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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture,
1550–1650
Arthur Williamson
California State University, Sacramento
Abstract
Scottish people during this period did not seek to discover their “identity,” which
we, as post-Romantics in a period of reaction, instinctively would expect today.
Instead, many of them developed highly articulated notions of civic society and
sought to realize them in a new and radical Britain. This projected Britain would
provide a model for world renewal. Further, civic society was imagined as intensely
anti-imperial. It constituted the direct opposite of the Hapsburg-papal universal
monarchy. At the same time it was not an order to be imposed on some putatively
inferior “other,” but a universal (and soteriological) transformation involving
everyone.
The signal geo-political event of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries was the emergence of the great Spanish and Portuguese empires,
the first empires ever genuinely on a global scale. Breath-takingly gigantic
and utterly unprecedented, they operated within the realm of grace no less
than within the realm of nature, and were preoccupied with salvation no
less than dominion – indeed with the historical redemption, prophecy, and
eschatology rather more than mere rulership. The people of Spain and more
generally of the peninsula had received the gift of “election,” an act of divine
favor that endowed them with a special destiny in what were perceived as
being the latter days of the world. The expanding Spanish kingdom promised
to be nothing less than Daniel’s prophesied Fifth Monarchy, the final world
order that presaged the return of the savior. The blind Jews would be
converted at last to the true faith; the “fulness” of the gentiles would be
called. Jerusalem would be retaken, the holy sepulture recovered. Roman
Catholicism would be propagated throughout the world which would be
governed by this messianic empire. The spectacular success of Hapsburg
power in the New World, Europe,Africa, and Asia created the world’s first
superstate, and gave such expectations considerable plausibility. Very similar
ideas developed in contemporaneous Portugal, the self-proclaimed “Ensign
of Christ,” which also created an empire of global proportions. Perhaps
surprisingly, the two empires enjoyed a relationship more symbiotic than
conflicted, and between 1580 and 1640 the two comprised a single gigantic
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state. Such fulsome mottos as Non sufficit orbis (the world is not enough)
could only seem appropriate.1
The Iberian phenomenon exercised the European imagination far more
than is commonly recognized. In the Anglophone countries quite varied
reflection occurred, involving figures such as John Mair, George Buchanan,
John Knox, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe,Andrew
Melville, as well as a great many less well known individuals. For many
during this period the central issue became the polarity between universal
empire and civic culture, both of which were seen as spiritual undertakings,
intimately concerned with redemption. The confessional conflict frequently
and perhaps characteristically resolved itself into just such a confrontation.
This dimension of the early modern period has been largely obscured by
contemporary revisionist and post-colonial historiography. Arising in the
late 1970s the new historiography has shown itself deeply distrustful of almost
all forms of political ideology, and has instead found itself preoccupied with
post-Romantic “identity,” and with what might be termed “images of
blood”: nation, ethnicity, race, family, and gender. Such categories enjoined
qualitative differences between people, inherently stressed the private and
the particular, and developed an arrestingly shrill rhetoric of victimization.
Hegemonic power structures, notably in England and to a lesser extent in
Scotland, it is argued, developed denigrating, ultimately racial caricatures of
the peoples they sought to dominate and thereby legitimated their violence
and exploitation. Concomitantly, the new historiography has discounted
public life and notions of universal reason, and envisioned all social
constructions as corrosive impositions enforced upon a prior authenticity.2
Francophone and, still more, Anglophone experiences have become the
normative measure of European colonialism, while British and French
radicalism has been dismissed and distorted. The vast privatization within
Western society since the 1970s has brought with it a privatizing of the
character of historical cognition. Early modern Scotland will illuminate the
imperial/anti-imperial cultural antimony and delineate the more telling
implications of these regnant historical approaches.
I
The Scottish poet and political theorist George Buchanan (1506–82) proved
to be the most influential and probably the most determined anti-imperialist
of the sixteenth century. Buchanan drew heavily on the political thought
of the Italian Renaissance, had seen city republics from Naples to Florence
to Ghent fall before the Hapsburgs, and by 1550 became convinced that
empire was incompatible with civic life. Only the citizen fully realized his
humanity; only the republic allowed for that to happen. The great republics
of antiquity, notably Athens and Rome, provided the models for human
society. The destroyers of the polis – Xerxes, Philip of Macedonia,Alexander
the Great (“the world’s most famous robber”), Sulla, the Roman emperors,
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and, above all, Julius Caesar – had been the great enemies of mankind. The
legendary Codrus who sacrificed himself for the Athenian republic served
as the anti-type to Caesar who sacrificed the Roman republic for himself.
Brutus emerged as a republican hero, an exemplar of civic virtue.3 His act
of tyrannicide manifested a severe Stoic morality and comprised an act of
piety. Buchanan’s reading of it looked to the recent past and the Brutus cult
of early sixteenth-century Italy. No less did it look to the future and a
Calvinist civil religion that would become integral to the Atlantic republican
tradition.4
The modern empires, massive congeries ruled through hierarchy,
dominated by “perverse” sodomite clergy, dependent on unstable commerce,
comprised the antithesis of human purpose, the utter inversion of
righteousness. Far more grotesque and unnatural than even the cannibals of
Brazil, the new superstates had “stirred misery and tumult into the peace
of the world”; they imposed “a shameful servitude” on the inhabitants of
the Americas; they had proven a catastrophe for humanity.5 Buchanan
emphatically repudiated all their cultural underpinnings: their racial claims,
their spiritual mission, and their eschatology. By rejecting all forms of
prophecy (the papacy was a “sacrilegious Judas” rather than the prophesied
Antichrist), he challenged their vision. By attacking clerical corruption
(sodomy with the choir boys), he undermined their mission. By impugning
their genealogy (Charles V was half Moorish), he inverted their
preoccupation with “pure” and “clean” blood.
During the 1550s Buchanan and many Europeans looked to Valois France
as the great counter-empire, the great defender of European liberty against
monstrous aggression. Along with other Scots, he hoped for an emergent
Franco-Britannia that protected local privilege and that, under its wings,
both enabled political societies and replaced repressive orthodoxy with some
sort of broad-gauged religious accommodation. Not everyone, and certainly
not all Scots, agreed with him. There existed a third option, if an initially
less plausible one: not Franco-Britannia but simple Britannia. The English
kingdom – revitalized and redefined by Thomas Cromwell, Thomas
Cranmer, and Henry Tudor in the 1530s, and then radicalized during the
brief reignwas disarmed through a footnote pointing out the
unenlightened times in which it was written.69 Printed in the midst of a
genuinely British struggle with partisans on both sides of the frontier, no
one gave the poem an anti-English reading.“Blood” could be a legitimate
category, if at all, only when subsumed within larger public purposes. When
civic Scots did appeal to kindreds, these were imagined as the northern
counterparts to such patriot dynasties as the Fabii, the Scipiones, and, we
might add, the Alberti.
But radical Britain not only rejected primitive tribal racism. It also rejected
the philosophical racism of the Hispanophiles John Mair (1467–1550) and
his successor in significant ways James VI. The latter figures regarded the
Amerindians as Aristotle’s natural slaves, and both of them redirected this
projection onto the Gaelic world.70 Neither form of racism, whether they
assumed defensive or aggressive postures, sat well with the Scottish civic
tradition.
Nor were the long-standing European commonplaces about nation,
civility, and barbarism more compatible with British radicalism. For Mary
of Guise, the ruler and regent of Scotland from 1548 to 1560, lowland Scots
were “ung people nourveau” and hard enough to bring to law-abiding
“perfection.” But the Gaelic Irish and their ill-affected Highland mercenaries
were simply “les sauvages.” The French elites agreed with Mary Tudor, if
on nothing else, in her view of “those light savage people.”71 Irish refugees
coming to France during the first decade of the seventeenth century were
utterly rejected as unskilled, uncouth, and idle “gueux,” who brought only
disorder and disease. Likened to Gypsies and other undesirables, the Irish
could not even be exported to the colonies because they were “inutile” and
“ne save et ne veullent travailler.” In Pol-de-Léon the authorities even listed
the Irish after dogs and swine in their interdicts. The only recourse was
expulsion and repatriation.72 Primitivism, not Catholicism, mattered. The
French authorities did not regard the Irish as religious refugees, and they
were right not to do so. For, significantly, the immigrants were responding
to the economic dislocation of the Nine Years War rather than religious
persecution.73 The British agenda had different priorities.
In the much more racially charged world of Philip II’s global empire, the
Irish fared little better. Even as the bitter war with England and the
Netherlands deepened, Ireland appeared to many Spaniards as no more than
a potential “pawn” which might be traded for places in the Netherlands
held by English forces. Philip’s investment in Ireland would be limited.
Neglect of Tyrone’s rising, Geoffrey Parker suggests, possibly ranks as the
“greatest lost strategic opportunity of the 1590s.” However that may be,
the circumstance speaks volumes about Hapsburg priorities and attitudes, as
well as the high cost of ethnic contempt.74 In the end the British are likely
to have gotten further away from long-standing, universal stereotypes and
developed far more reflective views of traditional Ireland than did their
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 113
continental contemporaries.75 The thinking of Buchanan, Melville, and
Hume – and of their English analogues – encourages this expectation and
runs manifestly counter the massive Irish Leidensgeschichte of the past four
decades.
If Counter-Reformed France and Counter-Reformed Spain drew on
and developed long-standing archetypes of primitivism, archetypes that were
in no way British concoctions, so too did Counter-Reformation Germany.
Catholic publicists greeted Sweden’s intervention into the Thirty Years War
in 1630 with thoroughly nasty caricatures of sylvan Lapps, Livonians, and
Scots sweeping down out of the north to rape and pillage. Verses under the
caricatures described these exotic and alien peoples (wunderslezmen Vöckher)
as hardy and swift, yet they “run away on even ground” (i.e., once out the
mountains). The Scots in particular are said to “hide [like] children within
the brush and hedges.”76 The caricatures seemingly met with success and
variants continued to appear throughout the Swedish phase of the
conflict. Another variant shows an Ihrländer and a Schotländer as brutal
comrades in arms. Baroque Germany did not distinguish between Irish and
Scots Gaels, but their portrayal will be recognizable: the Ihrländer can “run
very well without falling into a bog.”77 The Schotländer, his Lowland
companion, stays “fresh” (i.e., unfrozen) even under falling snow. With
both we encountered well-worn commonplaces – altogether bog-common
– now directed against the enemies of civilization, the Protestant primitives.
We have clearly entered a different mental universe when Hume argued
for British union by saying “I do not disparage the individual of any people
whatsoever. I would wish that others would refrain from extolling themselves
too much and from denigrating those who are different from them. Mindful
of justice and humanity [recti et humanitatis memores], rather let, one with
another, strive in temperate and righteous conduct.”78 Hume was appealing
to an audience of Scots and English Protestants. Yet his remarks obviously
and intentionally carry universal implications. Far from developing Europe’s
cultural stereotypes, the Scottish civic tradition would prove an important
element in their eventual eradication – or in the shaping the great efforts
that sought to do so. Early modern civic society comprised a religious
structure concerned with salvation, but it also was inextricably politicizing
and communalizing, profoundly public. It spiritualized activism as opposed
to simple obedience. It confronted its imperial rival, accordingly, within
terms at once religious, political, and cultural. Small wonder the prospect
on both sides seemed to be, quite literally, apocalyptic.
VII
Radical Britain has become obscured because its civic ideals are today in
decline. When public life ceases to carry conviction, the origins of public
life will cease to stimulate historical interest. Other questions will seem more
pressing and more cogent. Still, just these values and aspirations consumed
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significant numbers of early modern people and crucially in Scotland. These
triumphed in the British Revolutions and in their eighteenth-century
successors, events by no means inevitable, though not in the least accidental
or fortuitous.
