Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424-1540

KINGSHIP AND LOVE IN SCOTTISH POETRY, 1424–1540

This book is dedicated to the memory of Gillian Sands

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

JOANNA MARTIN University of Nottingham, UK

© Joanna Martin 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Joanna Martin has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Martin, Joanna, 1976– Kingship and love in Scottish poetry, 1424–1540 1. English poetry – Scottish authors – History and criticism 2. English poetry – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism 3. English poetry – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism 4. Kings and rulers in literature 5. Love in literature I. Title 821.2’09352621 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Martin, Joanna, 1976– Kingship and love in Scottish poetry, 1424–1540 / by Joanna Martin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6273-0 (alk. paper) 1. English poetry–Scottish authors–History and criticism. 2. English poetry–Middle English, 1100–1500–History and criticism. 3. English poetry–Early modern, 1500–1700– History and criticism. 4. Romances, English–History and criticism. 5. Kings and rulers in literature. 6. Love in literature. I. Title. PR8540.M37 2007 821’.2093543–dc22 2007013627 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6273-0

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations

vii ix xi

Introduction

The Wooing of the King

1

The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy

19

2

Lancelot of the Laik

41

3

The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour

61

4

Robert Henryson’s ‘traitie of Orpheus kyng’

79

5

The Thre Prestis of Peblis

103

6

King Hart

131

Epilogue

Poetry and the Minority of James V

155

Select Bibliography Index

1

179 195

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Preface It is often observed that little love poetry survives from fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury Scotland, and that the literature composed north of the Border in the late medieval period privileges moral and instructional themes and subject matter above the amatory. However, this study reveals and re-establishes the centrality of amorousness to the projects of Older Scots poets, suggesting that the discussion of love and the use of discourses connected with the amatory are fundamental to the advisory, ethical and political nature of much of the verse writing of this period. In this light, the study provides a reappraisal of poetry written by the major literary figures of late medieval Scotland, James I, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay. However, it also examines a number of less well-known and anonymous works which furnish a rich background to these canonical texts and are essential for our full understanding of Scottish literary culture between 1424 and 1540. The critical approaches that govern the book are historicist and cultural, and the amatory content of each work is related to the intellectual and political context in which it was composed, or to the interpretive context(s) provided by the manuscripts or prints in which it survives. In particular this study identifies a recurrent concern in these texts with the youth and consequent vulnerability of the monarch to personal misgovernance, and this is related to Scotland’s experience of repeated royal minorities from the succession of James I to that of James VI. The period of Stewart monarchy from which the poetry addressed here emanates, and to which it responds, is represented in the cover image of the ‘The Roiail Progenei of our Most Sacred King James’, reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery. Joanna M. Martin

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Acknowledgements The debts of gratitude I have accrued in writing this book are many. I am very grateful to Lincoln College Oxford where, during my time as a Darby Fellow in English, I was able to complete the volume. The Fellows’ Research Fund and the Zilkha Fund at Lincoln College have enabled me to attend conferences and to travel to various research libraries in the preparation of the book. Thanks are also due to the staff of the National Library of Scotland and National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh, the British Library in London, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, for assisting me with my research on many occasions. I am grateful to the National Portrait Gallery in London, for allowing me to reproduce the ‘The Roiail Progenei of our Most Sacred King James’ (1619) by Benjamin Wright, on the book jacket. Many individuals have contributed far more than they may realize to the writing of this book. I am particularly grateful for the help I have received from Dr Sally Mapstone, Dr Nicola Royan, Professor Priscilla Bawcutt, and Thomas Rutledge, all of whom have been generous with their wise advice, and have done so much to nurture and sustain my enthusiasm for Scottish literature. I owe special thanks to Dr Katherine McClune for friendship, encouragement, and so many invaluable comments and suggestions. However, my greatest and incalculable debt is to my parents and my sister Danielle without whose optimism and love this book could not have been completed.

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Abbreviations ALHTS APS BL CR DNB DOST

EETS ELR ES IMEV

IR MÆ MED MLQ NAS NLS NM OED PQ RES SHR SLJ SP SS SSL SSR STC

STS TEAMS

Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed., T. Dickson and J.B. Paul, 11 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–1916) Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed., T. Thomson and C. Innes, 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1814–75) British Library, London Chaucer Review The Dictionary of National Biography, ed., L. Stephen and S. Lee (Oxford, 1908) A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue from the Twelfth Century to the End of the Seventeenth, ed., W. Craigie et al. (Chicago, Aberdeen and Oxford, 1937–2002) Early English Text Society; ES Extra Series; OS Original Series English Literary Review English Studies The Index of Middle English Verse, ed., C. Brown and R.H. Robbins (New York, 1943), Supplement, ed., R.H. Robbins and J.L. Cutler (Lexington, Ky., 1965) Innes Review Medium Ævum The Middle English Dictionary, ed., H. Kurath and S.M. Kuhn et al. (Michigan and Oxford, 1956–) Modern Language Quarterly National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh Neuphilologische Mitteilungen The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford, 1989) Philological Quarterly Review of English Studies Scottish Historical Review Scottish Literary Journal Studies in Philology Scottish Studies Studies in Scottish Literature Scottish Studies Review A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, ed., A.W. Pollard et al., 2nd edn, 3 vols (1976–91), The Bibliographical Society Scottish Text Society The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages

