regni apud Scotos, Dialogus, Authore Georgio Buchanano Scoto was published in the autumn of 1579, dedicated Iacobo VI Scotorum Regi. The dialogue ran between Buchananus and Thomas Maitland of Lethington, dead seven years and unable to object to the use of his name. The argument was set out in clean humanist Latin: kings are made by the people for the people's good; the law stands above the king; a tyrant may be resisted, deposed, in extremity put to death by the community he was raised to serve. The book sold quickly. It was reprinted at Edinburgh, then at Frankfurt, then at La Rochelle. The Catholic League read it. The Huguenots read it. The States of Holland read it. In 1584 the Vatican placed it on the Index, where it remained for three centuries. In 1584 also the Scottish Parliament, on the petition of the now adult king, ordered every owner of a copy to surrender it for correction; few did.

THE PUPIL ANSWERS

Buchanan died in his lodging off the Cowgate on the twenty-eighth of September 1582, in his seventy-sixth year. By the testimony of his servant, Andrew Wilson, he had four shillings in the house at the end and the landlord paid for the grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard. The pupil, by then sixteen and ruling in his own name, did not attend. He spent the next decade composing his reply. The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, printed at Edinburgh in 1598, set out the contrary doctrine in plain Scots: that kings are God's lieutenants on earth, that the people may not call them to account, that to resist the anointed prince is to resist the Almighty. The two books, tutor's and pupil's, became the contesting Scottish texts on monarchy for a century. James never named Buchanan in The Trew Law. He did not need to. Every educated reader in Scotland knew which dialogue the king was answering, page for page, into the small hours at Holyrood. By the recollection of one of his English secretaries, the king said in 1607 to a young Scots advocate newly come south, they gar me yet imagine I see old Buchanan, and tremble at his approach. He was forty-one and had not seen his tutor in twenty-five years.

THE MARGINAL NOTE

The argument the old man had set in the field outlived both of them. In 1648, before the High Court of Justice in Westminster Hall, John Bradshaw cited Buchanan in his closing address against Charles Stuart, the pupil's son. The judgment of the court followed Buchanan's logic almost to the letter: a king is a trustee, the trust may be broken, the breach may be answered with the trustee's life. In Scotland the dialogue went on being read, in covenanting manses and at the Edinburgh bar, through the Killing Time and beyond. The first edition of De Jure Regni apud Scotos, in the bookplated copy long believed to have stood on the king's shelf at Stirling, passed to the National Library of Scotland at its foundation in 1925. On a catalogue cross-check in 2014 a Latinist running a finger down the inner margin of page forty-seven found two words in a careful italic hand, the ink browned, the letters narrow and slightly tremulous: non sequitur. The hand has been judged to be the king's, written when he was about eighteen. The pupil had been answering the tutor in the margins, in Latin, alone.

CODA

The great hour for a teacher comes not when the lesson is given but when the lesson is dedicated, signed, and sent out past the lifetime of the teacher and into the lifetime of the pupil and the pupil's heirs. Most teachers let it pass. Buchanan, white-haired at the lectern in the upper room of the King's Old Building, with the boy three feet from him at the oak desk and the corrected proof under his hand, did not. The dialogue is in the case at George IV Bridge, in vellum, open at page forty-seven, with two words in the king's hand in the margin.