But more is at stake. Some questions foreclose others. The lines of inquiry
considered here directly challenge and subvert probably the most cherished,
prominent, and vocal preoccupation of the past decades, “identity,” what
Richard Wolin has called “the anti-politics of cultural self-affirmation.”79
The intellectual sources of “identity” – whether understood in terms of
race, nation, gender, or any of their variants – lie firmly rooted in the great
critics of the Enlightenment. It is Edmund Burke’s “genius of the nation
philosophically considered,” with its constitution founded on “our dearest
domestic ties” and “family affections.” It is Joseph de Maistre’s recognizing
Frenchmen, Englishmen, and even Persians, but not humanity. It is Johann
Herder’s Volkseele.The European revolutionary tradition enjoins the exact
opposite with Tom Paine and “common sense” in the full range of its
meanings. Anti-Enlightenment historiography invites anachronism rather
more than does its revolutionary competitor because Romanticism, into
which the anti-Enlightenment subsequently issued, marks a more severe
disjuncture from the early modern past. In that earlier period neither mission
nor exclusivity derived from peoplehood, and it is most unlikely that either
“patriots” or the supporters of the last world empire could have understoodthe assumptions of modern nationalism. More telling is an extraordinary
irony: most modern critics of Britain and promoters of “identity” imagine
themselves on the political left, even though the traditions they seek to
uncover, just like the modalities through which their project is pursued,
arise from the founders of the modern right.
The irony appears prominently in one of the larger growth areas of the
new historiography, early modern Ireland. Within its matrices, victimization
and a smothered, yet emerging and coherent identity provide the guiding
themes. There too, civic culture becomes nothing more than an engine of
repression and of the most systematic destruction. Two of the more striking
titles in this genre are Richard Berleth’s The Twilight Lords: Elizabeth I and
the First Irish Holocaust (2002) and Claude Rawson’s God, Gulliver and Genocide
(2001). Some might find serious anachronism implicit in them; still others
might find them morally objectionable.80 Yet these views are hardly more
anachronistic than calling Desmond and Tyrone “freedom-fighters.” Nor
do they differ from describing the story of Ireland in the 1640s as running
from “independence to occupation,” portrayed as a glimmering anticipation
of 1922, when no one at all imagined Ireland as an independent state in the
modern sense – or indeed in any sense.81 Invoking the mid-twentieth-century
experience in this way is not only anachronistic but also has far-reaching
implications for the present age. Surely there was never a greater moment
of “identity politics” than with 1930s fascism. Adolf Hitler’s objection to
trade unions and socialism was not their economic program but their
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 115
internationalism, their Slavic comrades, their hostility to the struggle for the
preservation of German nationality. Herein lay the “incredible national
betrayal.”The new historiography distorts left and right beyond recognition.
Arguably the signal feature of the Buchanan-Hume tradition is its
inclusiveness, its willingness to embrace different social groups and different
peoples rather than any exclusionary imperative – much less any “genocidal”
implications. A British union in 1603 posed a far more difficult problem
than it would have earlier. The growing authoritarianism of the 1590s led
to an intensification of legal thought in both realms, for there now existed
a palpable need to formalize regal power and its limitations. Custom, its
history and underlying principles, assumed ever more importance, and in
both realms there emerged an increasingly rich legal culture as a result –
associated with figures such as Edward Coke and John Selden in England,
Thomas Craig and John Skene in Scotland.82 Once cast in these terms,
however, political union became significantly harder to achieve, at least
potentially. Hume’s unionism avoided the problem by adopting the familiar
if fading civic and moralist vocabulary rather than the language of
jurisprudence. Here were political traditions common to both countries,
and something that anyone might share. Only when imagined in this way
did a unified Britain seem possible. Only within a single country could
Scotland avoid becoming a province. Only within such a single country
would the very real economic and power disparities between the two realms,
so troubling to Englishmen, no longer matter. A common respublica
underwritten by common purposes and common sense rather more than
the claims of blood and royal descent could create Britain. “Mother
Scotland,” Hume insisted, should and would step aside in favor of the great
promise that was Britannia.83 And Britannia – civic, cultured, radical – had
a global mission of liberation and salvation, not through the erection of
empire but the ending of empire.
It is hard to imagine how Buchanan, Melville, and Hume could possibly
fit into the regnant historiography and the paradigms of “identity.” The
problem is of considerable consequence. It is not only historically important
but engages the political and cultural choices of our times.
Notes
1 Other mottos included: “now he [Philip II] will illuminate everything,” or “yet further” (than
the pillars of Hercules, the terminus of the classical world). Selectively within a vast literature: G.
Parker, The World Is Not Enough: The Imperial Vision of Philip II of Spain (Waco, TX., Markham
Press Fund, 2001); Parker, “David or Goliath? Philip II and his world in the 1580s” in Spain,
Europe, and the Atlantic World, ed. R. L. Kagan et al. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 245–66; J. M. Headley,“The Hapsburg world empire and the revival of Ghibellinism,”
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7, 1978, pp. 93–127; Earl Rosenthal, “Plus Ultra, Non Plus Ultra,
and the columnar device of Emperor Charles V,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 34,
1971, pp. 204 –28; M. Tanner, The Last Descendent of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image
of the Emperor (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 223 –36; C. R. Boxer, “Faith and
Empire: The cross and the crown in Portuguese expansion, fifteenth-eighteenth centuries,” Terrae
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Incognitae, 8, 1976, pp. 73 –89; L. F. Thomaz, “Faction, interests, and Messianism . . . Portuguese
expansion in the East, 1500–1521,” Luso-Brazilian Review, 28, 1991, pp. 97–109.
2 A. H. Williamson, Images of Blood: Ethnic Identity and the Destruction of the Left in Europe and
America, 1972–1992 (Sacramento, CSUS Publications, 1995); T. Gitlin, The Twilight of Common
Dreams: Why America is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York, Henry Holt, 1995); R. Wolin, The
Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2004).
3 P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson (eds), George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh,
Scottish History Society, 2000), pp. 84–91; P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson, “Britain, race,
and the Iberian world empire” in The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century, ed. A. I.Macinnes
and J. Ohlmeyer (Dublin, Four Courts, 2002), pp. 70–93.
4 M. Piccolomini, The Brutus Revival: Parricide and Tyrannicide during the Renaissance (Carbondale,
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), pp. 38, 63, 64–5; M. Todd,“Seneca and the Protestant
mind: The influence of Stoicism on Puritan ethics,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 74, 1983,
pp. 182 –200, esp. 189; P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson (eds), The British Union: A Critical
Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godsccroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot,
Ashgate, 2003), pp. 2–6.
5 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry, pp. 11–24, 58–9, 74–83.
6 F. W. Maitland, “The Anglican settlement and the Scottish Reformation” (1903), reprinted in
Selected Historical Essays of F. W. Maitland, ed. Helen Cam (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1957), pp. 152–210. For example, R. A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998). J. E. A. Dawson, “The two John Knoxes: England, Scotland and the
1558 tracts,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 42, 1991, pp. 555–76; R. A. Mason, “Introduction”
in John Knox on Rebellion, ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994),
pp. viii–xxiv.
7 For example, C. Kellar, Scotland, England, and the Reformation, 1534–1561 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2003); K. J. Kesselring, “The rebellion of 1569 in its British context,” paper
present to the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, 24 March 2004. Forty-five years ago
Gordon Donaldson adopted a British approach to the Anglophone reformations that stressed their
common conservative and episcopal character, most notably in The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press,1960).
8 In J. A. H. Murray (ed.), The Complaynt of Scotlande (London, Scottish Text Society, 1872),
p. 241 (Appendix III), pp. 208 –36 (Appendix II); W. Patten, “The expedition into Scotland” in
Tudor Tracts, 1532–1588, ed. A. F. Pollard (New York, Cooper Square, 1964), p. 69.
9 For example, R. A. Mason, “The Reformation and the origins of Anglo-British imperialism”
in Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603, ed. R. A. Mason (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 161–86; D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British
Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 36–8. Diarmaid MacCulloch provides
a clear-sighted view of the creative and defining moment that was Edward’s reign, in Tudor Church
Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, Penguin, 1999).
10 De statu religionis et reipublicae, Carolo Quinto Caesare, commentarii (n.p., 1557), fols. 344r–345v;
(n.p., 1559), fols. 350v–352r. M. Merriman, The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551
(East Linton, Tuckwell, 2000), pp. 277–8. A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the
Age of James VI (Edinburgh, John Donald, 1979), p. 152, n. 44. English unionists such as John
Hayward also appealed to Somerset’s “Epistle”: A Treatise of Union (London, 1604), p. 55.
11 S. Alford,“Knox, Cecil, and the British dimension of the Scottish Reformation” in John Knox
and the British Reformations, ed. Mason, p. 205; Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil
and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 45.
12 Myriam Yardeni, La conscience nationale en France pendant les guerres de religion (1559–1598) (Paris,
Béatrice-Nauwelearts, 1971), pp. 172–3; H. Hauser, Le principe des nationalités: Ses origines historiques
(Paris, Alcan, 1916), p. 18; G. Dupont Ferrier, “Le sens des mots ‘patria’ et ‘patrie’ en France au
moyen age et jusqu’au debout du XVIIe siècle,” Revue historique, 188, 1940, pp. 89–105; C. Wells,
“The language of citizenship in the French religious wars,”The Sixteenth Century Journal, 30 (1999),
pp. 441–56; P. Collinson, “The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John
Rylands Library, 69, 1986–7, pp. 394–424, esp. 407–8; Collinson,“The Elizabethan exclusion crisis
and the Elizabethan polity,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 84, 1994, pp. 51 –92; Alford, Early
Elizabethan Polity, Introduction; S. Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 117
Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 2, 201; Donaldson,
Scottish Reformation, p. 138. A general description appears in McGinnis and Williamson (eds),British
Union, pp. 24–6.
13 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry, p. 160.
14 R. A. Mason and M. S. Smith (eds), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical
Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (Aldershot, Ashgate,
2004), esp. pp. lxii–iii; Mason,“People power? George Buchanan on resistance and the common
man” in Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit. Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung Beiheft 26, ed. R.
von Friedeburg (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2001), pp. 163–81; McGinnis and Williamson (eds),
British Union, pp. 6–7.
15 Many of Buchanan’s ideas found contemporaneous expression in popular verse, perhaps most
notably “ane Declaratioun of the Lordis iust quarrell” as well as in vernacular tracts such as Ane
Discourse Tuiching the Estait Present. Buchanan himself produced at least two vernacular pamphlets
at the time. Much Scottish debate, especially after 1560, was conducted through such verse, whose
significance has never been fully analyzed. See J. Cranstoun (ed.), Satirical Poems of the Time of the
Reformation, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, Scottish Text Society, 1891, 1893), vol. 1, esp. pp. 57–64.
16 Despite his Protestantism, his genuine admiration for John Calvin, and his serving as the
Moderator of the Church of Scotland. Buchanan admitted, bravely, to the Lisbon Inquisition that
he rejected sacred prophecy, while he is also probably the most uncompromising critic of Merlin
(and Galfridian prophecy) which he regarded as outright fraud. See McGinnis and Williamson
(eds), Political Poetry, p. 4. Buchanan’s most reflective and layered discussion of prophecy occurs
in his play The Baptist (written in the 1540s). See A. H. Williamson, “British Israel and Roman
Britain as models of political polity, from George Buchanan to Samuel Rutherford” in Jewish
Christians and Christian Jews in Early Modern Europe, ed. R. H. Popkin and G. M. Wiener (Boston,
Kluwer, 1994), pp. 97–117.
17 Described at length in A. H. Williamson, Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the
Shaping of the Modern World (Westwood, Greenwood-Praeger, forthcoming), chapter 2.
18 John Ireland ( fl. 1483–90), The Meroure of Wyssdome, Composed for the Use of James IV, King of
Scots, AD 1490, ed. C. Macpherson (Edinburgh/London, Scottish Text Society, 1926), vol. 1,
pp. 72–4;William Dunbar (c. 1460–1514),“Lucina schynnyng in silence like the night” in William
Dunbar Poems, ed. J. Kingsley (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 49; D. Calderwood,
History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson (Edinburgh, Wodrow Society, 1842 –49), vol. 1,
p. 136 (Alexander Cunningham, fifth earl of Glencairn, d. 1574); Williamson, Scottish National
Consciousness, chapter 1 (esp. for Knox); PRO: SP 52/17/289 (“The Diallog of the Twa Wyfeis”);
“Ane Admonition to the Antichristian Ministers in the Deformit Kirk of Scotland” in Satirical
Poems of the Time of the Reformation, ed. Cranstoun, vol. 1, pp. 333 –45, at p. 337; M. Bath, “A
guise palace in Edinburgh?” in Renaissance Wall Paintings in Britain, ed. R. Gowing (forthcoming).
My thanks to Professor Bath and to Michael Pearce for sharing these images with me, and to
Professor Bath for sending me a copy of his article in advance of publication.
19 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry, pp. 276–81.
20 A. H. Williamson,“Scotland,Antichrist, and the invention of Great Britain” in New Perspectives
on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland, ed. J. Dwyer et al. (Edinburgh, John Donald,
1982), pp. 34–58, at pp. 42–3;Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, pp. 24, 156–7. Napier’s
seminal A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation had been published in the previous year. The
papacy had encouraged that identification both in the sixteenth century with adoption of imperial
imagery and in the middle ages. Tanner, Last Descendent of Aeneas, p. 309, n. 57. Item eight of the
“Dictatus Papae” (1075) declared that the pope “alone can use imperial insignia.” J. Kirschner
et al. (eds), Readings in Western Civilization 4: Medieval Europe (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1986), p. 142.
21 Tanner, Last Descendent of Aeneas, p. 236; McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry,
pp. 278, 279.
22 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry, pp. 284–97.
23 Translated by I. C. Cummings, National Library of Scotland. Melville’s patriotic geography
grew out of the intellectual environment of St. Andrews University that included the writer on
maritime law, William Welwood. The St. Andrews minister Robert Pont, apocalyptic exegete
and astrologer, was also part of this environment. Pont’s son Timothy would undertake the earliest
systematic mapping of Scotland. C. Withers, “Pont in context: Chorography, map-making and
118 . Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650
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national identity in late sixteenth-century Scotland” in The Nation Survey’d: Timothy Pont’s Maps
of Scotland, ed. I. C. Cunningham (East Linton, Tuckwell, 2001), pp. 148–9.
24 A. Melville, Viri clarissimi A. Melvini Musae . . .  (n.p., 1620),p. 21.
25 A. H. Williamson, “Patterns of British identity: ‘Britain’ and its rivals in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries” in The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715, ed. G.
Burgess (London, I. B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 139–40, 143.
26 J. Guy (ed.),The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1995). R. J. W. Evans has described approximately the same period in central
Europe as a “false dawn.” The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550 –1700 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1979), chapter one.
27 J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments . . . , ed. R. S. Catley, 8 vols. (London, 1837 –41), vol. 1, p. 5; P.
Collinson, “John Knox, the Church of England and the women of England” in John Knox and
the British Reformations, ed.Mason,p. 87;A.H. Williamson,“Latter-day Judah, latter-day Israel: The
millennium, the Jews, and the British future” in Pietismus und Neuzeit 14: Chiliasmus in Deutschland
und England im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. M. Brecht et al. (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988),
pp. 149–65; C. Gribben, The Puritan Millennium: Literature & Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin, Four
Courts, 2000), pp. 54, 97, 106–7, 115, and passim.
28 Williamson, “Latter-day Judah, latter-day Israel”; Williamson, “The Jewish dimension of the
Scottish Apocalypse: Climate, covenant, and world renewal” in Menasseh Ben Israel and His World,
ed. Y. Kaplan et al. (Leiden, Brill, 1988), pp. 7–30.
29 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, pp. 28–30.
30 Daemonologie (1597), p. 81.
31 Counterparts to Napier and Brigthtman abounded on the continent during the early decades
of the seventeenth century: Tobias Hess, Simon Studion, Christoph Besold, J. V. Andreae, David
Pareus, the Rosicrucians among many.
32 J. Pearl, The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France, 1560–1620 (Waterloo, Canada,
Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1999); Wm. Braford Smith, “Friedrich Förner, the Catholic
Reformation and witch-hunting in Bamberg,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 36, 2005, pp. 115–
28, esp. p. 119; M. Roberts, Gustavus Adolphus: A History of Sweden, 1611–1632, 2 vols. (London,
Longmans, 1962 [1953, 1958]), vol. 1, p. 379.
33 M. Wasser, “The Privy Council and the witches: The curtailment of witchcraft prosecutions
in Scotland, 1597–1628,” Scottish Historical Review, 82, 2003, pp. 24–5, 29, 42; Donaldson, Scottish
Reformation, pp. 127, 161– 2, 214 and n. 1; Hume, History of the House of Douglas (Edinburgh,
1644), pp. 320 – 1; Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness, p. 56; Williamson, “Scotland,
Antichrist, and the Invention of Great Britain,” p. 40.
34 Francis Hay, 9th earl of Errol (c. 1566–1631); George Gordon, 6th earl of Huntly (1562–1636).
J. Goodare,“The Aberdeen witch panic of 1597,” Northern Scotland, 21, 2001, pp. 22, 24, 30.
35 Hume, History of the House of Douglas, pp. 418 –19. The high points of seventeenth-century
witch activity occurred in episcopal Scotland during the 1630s and 1660s. The 1649 panic did
take place under the radical Presbyterian regime, but at a moment when Scottish hopes had been
dashed and effective government barely existed. A. I. Macinnes, “The Scottish constitution,
1638–51: The rise and fall of oligarchic centralism” in The Scottish National Covenant in its British
Context, 1638–1651, ed. J. Morrill (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 127.
36 Hume, Poemata omnia (Paris, 1639), p. 11 (in Jacobaea, paginated separately); L. F. Kaster and
H. B. Charlton (eds), The Poetical Works of Sir William Alexander, 2 vols. (Edinburgh/London,
Scottish Text Society, 1921, 1929), vol. 1, pp. x–xi, 2, 289, 390 and passim; Maxwell, Carolanna
(London, n.d.), sig. D33, as well as a number of other poems, in addition to his Admirable and
Notable Prophecies (London, 1615); Gordon,Famous Historie (Dort, 1615), sigs. G4r–G4v. Summarized
by A. H. Williamson, “The problematics of patriotism: Conflict, identity, and British mission,”
a Foreword to Murdoch, Fighting for Identity, pp. xiii–xx.
37 D. H. Willson, “King James I and Anglo-Scottish union” in Conflict in Stuart England,
ed. W. A. Aiken et al. (London, Longmans, 1960), p. 45; A. I. Macinnes, The British Revolution,
1629 –1660 (London, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), pp. 40 –73; Macinnes, “Politically reactionary
Brits?: The promotion of Anglo-Scottish union, 1603–1707” in Kingdom United? Great Britain and
Ireland since 1500, ed. S. J. Connolly (Dublin, Four Courts, 1990), p. 49.
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 119
38 L. A. Ferrell, “The sacred, the profane, and the Union: Politics of the sermon and masque at
the court wedding of Lord and Lady Hay” in Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain,
ed. T. Cogswell et al. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 45–64.
39 Hume, History, p. 427.
40 Willett, Ecclesia Triumphans (Cambridge, 1603), sig. 7v, cited and discussed by B. P. Levack in
The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603 –1707 (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1987), p. 107.
41 R. Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London,Thames and Hudson,
1986). A. H. Williamson,“An empire to end empire: Empire and anti-empire in the dynamic of
early modern British expansion,” Huntington Library Quarterly, forthcoming. Despite Henry’s
extensive interest in geography, colonial endeavors, and the struggle against the Hapsburg empire,
there is only a single reference, in passing, to the prince in N. P. Canny (ed.), The Oxford History
of the British Empire I: The Origins of Empire (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998) .
42 E. R. Samuel, “Portuguese Jews in Jacobean London,” Jewish Historical Society of England, 18,
1953–55, p. 183; C. Roth, History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1964), p. 284; P. McCulloch, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean
Preaching (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 184, 188.
43 Verstegan (originally Rowlands), A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities (Antwerp,
1605);Verstegan had earlier authored Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri (Antwerp, 1588),
a Catholic martyrology designed to counter John Foxe’s great work. C. Highley, “Antiquarians,
Catholics, and Anglo-Scottish union.” My thanks to Dr. Highley for sharing his article with me
in advance of publication. G. Parry, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth
Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 66; C. Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the
Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 153 –4; C. Kidd, British
Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 62 –3, 87; A.
H. Williamson, “‘A pill for pork-eaters’: Ethnic identity, apocalyptic promise, and the strange
creation of the Judeo-Scots” in The Expulsion of the Jews: 1492 and After, ed. R. B. Waddington
and Williamson (New York, Garland, 1994), pp. 245–6.
44 C. Russell, “Composite monarchies in early modern Europe: The British and Irish example”
in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant et al. (London, Routledge,
1995), p. 145.
45 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, pp. 59, 91, 277, 293ff, and passim.
46 Ibid., pp. 176–91, 250–5, 279–83.
47 Ibid., pp. 225–49.
48 Ibid., pp. 41–4, 166–71.
49 See, for example: J. Adamson (ed.), Tα τ5υ μοσ4υ 3ζοδια. The Muses Welcome (Edinburgh,
1618), p. 288, for Scottish attitudes; also M. O’Callaghan, The “shepheards nation”: Jacobean
Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (New York, Oxford University Press,
2000); S. Murdoch,“James VI and the formation of Scottish-British military identity” in Fighting
for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550–1900, ed. S. Murdoch et al. (Leiden, Brill, 2002),
pp. 3 –31;T. Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages underJames VI and I
(Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000). The initial response to the prospect of a British
future may turn out to have been more mixed than commonly recognized.
50 [Overton], A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (1646), in D. M. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes
(New York, Humanities, 1967), p. 123.
51 A. H. Williamson,“Scots, Indians, and empire: The Scottish politics of civilization, 1519–1609,”
Past and Present, 150, 1996, pp. 46–83. The fashionable “post-colonial” reading, proposed notably
by Edward Said, wherein the aborigine is demonized in order to legitimate conquest, simply will
not work for Scotland. It probably will not work for Ireland either. Examples of French and
English concern with the problem of culture and climate occur in M. Wintroub,“Civilizing the
savage and making a king: The royal entry festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550),” The Sixteenth
Century Journal, 29 (2), 1998, pp. 465 –94, and esp. 473, 491; Z. S. Fink, “Milton and the theory
of climatic influence,” Modern Language Quarterly, 2, 1941, pp. 67–80.
52 Mason and Smith (eds), Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots, pp. 4, 5.
53 Buchanan, History of Scotland (Rerum Scoticarum Historia), 4 vols., trans. J. Aikman
(Edinburgh/Glasgow, Blackie Fullaton, 1827 –29), vol. 1, p. 9; Political Poetry, pp. 150, 116, 274,
316; De jure regni, sig. A3r.
120 . Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650
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54 A. Grafton and L. Jardine, “Studied for action: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy,” Past and
Present, 129, 1990, esp. pp. 35, 40.
55 Cf. G. Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (New York, Praeger, 1966), p. 118; Donaldson,
All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (New York, St. Martin’s, 1983),
p. 57; J. Wormald, Mary Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (London, George Philip, 1988), p. 179.
56 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Political Poetry, pp. 122–3. Empirical experience far more than
a priori principles about gender difference consistently shaped the outlook of Buchanan and his
contemporaries.
57 Ibid., p. 296.
58 Hume, Poemata, pp. 72–3 (Third Part).
59 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, p. 89.
60 Ibid., p. 83.
61 Ibid., p. 93.
62 Ibid., p. 125.
63 Ibid., p. 87.
64 Ibid., p. 81.
65 Ibid., p. 83.
66 Ibid., p. 217.
67 Ibid., p. 223.
68 A. I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton, Tuckwell,
1996), pp. 3, 99–100; E. J. Cowan, “The discovery of the Gàidhealtachd in sixteenth century
Scotland,” in Transactions. Gaelic Society of Inverness, 60, 2000, pp. 267, 264. H. Boece, The History
and Chronicles of Scotland, 2 vols., trans. J. Bellenden (Edinburgh, W. & C. Tait, 1821), vol. 1,
p. xxvi; Boece, Scotorum historia (Paris, 1527), fol. V.b.62–8 (peregrino sanguine corrupti). It would be
the genius of the earls of Argyll and clan Campbell to construct a pan-British genealogy (derived
from Arthur and Constantine) – in the process adopting Protestantism and introducing more
modern agriculture. Macinnes, Clanship, pp. 60, 69 – 70; D. Sellar, “The earliest Campbells:
Norman, Briton, Gael?” Scottish Studies, 17, 1973, pp. 109 –25; W. Gillies, “The invention of
tradition, Highland style” in The Renaissance in Scotland, ed. A. MacDonald et al. (Leiden, Brill,
1994), pp. 144–56; J. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary Queen of Scots (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 76. No complete study has been written of the Campbells
and the Britain they sought to create.
69 R. J. Moll,“‘Off quhat nacioun are thow?’ National identity in blind Hary’s Wallace” in History,
Literature, and Music in Scotland, 700–1560, ed. R. A. McDonald (Toronto, Toronto University
Press, 2002), pp. 120–43; R. J. Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval
Scotland (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
70 Williamson, “Scots, Indians, and Empire,” pp. 56–66. Modern historians, most recently Ted
Cowan, have promoted a benign view of Mair only by disregarding his European context: his
Hispanicized anti-Judaism (that extended to proscribing Hebraic studies) and his natural law defense
of the New World conquest. Cowan, “Discovery of the Gàidhealtachd,” p. 263.
71 J. H. Pollen (ed.), Papal Negotiations with Mary Queen of Scots during her Reign in Scotland, 1561
–1567 (Edinburgh, Scottish History Society, 1901), pp. 425, 428; W. B. Turnbull (ed.), Calendar
of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Mary, 1553–1558 (London, Public Record Office,
1861), p. 24.
72 M. A. Lyons, Franco-Irish Relations, 1500–1610 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2003), pp. 173–4, 183,
189.
73 Ibid., pp. 187–8.
74 Parker, “David or Goliath?” pp. 257, 261.
75 See McGinnis and Williamson, “Britain, race, and the Iberian world empire.” Even so, King
James only took a sustained interest in the Irish territories for a few years.
76 “Abbildung der wundersezamen Vöckher so sich vnder der Schwödischen Armada befinden”
(n.p., 1632), illustration reprinted in Williamson, “Scots, Indians, and empire,” p. 55.
77 Untitled (n.p., 1632), reprinted in J. R. Paas, The German Political Broadsheet, 1600–1700, 8
vols. (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1996), vol. 6, P-1608, p. 88.
78 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, p. 83, cf. p. 285.
79 Wolin, Seduction of Unreason, p. xii.
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 121
80 Cf. P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and A. I.
Macinnes, “Introduction: Connecting and disconnecting with America” in Shaping the Stuart
World, 1603 –1714: The Atlantic Connection, ed. Macinnes and A. H. Williamson (Leiden, Brill,
2005), pp. 1–30. Berleth later softened his subtitle to,“Elizabeth I and the plundering of Ireland.”
81 Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the crisis in Ireland, p. 1; J. Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from
Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
82 G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Houndsmills, Macmillan1992), p. 100.
83 McGinnis and Williamson (eds), British Union, p. 111.
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Alford, S.,The Early Elizabethan Polity,William Cecil and the Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Alford, S., “Knox, Cecil, and the British dimension of the Scottish Reformation” in John Knox
and the British Reformations, ed. R. A. Mason (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998), pp. 201–19.
Collinson, P., “The monarchical republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library,
69, 1986–7, pp. 394–424.
Collinson, P., “The Elizabethan exclusion crisis and the Elizabethan polity,” Proceedings of the
British Academy, 84, 1994, pp. 51–92.
Collinson, P., “John Knox, the Church of England and the women of England” in John Knox and
the British Reformations, ed. R. A. Mason (Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998), pp. 74–96.
Coward, B. (ed.), A Companion to Stuart Britain (Malden, MA., Blackwell, 2003).
Dawson, J., The Politics of Religion in the Age of Mary, Queen of Scots (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2002).
Donaldson, G., The Scottish Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960).
Gitlin,T., The Twilight of Common Dreams (New York, Henry Holt, 1995).
Gribben, C., The Puritan Millennium: Literature and Theology, 1550–1682 (Dublin, Four Courts,
2000).
Kellar, C., Scotland, England, and the Reformation, 1534–1561 (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2003).
Lyons, M., Franco-Irish Relations, 1500–1610 (Woodbridge, Boydell, 2003).
MacCulloch, D., Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (London, Penguin,
1999).
McGinnis, P. and Williamson, A. (eds), George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh, Scottish
History Society, 2000).
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Hume of Godscroft’sDe Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot,Ashgate, 2002).
McGinnis, P. and Williamson, A., “Britain, race, and the Iberian world empire” in The Stuart
Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. Ohlmeyer and A. Macinnes (Dublin, Four Courts,
2002), pp. 70–93.
Macinnes,A., Charles I and the Making of the Covenanting Movement, 1625–1641 (Edinburgh, John
Donald, 1991).
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1996).
Macinnes,A., The British Revolutions, 1629–1660 (London, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005).
Macinnes, A. and Williamson, A. H. (eds), Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic
Connection (Leiden, Brill, 2005).
Mason, R., “People power? George Buchanan on resistance and the common man” in Widerstand
in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. R. von Friedeburg (Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, 2001), pp. 163–81.
Mason, R. and Smith, M. (eds), A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition
and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (Aldershot, Ashgate,
2004).
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1972–1992 (Sacramento, CSUS Publications, 1995).
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Past and Present, 150, 1996, pp. 46–83.
Williamson,A., “Patterns of British identity:‘Britain’ and its rivals in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries” in The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715, ed. G. Burgess
(London, I. B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 138–73.
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 123of Edward Tudor – also presented itself as an empire for
liberty. The new England also drew heavily on classical values and the
language of commonwealth, but it went further and endowed them with
an energized spiritual dimension. For the realm joined Christian liberty with
political liberty in a powerful apocalyptic vision that projected universal
reform. Just as Constantine the Great (d. 337), allegedly born in Britain of
his allegedly British mother Helen, had overthrown Satan’s public kingdom
and instituted the true faith, so his heir, a latter-day Constantine, might
overthrow Satan’s successor, the Antichristian papal monarchy, in the final
age of the world. If Constantinian protection appeared to mix badly with
decision-taking citizens, direct action, and ordinary people driving the
engines of sacred history, that tension remained submerged – much like the
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 93
underlying tension between Buchanan’s hugely popular verses and Valois
ambitions.
II
Now just over a century ago F. W. Maitland famously laid out a decisively
disjoined perception of the Reformation in England and Scotland, and
nationalist as well as other conservative historians have persisted in this
view. The dissociation has led recently even to the bifurcating of the great
Anglo-Scottish reformer John Knox, not only two reformations but two
John Knoxes.6 Yet it has become increasingly apparent that almost from the
outset these reformations in fact comprise a single pan-British phenomenon
and that they were recognized as such by contemporaries. Every crisis point
during this period – 1559 –60, 1568 –73, 1584, 1638 –42, and 1650 – did
not incidentally come to involve both kingdoms but was dominated by a
British horizon.7
Quite early on and then very prominently in the 1540s, English and
Scottish reformers created a British vision, albeit a fractured one. It arose in
most uncongenial circumstances: during the “Rough Wooing,” 1548 –50,
England’s brutal invasion that sought to secure the marriage agreement made
between Edward and the Scottish princess Mary Stewart. On the one hand
Edward’s government claimed historic feudal suzerainty over Scotland, a
view bolstered by medieval mythologies and, to some extent, by medieval
history. On the other, there also emerged the prospect of a British union
of equals, founded on mutual solidarity, common reforming purposes, and
a fusion of the two peoples. The most influential writing promoting the
latter was an “Epistle Exhortatorie” in 1548, ostensibly written by the English
regent, Edward Seymour, the duke of Somerset. Appealing to “the indifferent
old name of Brytaynes,” the “Epistle” offered realistic insight into
contemporary politics, as well as genuinely powerful flights of rhetoric:“we
offer equalitie & amitie, we ouercome in war, and off peace, we wynne
holdes, and offer no conquest, we gette in your lande and offre Englande.”
The contemporary English publicist William Patten further insisted that we
seek “not the Mastership of you, but the Fellowship!” Seymour’s Scottish
colleague James Henrisoun urged the idea that virtually all the inhabitants
of the island were ethnically British.8 The more egalitarian version and the
literature promoting it were no doubt shaped by émigré Scottish Protestants,
like Henrisoun, who passionately sought the creation of a radical, reforming
Britain, one that might provide the model for mankind in the final era of
the world.
Conservative historians have often ignored or discounted the extraordinary
idealism during Edward’s reign and focused upon the traditional medieval
claims to suzerainty. They have spoken of an “Anglo-British imperialism”
that simply and cynically meant England writ large.9 Yet the more egalitarian
British expression, notably in Somerset’s “Epistle,” provided the centerpiece
94 . Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650
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of this unionist literature, achieved high visibility, and had an enduring
impact on British politics. It addressed a European audience through Johannes
Sleidanus’s Latin translation (and succeeded in irritating Charles V). It
subsequently appeared in German. The “Epistle” would inform virtually all
Scottish writing on the subject of Anglo-Scottish union – from John Knox
in 1558 to Thomas Craig, Robert Pont, and John Russell in the wake of
the 1603 regnal union.10 “Anglo-British” appears to be a term adopted by
modern historians rather than contemporaries. But “Scoto-Britannic” and
“Scoto-British” did achieve currency before the end of the century, terms
carrying with them the Edwardian egalitarian tradition and, often, a
far-reaching reform agenda. Both views of union persisted and could even
coexist within a single individual; one modern historian has found English
attitudes generally and William Cecil’s in particular to be “rather
schizophrenic” and even “curiously Orwellian.”11 In the end, Britain could
be variously imagined, traditionally but also radically.
III
That tumultuous and remarkable decade 1558–1568 saw the Reformation
unleash a revolutionary upheaval that challenged authority throughout
northwestern Europe: authority became destabilized in England, twice
overthrown in Scotland, radically contested in France, and violently rejected
in the Low Countries. Moreover, the fortuitous emergence of female rulers
with problematic claims to the throne further heightened the volatility of
the moment. During these years direct action became all but inescapable,
and legitimacy needed to be imagined anew, indeed self-generated. Society
seemed less inherited than constructed. In such a context, classical political
thought and the civic vocabularies, so promoted by Buchanan, acquired a
cogency, immediacy, and urgency that would have been unthinkable in
earlier decades. Appeals to fellow countrymen, to the common good, and,
literally, to the respublica – now seen as underlying dynasty, region, customs,
traditions – became insistent and frequent. Civil communities basking under
the protection of a liberating overarching order, quite simply, could no
longer carry conviction. Counter-empire became supplanted by anti-empire.
By 1562 Chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital had ceased to speak of France
guiding the “totum orbem,” and instead appealed to the “cives” and the
“citoyen.” By the 1570s the French had begun to construct a new vocabulary,
one that enjoined the duties of “bon patriottes et concitoyens” – terms and
concepts that soon thereafter entered English. At the same time the French
invented a non-episcopal ecclesiastical polity that, for many, appeared to be
a civil church. Contemporaneous activism in England has led historians to
describe the earlier Elizabethan realm as a “monarchical republic,” involving
an enduring activist tradition that served the English republic in the next
century. In 1559–60 the Scots too took direct action and on a grand scale,
by enlisting with the Lords of the Congregation, by turning up in record
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 95
numbers at the Reformation parliament, by assuming control of their
shires. There existed the distinct possibility that Scotland’s absentee monarch,
Mary Stewart, would face deposition.12 For Buchanan, Scotland now
appeared an autonomous commonwealth, led by selfless aristocrats pursuing
the public good, and where, ideally, citizens imposed law on themselves.
In such a commonwealth, as Buchanan declared in Latin verses written for
the new-born James in 1566, the king would be a far more modest figure
than the great emperors both past and present. But, as the self-ruled model
for citizens, he would also be a more worthy and significant one.
And if he could truly be king of himselfand king of his own people,
He would think his kingdom more extensive by far than it would be
If it stretched from the Indies to the shores of Hesperia [Iberia].13
The virtuous Scottish republic, unlike its grotesque Portuguese anti-type,
had no place for empire (however conceived) and could only be corrupted
by it. The high point in this line of thinking occurred with Scotland’s second
revolution in 1567 –68, on whose behalf Buchanan wrote his famous (for
some, notorious), De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus. The dialogue sought to
imagine Scotland as an extended polis, where ad hoc assemblies along side
more formal bodies comprised a dispersed form of the Athenian ekklEsia and
where final authority rested, potentially, with all the adult males. Buchanan
still looked to Scotland’s political elites to provide leadership and formulate
policy. He also felt deep unease about the “imperta multitudo.”That is, those
who were more concerned with personal survival than public decision-taking
and whose threat lay not in their unbridled radicalism but their blinkered
conservatism, their inability to see beyond the tyranny of custom. Yet in
that heady moment Buchanan believed that reasoned discourse rather than
status or coercion could carry the nation. In the end, the criterion for
citizenship was simply this: civic behavior.14 These values reached into
Scottish vernacular culture and became surprisingly widespread.15 If in
subsequent years they became more qualified, the ideal of self-realization
through politics retained its validity and vitality – while, for many, Buchanan
himself achieved an iconic status in the national memory.
Similar lines of thought spread through all three kingdoms and what
would become the United Provinces. However, their similarity comprised
more than simply a response to common problems and common
opportunities. For they were interconnected not only in their genesis but
also in their sense of shared purpose. Exactly during these years, Buchanan
continued to be directly and passionately involved in both the French and
English Reformations. So too were his close intellectual associates such as
Andrew Melville and Philip Sidney. These early modern “patriots” were
consistently internationalists, reformers in a great common cause at once
religious and political, that ran everywhere in the region – and extended
from there to all Europe and throughout the globe. Rarely did “patriots”
become apologists for their home government, and normally they were at
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odds with it. Their civic world pointed to confederation and the most
intimate collaboration in the struggle against the Hapsburgs and their papal
ally.
IV
To speak in these terms led most people, if not Buchanan, to adopt an
apocalyptic register.16 For prophecy and apocalyptic expectations reached
far more deeply into Protestant religious culture than they did with
Catholicism. Like serious reformers in any era, Protestants needed to explain
how things had gone so terribly wrong, and why at this juncture they were
at last being set right. The only sixteenth-century vocabulary for imagining
qualitative change in time was the Judeo-Christian eschatology. Only through
prophecy and the idea of an underlying, sequential program could deep
transformation be made intelligible. Only in this way could anyone articulate
how today might be one way, but tomorrow fundamentally different. To
be sure, the apocalypse had featured on the margins of medieval civilization.
But when medieval people spoke of the prophetic Antichrist at the end of
the days, they all but invariably meant an individual: Saladin, Frederick II,
Pope John XXII (the Avignon pope with the dubious distinction of being
judged most often the historic Antichrist). Accordingly, a vast underbrush
of medieval legend grew up about the life and deeds of Antichrist. By contrast
Luther and the sixteenth-century reformers saw Antichrist as the institution
that was the papacy and the medieval church, its doctrines, its ceremonies,
its spirituality. Inherently the reformers undertook a project of greater
complexity, with wider intellectual sophistication, and with a deeper
preoccupation with time. The story of Antichrist became nothing less than
the story of Europe, the rise of the (false) medieval world and the current
confrontation with it. By the 1530s the sacred drama framed a linear time
sequence that gave meaning to the course of human experience. Founded
on humanist analysis of text in context and reinforced by the claim that
Christ’s sacrifice was sufficient (and thus located in time and comprehended
through memory), the Reformation initiated a vast temporalization of
European culture.17 Against the miracle of the mass arose the arrow of history.
We can see this transition throughout Europe, and quite clearly in
Scotland. When the Scottish theologian John Ireland spoke of Antichrist in
1490 or when the Scots poet William Dunbar did so about a decade later,
in typical medieval fashion they both meant an individual. The term bore
no political implications; there was nothing even remotely imminent about
it. By the later 1530s all that had changed. We encounter a new landscape
when the earl of Glencairn in 1539 denounced the Catholic clergy as
“monsters with the Beast’s marke.” In 1550 John Knox outlined the
apocalyptic programmatic underlying human experience in what would be
his most remembered sermon. By the 1560s it featured in the university
curriculum. By the 1570s it had become a political commonplace within
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 97
popular culture:“the quhilk thai prove be the buke of pocalippis,” comments
one of the wives in the “Diallog of the Twa Wyfeis.” By the early 1580s,
with the prospect of counter-revolution, Catholics had no choice but to
confront the Protestant apocalyptic and try to deflect it. Ending the mass
showed the real Antichrist: “And sacrifice of the Altar eik [also] aboleist; /
Thus is zour Antichrist be S. Iohne descryuit.”Antichrist resided in Geneva,
not Rome. By the 1590s Calvinist merchants in Edinburgh would have
highly politicized readings of the apocalypse done as murals on the walls in
their homes.18 Later sixteenth-century Scotland developed a prophecy-soaked
culture, long on history, short on miracles.
The values promoted by reformed Scotland remained much the same as
those of Buchanan, but they had now become endowed with a cosmic
significance that enriched and amplified the great humanist’s civic piety.
Buchanan’s friend, the poet, preacher, and professor, Andrew Melville
(1545–1622) wrote a remarkable Latin pastoral in 1594 celebrating the birth
of Prince Henry, King James’s son and heir. The prince, as the head of a
united Britain, would lead a great confederation against Rome and Madrid,
and eventually rejoice at having “buried the insolent spirit of empire in its
tomb.”19 Like his contemporary the apocalyptic exegete, John Napier of
Merchiston, like the Edinburgh merchants and a great many Scots, Melville
saw a close political and spiritual connection between the pagan Roman
Empire and its papal successor.20 The struggle against empire was integral
to reform and, in some ways, could seem a continuation from classical times.
“Rust blunts the edge of the sword Aeneas wielded.” Similarly, the Spanish
portrayal of Philip II’s Fifth Monarchy as the labor of a latter-day Hercules
now confronted a British Hercules, destined to scatter that empire.21
Buchanan’s anti-imperialism had become the apocalyptic project, the British
mission.
During these years Melville began a Scottish national epic. Drawing on
Scotland’s medieval origin myths, Melville made Gathelus, the eponymous
founder of the Gaels, into a Gaelic Abraham whose two sons Hyber and
Hemecus (Westernequivalents of Ishmael and Isaac) embodied conflicting
spirits that would work themselves out in world history. Hyber, based in
Galicia, was motivated by boundless ambition. He would sweep through
the Iberian peninsula; he would mount to the heavens; his spirit culminated
in world empire. Orbis non sufficit. Hemecus, based in Ireland, was a much
more modest figure, committed to the rule of law, shared governance, and,
we might say, public life. His spirit realizes itself with the imminent creation
of contemporary Britain.22 Now in the latter days of the world these two
spirits confronted each other to determine the destiny of mankind – Fifth
Monarchy versus civic society. Scottish consciousness had generated British
mission, and that mission was the end of empire.
Melville’s passionate commitment to Britain and his no less passionate
universal agenda cannot disguise the fact that, at the same time, he was one
of Scotland’s great patriots. His longest extant poem,“Scotia Topographia”
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(c. 1603), is a verse rendering of Buchanan’s Scottish chorography. It
eventually saw print accompanying the maps of Scotland in Joan Blaeu’s
Atlas Novus (Amsterdam, 1654). Yet his celebration of Scotland in the
“Topographica” included a verse dedication to Prince Henry that looked
to “the mutually united Britains.”23 Melville also could be ferociously
anti-English when, in the new century, James and the English bishops,
notably Richard Bancroft, sought to reimpose episcopacy on Scotland: “Is
it, O Englishman, a matter of envy that all the light of Christ shines on the
Scots?” Is it “because the Scot goes on the road which leads to heaven, [that]
you, Englishman, bend your journey headlong to the Styx?”24 Yet the
struggle against episcopacy never for a moment obscured the larger British
design. Mission was the defining, driving force, and no “identity” could
exist apart from it. It was not a matter of “finding” oneself, but of recreating
the world. Melville’s younger associate, David Hume of Godscroft (1558–
1630?), was one of the earliest to use the neologism “patriot,” delighted in
speaking lowland Scots, thought southern English just might be a dialect of
it, struggled mightily against the English “tyranny” of episcopacy.25
Nevertheless, his commitment to Britain never wavered. Precisely because
of his patriotism, he worked to envision a common British culture.
V
The opening that had occurred during the 1558–1568 decade closed rapidly
in the 1590s. Authority, hierarchy, empire recovered their power, their
cogency, their poets. A new authoritarianism appeared with Henri IV, the
aging Elizabeth, James VI, and indeed throughout Europe.26 In these years
the Counter-Reformation had begun to bite seriously into European
thinking. A “new humanism” that promoted skepticism, disengagement,
and private life challenged the moral imperative of politics. Open Ciceronian
discourse became supplanted by backstage Tacitean manipulation.“Reason
of State” and the emerging royal economic activism, subsequently known
as mercantilism, further enjoined a lowering of voices. The Protestant
apocalyptic, preoccupied as it was with institutions, purposeful change,
human agency, and so with politics, became increasingly challenged. Yet,
despite the changing climate, apocalyptic thinking during these years actually
deepened in scope. The Scots John Napier of Merchiston (1550–1617) and
Robert Pont (1524 – 1606) joined the Englishmen Thomas Brightman
(1562 –1607), Hugh Broughton (1549 –1612), and Andrew Willet (1562 –
1621) in developing a more articulated future and, in the case of Brightman,
projected a future millennium. Analogous developments occurred on the
continent, and the period from the 1590s through the 1630s experienced a
kind of push-pull, radicalized expectations arising in a context of ever
deepening reaction.
The future-oriented apocalyptic strengthened the prospect of a British
state because it qualified the present settlement and looked to a new
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 99
dispensation which might well include Anglo-Scottish integration on new
foundations. By far the most influential earlier English-speaking writer to
develop an apocalyptic historical vision, was the Englishman John Foxe (d.
1587). His massive and continually growing Actes and Monuments of these
latter and perillous dayes . . . (1563 and thereafter) provided an extraordinary
projection of the Anglophone past within the sacred drama and would prove
a defining work for Anglo-America. Foxe had spoken of “this my country
of England and Scotland” and included Scottish experience within his
eschatological narrative. Yet the Edwardian promise of a refounded Britain
is totally absent. Foxe had been well received in Scotland, certainly by John
Knox. But the future-oriented Brightman had a much greater impact among
Scottish intellectual elites, exciting both the radical Presbyterian James
Melville and the moderate Episcopalian Patrick Forbes of Corse. During
the British revolutions of the 1640s the writings of the later exegetes, and
especially Brightman, fueled hopes for an eschatological Anglo-Scottish
union.27The new apocalyptic brought with it another largely unprecedented
element, philo-Semitism. Where Foxe had been resoundingly hostile to
Jews, Brightman and the new exegetes increasingly saw them as the key to
the future. The Jews would play a decisive role in human redemption; the
Jewish monarchy would be restored in the Middle East; their wisdom was
crucial to understanding the prophetic texts and perhaps even to the recovery
of the pre-lapsarian intellect.28
Apocalyptic hopes encountered a much harsher world in Scotland after
1596. During that year James broke off his alliance with the Presbyterians
and undertook a sustained effort to reintroduce hierarchy and eliminate
“parity,” both clerical and civil. He would establish unqualified authority
over the church and every element within society. Perhaps above all, he
would found his rulership on bases utterly divorced from the Scottish
revolutions and the claims of civic society. To this end he fired off a series
of tracts – the Daemonologie (1597), the True Lawe of Free Monarchy (1598),
and the Basilikon Doron (1599) – that anchored kingship (and James’s
legitimacy) within an underlying natural and sacred order that withstood all
change, all flux, all upheaval, all contingency. Here lay a structure so
pervasive, so much a part of the logic of things, and so divinely sanctioned
that even the damned and the demonic participated in it. Classical values
remained evident, especially in the Basilikon Doron, but James found his
antique predecessors among the Roman emperors, not in the
republic. Augustus, Constantine, and, sotto voce, Julius Caesar provided the
archetypes. In addition, James was emphatic that the public good rather than
private interest must animate the crown and define its purposes. Here was
something that only a legitimate king, a king of the royal blood, could hope
to achieve – altogether inconceivable with any parvenue hireling,
compromised and uncouth. We encounter a civic ideal of sorts, but within
a world where there existed only one citizen. In 1596 James could still speak
of the need for everyone to see beyond his “own particular,” lest Scotland
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suffer the fate of the “beastly Indians” in the Americas.29 Yet the
decision-taking citizen transmuted into the obedient subject. At the opening
of the new century, James’s vernacular royalist prose rather than the
Presbyterians’ Latin civic poetry gripped the public imagination. In the years
after 1603 the BasilikonDoron became an international best seller.
Even though James admired the Roman emperors and found them his
model, he was no Fifth Monarchist and aimed at no last world empire.
Unlike most of his subjects, he genuinely admired Spain and the Hapsburgs,
endorsed their conquests, and shared their racial values. His extreme légitimiste
outlook encouraged him to defer to them and led to exceedingly varied and
quite odd foreign policies, while at home he strove to impose an integrating
conservative uniformity throughout the British Isles. Within this environment
the apocalypse became increasingly marginalized as a construct for making
experience intelligible. In the years about the Armada crisis James had been
seriously drawn to the Protestant apocalyptic and even wrote on the subject,
enhancing his international reputation thereby. But his interest gradually
waned during the next decade and continued to do so throughout the
remainder of his life. His intense involvement with demonology and
witch-hunting in the 1590s marks a turning away from eschatology. It
comprises an element within the new conservatism, and one of unexpected
importance.
Witchcraft involved Satan directly rather than Antichrist, and Satan, the
universal tempter, was a far less time-bound figure. As an institution,
Antichrist was a historical phenomenon, involving a linear process and
providing the spine to the European experience. Antichrist enjoined systemic
reform, politics, and public life. Witchcraft was inherently personal, even
intimate. If it carried significant social and spiritual implications, these could
only be depoliticizing. No pope ever slipped into little old ladies’ bedrooms
at night to spirit them away to kinky parties in the neighboring woods
(possibly to their disappointment). No Jesuit invested his time pursuing
impoverished nobodies. Demonology promoted conservatism in still other
ways. Satan, as “God’s ape” in King James’s phrase, parodied and thus
reinforced the natural order. Demonic hierarchies reassured people about
the ones in nature and heaven. A black mass validated the true mass. A
compact with Satan reinforced the personal covenant with God. Even if
demons were natural phenomena and, unlike God, could only work “false
miracles,” they still promoted the power of the sacraments, and notably the
mass, because what you saw and what really existed comprised two different
things. Most important, demons, understood in this way, could be
approached – and perhaps only approached – through Aristotelian
scholasticism and traditional learning.
To be sure, scriptural prophecy ensured that there would be
“necromantic” popes, and Protestant apocalyptic historians readily identified
a substantial number of them. But wicked popes from past centuries were
interwoven into historical analysis and grand narratives rather than providing
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 101
present prescriptions. Only an increasing incidence of witchcraft cases –
themselves always much the same – might be correlated to the sacred time
sequence and the end of days. As the Scottish King observed, “the
consummation of the worlde, and our deliuerance drawing neare, makes
Sathan to rage the more in his instruments, knowing his kingdome to be so
neare an ende.”30 Yet, for James and others, this sort of observation marks
a transition from the eschatological rather than a lead-in to it. Virtually
everyone was prepared to prosecute witches to create a “disciplined” society,
but demonology was the weapon of conservatism. It deflected the political
in favor of the personal, upheld tradition against reform.
In late sixteenth-century France demonology was overwhelmingly and,
after 1566, exclusively a Catholic preoccupation. The great Jesuit
Counter-Reformers Juan Maldonat, Martin Del Rio, and their associates
made witchcraft a centerpiece in their struggle against Calvinism. Exorcism
was a Catholic property, while miracle-wanting Calvinism, always uneasy
with demonic possession, could only confront the problem with prayer. In
early seventeenth-century Germany, Friedrich Förner, the leading
Counter-Reformer of Bamberg, inveighed against Protestant prophetic
dreams31 –“divinations” as he called them – while leading the charge against
witches. Only in Bavaria and Catholic Franconia did major interest in the
theology and legal aspects of witchcraft persist after 1600. On the other side
of the struggle, Gustavus Adolphus’s Sweden,“so choked with eschatological
speculation,” encountered relatively little witch activity, and the great
Swedish hunts lay as yet over the horizon.32
So too in Scotland, the royal demonologist, we now know, was the
driving force behind the great witch-hunts of 1590 and 1597. Earlier in
1568 John Erskine of Dun (c. 1508–1591) had initiated a major witch-hunt
throughout the shires of Angus and Mearns. Erskine, the superintendent of
that region and also a laird, was solidly Protestant, but no less solidly
conservative. Committed to clerical hierarchy, he stoutly resisted “parity”
and the Presbyterian church polity. Hume of Godscroft believed that he
was the key figure in the effort to reintroduce bishops into Scotland ( just
as Knox was holding forth against them). Always a friend of the crown,
Erskine tried to prolong negotiations with the regent during the 1559–60
revolution, and in Knox’s view was too “addicted” to pleasing her. When
Knox reduced Mary Stewart to tears, it was Erskine who dried them.33 The
great Catholic earls Errol and Huntly, the would-be leaders of the
Counter-Reformation in Scotland, joined with the king to play a major
role in the events of 1597, one of the bloodiest hunts in Scottish history.34
Although Presbyterians would participate in these events and the king
certainly could stampede the church, the radicals had another agenda and
did not share a comparable level of interest in the subject. Andrew Melville
does not seem to have been recorded as having said anything about
witchcraft. The witch scares are mentioned only in passing, if at all, in James
Melville’s and David Calderwood’s contemporaneous Presbyterian histories
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of the period. Hume of Godscroft dismissed Jean Bodin’s absolutist doctrines
in part by mocking his De la démonomanie (1580). The preoccupation with
witches penetrated Scottish culture largely through the episcopal tradition.35
Not all political conservatives promoted demonology, but all demonologists
were politically conservative.
The 1603 regnal union of England and Scotland therefore occurred with
Scotland deeply divided, but not divided on the matter of Britain. There,
and perhaps there alone, the king and his erstwhile allies, now bitter
opponents, remained at one. Certainly Scots were much exercised that the
realm not become a province or a “pendicle” to England. Nevertheless, for
patriotic and religious reasons it was almost impossible for them not to
support some sort of British union. The “patriots” Melville and Hume of
Godscroft looked to a “Scoto-Britannic” commonwealth that would confront
the Hapsburg-papal superstate. As Hume, a self-proclaimed
“Scoto-Britannus,” put it in Latin verses:“Nor at all in vain will Rome fear
the British. Nor will the Tarpeian flamen, twisting his lightning bolts, oppose
them with impunity.” Let the pope beware, the British are coming. With
his play on the Scottish motto, Hume indicates that he has in mind radical
Scoto-Britannia.
More conservative contemporaries like Sir William Alexander
(1567?–1640) adopted a similar voice, but, doubtless in deference to James’s
sensibilities, he urged Prince Henry to direct the emerging British force
against the other Antichrist, the Ottoman Empire, rather than the Hapsburgs
and the papacy. The poet and scholar James Maxwell (c.1581 –1635) was
still more conservative in his ecclesiology and high church commitments. Yet
he too hoped for an apocalyptic British age that would achieve a latter-day
Constantinian order. Perhaps even more conservative was the poet Patrick
Gordon ( fl. 1615). Hailing from Huntly country and of indeterminate
religion, Gordon promoted British expansion in what must be the most
uncongenial context imaginable: an enormous poem celebrating Robert
Bruce,The Famous Historie of the Renowned and Valiant Prince Robert Surnamed
the Bruce, King of Scotland.36 Whether courtiers or enemies of the court,
whether militant Presbyterians or enthusiastic Episcopalians, whether from
the Borders in the south (with Hume) or from Aberdeen in the north (with
Gordon) or from Dumfriesshire in the west (with Maxwell), Scots found
Britain to be prophetic and appealing. The question was not whether there
should be a Britain, but what kind of Britain should it be.
King James’s British project grew directly out of his central concerns of
the later 1590s. During those years he had constantly defended his
untrammeled authority on the basis of his ancestry and dynastic descent, on
the basis of the natural order and its directives, and on the basis of grace and
its prescriptions. People needed to obey him not because he was James Stuart
and could raise so many thousand men, but because he was king by right
and inheritance. He had anchored his claim to the southern crown in exactly
the same légitimiste way. Precisely these values would suffuse the Britain he
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sought to construct. Although James continued to regard the papacy as the
prophesied Antichrist, blood, not prophecy, defined the emerging
Britain. The result would be, ideally, an integrated, self-contained Britannic
empire: authoritarian, hierarchical, comprehensive in that it included elites
throughout the British Isles, but in no way tolerant. Accordingly, he initially
considered naming Richard Bancroft the primate of all Britain. So too, his
first coinage proclaimed him the emperor of Great Britain. Privilege was
largely protected within this new order, and throughout the century, we
now know, conservative Scottish elites would seek to reconstruct it.37
As in the Basilikon Doron, an anti-reform, anti-“puritan” undertaking lay
at the heart of the enterprise, and the destruction of “parity” in any form
was integral to James’s political theology. When the constitutional objectives
the king sought foundered within the English House of Commons by
1607–08, James’s underlying religious motivations assumed center stage.
Conformity with establishment England went beyond merely the imposition
of bishops on Scotland, but the liturgical “marriage” of the two realms within
the conservative English forms of the Book of Common Prayer – and literally
acted out in the wedding of the Scot James, Lord Hay, to the English heiress
Honora Denny.38 Jamesian Britain was not simply conservative, but
conservatizing. It sought to undo the pan-British radicalism of the previous
thirty years.
Against James’s design arose a great many voices both in England and
Scotland. By far the most comprehensive was Hume of Godscroft’s, whose
De unione insulae Britannicae (1605) and concomitantly published Latin poetry
comprises the Presbyterian reply to the True Lawe, the civic riposte to the
Basilikon Doron. Hume looked back to the English and Scottish (and French)
reforming oikoumene that had existed in the 1570s and 1580s – the “patriot”
cause – as the foundation for the British union. In the later 1580s he had
urged the king to see his hope of succession to the southern crown as best
secured through those in England who sought reform. “Those that seek
Reformation are the strength of the Countrey [England], and certainly the
wisest part of it, of greatest power by the people’s favour and credit in
Parliament, and everywhere . . . gaine these, gaine that Countrey.”39 Hume
was right. Radical, future-oriented Englishmen like Brightman, Broughton,
and Willet, welcomed Britain and formed her natural constituency. More
than that, they would actively seek to build a new British world. England
and Scotland, in Willet’s words, should as “louing sisters and fellow
tribes . . . go up to Jerusalem together.”40 The prophetic and the Judaic
could meld with the classical and the civic to create a sustainable, genuinely
British polity. Hume went further and suggested that far more than simply
the puritans were unhappy with the Elizabethan settlement and hoped for
reform. In 1604 he may well have been right again.
Whether a majority of Englishmen might have endorsed root and branch
reform or the Presbyterian church polity, as Hume also intimated, is far
more problematic. Yet the popularity of Prince Henry – probably the only
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genuinely popular Stuart prince – is surely telling. The prince was
prominently identified with religious reform at home and an anti-Hapsburg
policy abroad. His little-studied household and court seem to have begun
a synthesis of Italian Renaissance sensibility with Calvinist spirituality. A
Henrician Britain would doubtless have proven a more culturally complex
structure and have resulted in a fuller fusion of the two realms.41The contrast
between the king and his son ran deep. James initiated an expulsion of the
Jews living illegally in England, a mini reprise of 1290; Henry maintained
the great English philo-Semites Broughton and Willet whose thought
culminated in the 1655 re-admission. Traditionalist authority confronted
apocalyptic vision, a matter of no small moment when we recall that Scots
and reformers were frequently and negatively identified with the Jews.42
By contrast the most determined hostility to Britain and the most militant
Scotophobes came from no less determined Catholic and Anglo-Catholic
conservatives: Guy Fawkes, Richard Verstegan ( fl. 1565–1620), and Ben
Jonson. The militant Counter-Reformer Verstegan insisted that the English
were a Germanic people utterly divided from the Scots and Welsh. Thus
there existed an unbridgeable racial chasm between the peoples on the island
which precluded any Britain and drew Englishmen to their roots on the
Catholic continent. The polar opposite of the Edwardian James Henrisoun,
Verstegan urged both racial and linguistic purity; ethnic intermarriage simply
had not happened in the past (nor should it be expected to do so in the
future). Guy Fawkes’s spectacular conspiracy relied on antipathy to the Scots.
Jonson interwove Anti-Calvinism, Scotophobia, and anti-Judaism, probably
most successfully in his Bartholomew Fair (1614, revived 1661).43
Overwhelmingly Englishmen were not racists or bigots, whatever the
reflexive requirements of post-colonial historiography. English disquiet about
Anglo-Scottish union arose from institutional concerns rather than any
preoccupation with blood or nation. The MP Lawrence Hyde genuinely
believed that the introduction of the English Common Law into Scotland
would be liberating for most Scots and opposed only by a handful of great
lords.44 English institutions, not English blood, made one English. Moreover,
English institutions assumed their true form with the Reformation and were
imagined within an eschatological framework that was very much a part of
Protestant (and Scottish) thinking. Developing this common vocabulary,
something radical Scots and Englishmen had long shared, became David
Hume’s central concern.
Hume seems to have regarded the 1603 regnal union and the prospect
of a new Britain as a Machiavellian occasione, an altogether unique opportunity
for immediate, far-reaching political innovation and creativity.45 Quite unlike
any other unionist literature of the time, Hume’s writings passionatelyurged
a civic and reformed British commonwealth. But they also went much
further. The new commonwealth would fuse England and Scotland into a
common society with a common British culture neither English nor Scottish.
Scots and Englishmen would become Britons by the creation of public life
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 105
through which citizens pursued shared social goods and articulated common
purposes. Only within such a politicized, quasi-republican world could there
ever be an enduring, workable union, and Hume went on in the second
part of the De unione to outline in surprising detail the constitutional and
political arrangements by which it might be achieved. Only civic ties rather
than dynastic loyalty, only the values of the polis rather than of the court,
only radical enactments rather than tradition, could produce an equitable
and truly British society. No other unionist writing, however ardent, at any
point approached such sweeping vision. Hume’s determined civisme reaches
in some ways beyond that of any of his predecessors, whether Buchanan in
1567 or Melville in 1594. It would require one great legislative act of almost
Sinaitic proportions, and yet one in which the peoples of both realms directly
participated. If at moments Hume seemed to cast James in the role of a
classical legislator, the king still remained a surprisingly modest figure. No
Lycurgus, no Solon, and certainly no Moses, James needed only to give his
“nod.” Political society would emerge not simply through approbation, but
participation. To a surprising extent Britain would be self-created.
It will not surprise us that Hume anticipated a British council and a British
parliament. The great offices of state would be jointly held by an Englishman
and a Scot – in a way almost sounding the consuls of classical Rome. More
arresting is his plan to create powerful regional councils based in Lancaster,
at York, London, Edinburgh, and perhaps Aberdeen. Quite unlike late
twentieth-century devolution – quite unlike anything projected by Jim
Callahan or Tony Blair – the new councils would be British as well as
regional, their purpose civic rather than ethnic, their concern participation
and integration rather than localism and identity. One fifth of the
membership of each council would be drawn from the other country.
Moreover, the new provinces governed from Edinburgh and Carlisle would
straddle the old border. There would also be a new British order of
knighthood, in fact the Order of the Garter now transformed into a British
organization for British purposes. Its membership would be drawn from
those whose commitment to Britain and specifically British public service
had proven outstanding. Members of the British Council of State would be
excluded, thereby encouraging the provincial elites – and, presumably, those
serving on the new regional councils. These guardians of the new Britain
clearly received their recognition for efforts on behalf of the community
rather than simply or perhaps even mainly on behalf of the ruling
dynasty. These would be public knights, and hence altogether atypical ones,
whose title derived manifestly from merit. Hume even wanted to establish
a set of British prayers, but these would be civil prayers, a kind of social
liturgy that sounds something like the modern pledge of allegiance.46 Less
happily, Hume also sought to institute a system of fines for ethnic slurs, an
arrangement that, distressingly, seems to anticipate today’s politically correct
speech codes.
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By far the most contentious issue – then and now – would be the creation
of a British church. Here Hume’s views were emphatic: a civic Britain would
be a reformed Britain, and that meant a non-hierarchical church, a
Presbyterian church like the one that existed in Scotland. Naturally enough,
the creation of such a church itself needed to be a British undertaking. A
great council would convene to decide the British church polity through
“frank, friendly, and unrestricted” discussions. Where disagreements arose,
“the best foreign churches shall be consulted” – a striking anticipation of
the 1640s Westminster Assembly. Once agreement was reached, the “great
Council of Britannia” (it is not clear whether the “consilium” is the British
Council of State or the British Parliament) would make the final decision.47
If the British would prove a nation of legislators, they would also prove
a nation of prophets. For the political was also the soteriological, the public
spirit was also redemptive, the British state entailed eschatological
mission. The Scoto-Britannic lion was the heir to the lion of Judah. The
sincere faith at home implied cosmic struggle against world empire abroad.48
Whether Hume and his associates on both sides of the border succeeded
significantly in overcoming deep tensions and long memories remains of
course an open question. But there can be no question at all that large
numbers of people in England and Scotland passionately endorsed Hume’s
British mission, even if they did not thereby become Humean Britons. Their
severe disappointment at King James’s fussy, légitimiste, conflicted, and
ultimately paralytic foreign policy found expression in many registers and
at many locations.49 In 1637–38, some eight years after Hume’s death, that
sense of mission helped ignite a revolution which shook Scotland and
thereafter the British Isles to their foundations. The Scottish National
Covenant – a great legislative act between people and king (at least
nominally) as well as between nation and God – mobilized the country,
harnessing its vitality in ways that were completely unprecedented (and have
never been duplicated). Like the Jews of the Old Testament, Scots had
acquired a sacred constitution, a divine mandate. They also acquired
something more, for as Christians, albeit highly Judaized Christians, they
not only reenacted the Old Testament but worked to realize its promise in
the new dispensation. Where Israel had pointed, Scotland would go. What
Israel had seen in the distance, Scotland would travel.
Scots certainly rose up against the anglicizing consequences of King
Charles’s religious policy. Scots certainly revolted against the provincializing
consequences of Caroline political policies. Certainly, the National Covenant
revitalized and reconfigured Scottish politics and spirituality; there is far
more than a hint of religious revivalism. Yet it would be a grave mistake to
see the Scottish revolution as a nationalist uprising or the National Covenant
as a quest for “identity.” Scotland’s revolution was a pan-British phenomenon
both in practice and perception – involving from the outset radical reformers
in both Ireland and England. From the earliest stages Scots also looked to
long-standing allies in the Netherlands, Sweden, and throughout the Baltic
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 107
as part of a great common cause. Their purposes were emphatically universal.
Scotland was not unique among nations but a model for nations. Scots were
consumed by mission, not self-actualization. For the next decade the
revolutionaries would work tirelessly to achieve a great confederation to
defeat universal monarchy, both imperial and papal. Their objective went
well beyond any network of treaties and alliances. They sought nothing less
than an alternate world order. Extra national structures were essential, and
we get an indication of what they had in mind with the joint committees
that were created by the 1643 Solemn league and Covenant with
revolutionary England – the first genuinely British institutions. They were
self-consciously the heirs of Sidney,Melville, Spenser, and Hume. Their
goal was seen to be world liberation, understood as a world of reformed
polities, and that in turn could only mean the eschaton.
One of the striking features of the period lies in the resilience of the
British orientation among conservative as well as radical Scots. No less
striking is the commitment among powerful English Presbyterians to an
eschatological Anglo-Scottish union. If they were defeated by still more
radical English eschatological programs that had arisen from tensions and
changes within English puritanism during the early seventeenth century, all
of these groups shared a common inheritance. Ostensibly there could hardly
be people more different from the Leveller Richard Overton, a General
Baptist who thought everyone had a chance to be saved, and the Scottish
leaders Samuel Rutherford, George Gillespie, James Durham, and Archibald
Johnston of Warriston, all double predestination surpralapsarians. Yet
Overton and the Scots comprise variants on a common British apocalyptic
tradition that was anchored in Calvinism. They shared a common
philo-Semitism, a common apocalyptic, common revolutionary principles,
a common vision of Europe’s historical development, even common hopes
for political developments in the Middle East. All sides used the language
of the “patriot” and the public good. These were erstwhile allies whose
common cause had made the revolution possible in the first place. The
liberation of “our deluded brethren, the commons of Scotland” from lords
and clergy seemed a worthy cause not only to secure English liberty against
the very real danger of Presbyterianism, but as a larger mission.50 If the
English had succeeded in constructing a still more public society, founded
on civil religion and anti-clericalism, values that in large measure ensured
the English triumph, the common British tradition had encompassed them
all. The drastically conflicting agendas from now multiple radical Britains
all derived from shared vocabularies that looked back to Anglo-Scottish
radicalism ultimately rooted in the 1540s.
VI
The Scottish civic tradition possessed another dimension that emanated from
its core and shaped its purposes. Civic society was inherently civil society,
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learned, cultured, and articulate. To create the one could only involve
creating the other at the same time. Scots radicals had an almost boundless
confidence in the power of education and its ability to underwrite
citizenship. And well they might. For literally millennia, deep-seated
European tradition deriving from both biblical and classical sources regarded
the north as the region of the primitive, the barbaric, the bestial, and the
satanic. This great commonplace appeared in virtually every European
language; it informed a vast range of writing. It shaped thinking in both
England and France. As Scotland occupied still more northerly reaches of
the globe and was more emphatically defined by its location, the effects
there were all the greater. Indeed, sixteenth-century Scots of every political
and religious persuasion found themselves exercised to the point of obsession
as to whether civilization could be sustained within their cold and remote
country. Could it be discovered in the past, could it be created in the future?
In addition, within Scotland itself, the further north one went the more the
great truism seemed to be born out, for there in the north one encountered
the militarized kin-structures of the Highlands, regions reputedly populated
with fierce predators and lawless primitives. Even so, the Highlands, it must
be stressed, did not embody the problem, but merely typified it. The issue
was never simply the Highland line. It was always Scotland itself.51
Buchanan’s 1567 Dialogus was emphatic about the matter. To be sure,
Scots found themselves at a disadvantage when compared against the
“nimbler wits” of Africans, Egyptians, and numerous other peoples. But
this circumstance need not prove decisive, and the great humanist could
think of no more telling testimony to human capability than his own
experience. He was, after all, “a man of modest ability and almost no
resources.” Still worse, he had been “born in an uncultured age” – by which
he apparently meant a world at once warlike, priest-ridden, and
superstitious.52 Again and again in his writings we find him noting “the
infelicity of our birth,” an event that had taken place up in “the British
mountains . . . among a rude people.” Later, he says, he faced discrimination
in the sense that he had difficulty establishing his credibility: because of his
obscure, dark origins, the learned “scarcely and rarely . . . [paid] me heed.”
But, for all that, Buchanan still had “achieved something in my struggle
against [these] unfavorable circumstances.”53 And in fact so could every man.
But the point of the dialogue actually lay elsewhere: not Buchanan’s bitter
struggle and how others, determined enough, might replicate it, but the
universal opportunity now emerging for virtually everyone in revolutionary
Scotland. Young Thomas Maitland, the other character in the dialogue to
whom Buchanan played interlocutor, would not have to face obstacles like
those that Buchanan himself had needed to overcome. Revolutionary
Scotland would not only create a civic world, but integral to it, a cultured
one. Here was something truly radical: men could build a new society that
would tap into human capability and universalize Buchanan’s achievement.
Revolution would inherently stimulate learning. A civic world required
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 109
intimacy with antique values; reform required the liberation provided by
scripture; both required a politico-moral “pietas” needed to undergird
civilization. An ignorant citizen could only be a contradiction in terms.
Precisely here had lain the fatal difficulty in Mary’s reign. More than
anything else, for Buchanan and for James Stewart, earl of Moray, the
revolution’s leader and Mary’s half-brother, Mary’s catastrophic misrule and
incipient tyranny derived from a no less catastrophic education. Both Moray
and Buchanan made determined efforts to convert Mary into a
citizen-monarch – Buchanan famously so by reading her selections from
Livy after dinner. The significance of Buchanan’s reading to her has been
overlooked. Its point was neither learned entertainment nor passive
edification, but policy and action. As Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine have
noticed, “a nobleman or a prince might employ a poor but gifted young
man to read and excerpt the classics for him”with the purpose of mediating
“modern needs and ancient texts.” “Renaissance readers . . . persistently
envisage action as the outcome of reading” – education in the most direct
and applied sense.54 Although Buchanan had long before ceased to be a
young man, his role here is unmistakable, and without doubt Mary was
receiving the best instruction available. At the same time Moray himself
provided, or sought to provide, a still more hands-on kind of instruction,
yet one very much informed by the same moral principles.55
If they failed, it was not for want of trying. Nor did they regard their
failure as resulting from any natural predisposition of character or even of
gender. Despite the disabilities inherent in women rulers, disabilities founded
on cultural assumptions that no one of either sex seriously contested, neither
Moray nor Buchanan thought Mary Stewart’s governance need prove a
disaster. Both believed that Mary had been corrupted (irremediably as it
turned out) through the dreadful upbringing she had received from the
House of Guise. Mary the little girl who had left Scotland at age six,
Buchanan insisted, was a wonderful creature who improved her mind tosuch an extent that she made even nature seem crude and even art unskillful.
But Mary the young adult who returned to Scotland at age nineteen was a
very different kind of person indeed. As he had her lament in his verses,
If my uncle had not been so dangerous to me and so dishonorable,
I, Mary, should have been the leading lady of my age.
But he disgraced both his own repute and mine as well
By those wrongs which turn whole kingdoms upside down.56
The education of her son, the infant James VI, offered far brighter prospects.
Education could overcome climate, geography, and, if necessary, even
gender.
Buchanan’s successors, Melville and Hume, fully agreed. Melville makes
Gathelus almost a kind of professor who publicly explicates the wisdom of
Athens and Memphis: “In Greek letters or in Egyptian hieroglyphs, /
Everyone accustomed himself to receive from the mouth of Gathelus / All
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of the master’s teachings howsoever much there might be.” Here was the
learning of the Druids, learning that Hemecus took with him into Ireland
and from there into Britain. Small wonder that Gathelus’s wife, the Egyptian
princess Scota, turns out to be a woman outstanding in “character” and
“accomplishment” – rather than a rare beauty, as we might have expected.57
Accordingly, Gathelus will share his vision of the future with her. Nor will
it surprise us that Hume’s real daughter Anna was highly educated and
proved a formidable presence. This is far from a world of gender equality.
But the power of education made it far more plastic than its formal norms
might lead us to expect. Only when empirical experience seemed to validate
female disability, did those principles, usually, become axiomatic injunctions.
The upholders of sincere religion were at the same time upholders of the
learning and creativity. In 1586 Hume would celebrate not only Francis
Walsingham’s devotion to “vera pietas” (with its full range of meanings) but
also and no less to the Muses.58 In 1603 the opportunities in the emergent
British age seemed all but limitless, and they apparently extended to just
about everyone. The conclusions seem extraordinarily meritocractic and
populist when Hume declares: “We don’t want men of this kind [of learning
and letters] to be as rare as in former times, but to be numerous, indeed to
be the entirety of the population.”59 After all, so many achievements seemed
to result simply from education.“Nor do I doubt that there were some of
small or no name who, given the same chance in life and the same education,
could have equaled or surpassed” even the greatest names.60The implications
were emphatically activist. “Let not our native land stand in the way of
anyone’s ambition. Whoever you are, do not be lacking in yourself, and
she [Britannia] will not be lacking to you.”61 Familiar ways of thinking
crumbled; traditional postures became untenable. The old excuses simply
would not do. “Nor will there be any person complaining that his native
land will stand in the way of his virtue which, if I am not mistaken, was the
excuse we used to hear from people born in Scotland.”62 Buchanan had
indeed become universalized. Now the opening remarks to the Dialogus
became articulated, elaborated, and, seemingly, realizable. In the new Britain
men will “move over to the camp of the Muses.” That, however, by no
means implied that they withdrew from public life. Just the reverse. They
would not do so “as baseborn knaves, nor as cowards . . . but as soldiers
ready to do battle henceforth on a different ground, and with a different
expense.”63 Learning necessarily comprised a civic activity. The struggle
against universal empire, the Counter-Reformation, the Hapsburgs, would
not be decided simply on the battlefield but also within the realm of letters.
Men who, as fighters in the wars between England and Scotland, had
formerly worked against the good of this island would now strive for the
common interest.
Hume’s buoyant optimism could face no greater challenge than the
Scottish Highlands. These regions, he insisted, did not distinguish Scotland
from other countries. Did not all nations have their primitive regions, their
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Scotland and the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650 . 111
mountain men? “The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines, the Caucasus, and
the like; that is, Italy, France, Spain, Asia Minor, etc.,” how did they differ
from Scotland and her mountains?64 Nothing need condemn any individual,
any nation. No place on earth need be blighted. What were needed were
the right institutions and the right determination. Paraphrasing Horace,
Hume added “what in sum do we find? That mental ability is lacking to us?
Or to this clime, or this earth? Or is there anything so wild that it cannot
become tame, and, if you train it, that cannot take on a civilized way of
life?”65 Hume’s solution to the Highland problem will be grossly offensive
to today’s romantic sensibility. He proposed the establishment of English
settlements at Lochaber and in the Isles. Later lowland Scots would join
them, and intermarriage between these two groups would feature high on
Hume’s agenda.66 Why in the world did Hume want English people in the
Scottish Isles and in the most intractable region of the mainland? Britain was
to be one country, one people. Ethnic identity was not something to be
invented, savored, and defined by its (putative) victimhood, but to be
overcome for higher, shared purposes and common humanity – very much
in ways that anticipate the European Enlightenment. His view is profoundly
anti-racist in the sense that it vehemently denied the significance of any such
category. Much the same principles informed Hume’s proposed plantations.
English settlements in the most remote areas of Scotland would cause English
people everywhere to own these regions as part of their country and part
of their responsibility. Such settlements, whether English or lowland Scottish,
would not seek to overawe the local inhabitants, but to provide an exemplary
model.“Let’s see the inhabitants there put aside their ill-will by slow degrees,
their uncivilized way of life by the example [of the settlers], and little by
little take on the aspect of humanity.”67 Adopting the aspect of humanity
can only have meant joining the highest form of human association,
becoming a citizen. Hume visibly sought assimilation rather than
extirpation. There would be no clearances, but, like Buchanan, he envisioned
civics and civility supplanting Gaelic traditionalism. Post-Romantic
preoccupations with “authenticity,” “higher wisdom,” and “diversity”
formed no part of his mental world. Hume was not in the least
“multi-cultural,” and precisely for that reason surprisingly egalitarian.
If many of Hume’s ideas seem to anticipate key liberal attitudes and what
Walter Lippman called the Public Philosophy, his real measure, along with
that of Melville and Buchanan, can only be against the commonplaces of
their age. All three totally rejected the blood-based, Gael-Gall (foreigner)
partition between the Gàihealtachd and the rest of Britain, the Gaels’ resolute
refusal to mix “with uncouth blood,” and still more the cruel eugenics
practices intended to preserve Gaelic blood from internal degeneration.68 In
1570 British-oriented Scottish Protestants transformed Harry the minstrel’s
blood-based, anti-English verse narrative The Wallace (1470s) into a civic
poem with astounding ease. They merely prefaced it with Ciceronian and
other classical tags, ignored the references to “Our ald Ennemys cummyn
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of Saxonys blud,” and read it as an appeal for activism and reform. Even the
poem’s medieval piety