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Introduction

The Wooing of the King This introduction takes its title from the sixteenth-century rubric which accompanied William Dunbar’s beast fable, ‘This hinder nycht in Dunfermeling’, in the Bannatyne Manuscript (c.1568): ‘Follows the wowing of the king quhen he wes in Dunfermeling’. Although the characterization of the poem as an account of the ‘wooing’ of a king, in this case, of James IV of Scotland, is now believed to be a misreading of Dunbar’s disturbing allegory, in which a fox seduces a lamb, and creeps into her skin for his own safety, Bannatyne’s creative entitling nevertheless provides a telling insight into the literary concerns of one of the earliest audiences for late medieval Scottish poetry. Indeed, even if Bannatyne’s rubric has no historical or interpretive authority for the decoding of Dunbar’s allegory, it nevertheless draws our attention to a strongly discernable body of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Scots poetry concerned with the wooing of kings. This study provides the first full-length investigation of this synthesis of amatory and political themes and discourses in Older Scottish poetry, and where recoverable, of contemporary responses to this literary concern. The texts examined in the following six chapters and epilogue were composed between c.1424 and 1537 and include canonical writings by major literary figures from this period such as James I, Robert Henryson, Dunbar, Sir David Lyndsay and John Bellenden, as well as less well-known anonymous compositions which may not have had a wide circulation in their own day. Between them, these writings represent a diverse range of poetic forms and genres from dream vision, to romance, fable, tale collection and allegory, attesting the richness of Older Scots literary culture. They all share a concern with the impact of sexual desire on the king’s governance of his realm and therefore establish a connection between the moral order of the self and good political rule. All focus their concerns in the complex figure of the king, mostly fictional but sometimes historical, as a lover. It has frequently been observed that little love poetry survives from late medieval Scotland,1 and that the literature composed north of the Border in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century privileges moral and instructional themes and subject matter above the amatory. It has also been astutely noted that where Scottish texts do address the theme of love, they nevertheless exhibit a ‘subjection in emphasis of the amatory to the political or ethical’.2 However, this study re-establishes the centrality of amorousness to the projects of Older Scots poets, suggesting that the discussion of love is fundamental to the advisory and ethical nature of much of the verse writing of this 1 See Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), p. 293. 2 Sally Mapstone, ‘Kingship and The Kingis Quair’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 51–69 (62–3).

2

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

period, particularly that which deals with kingship, and impossible to disengage from political contexts and concerns.3 It argues that amatory discourses – love narrative, love lyric, amatory debate, vision or complaint, the register of fin’ amor – are used to focus attention on the most profound and challenging aspects of the governance of the self, that prerequisite quality for the rule of others. These texts figure passion as the area of human experience which is natural, inevitable and so inescapable, and which therefore stretches the moral and ethical resources of the individual to their limits, making unexpected demands on the restraints established through received learning and advice giving. Nevertheless, the book demonstrates that the positions that these writings adopt on royal amorousness are far from homogenous. Although the royal desires scrutinized by the poems covered here are almost exclusively heterosexual, and usually exclude extreme forms of ‘deviant’ sexuality (such as incest), they still reveal a range of subtle perspectives on the role of passion in public life. The lexis with which amorousness is described by these writers – ‘lufe’, ‘desire’, ‘delite’, ‘pleseir’, ‘sensualite’, ‘fantesy’, ‘affection’, ‘plesance’, ‘appetyte’, ‘wantoness’ – contains resonance of natural desire, love and physical enjoyment, as well as of the exercise of the will, and excessive, lascivious and unreasoned conduct. While the early sixteenth-century writers such as Lyndsay and Bellenden begin to explore notions of ‘effeminate’ desire (lust which makes its subject weak and ‘womanish’); express anxiety about intimate male relationships; and employ explicitly negative adjectives, ‘abhominabill’, ‘vnbridillit’ and ‘immoderatt’, to denote all unrestrained passion, this study argues that Older Scots poetry does not exclusively moralize love as a negative influence on the individual or community. In exploring the full spectrum of poetic responses to amorous kingship, the study locates this persistent literary concern in the distinctive cultural and political environment of late medieval Scotland. The fusion of amatory and political elements which dominates so much of the Scottish poetry of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century represents a tradition of writing which is largely distinct from the literary developments taking place in contemporary England. As will be discussed later in this introduction, this tradition was shaped by factors relating to the political and cultural context from which the poetry emerges, and also by the identity of the reading public of late medieval Scotland. But, despite its distinctiveness, this poetics of love and kingship has a number of literary influences, which include English, Scottish and Continental texts. It is necessary to outline these briefly here. Most obviously, the Scottish poems that this book addresses are influenced by the seminal texts of the medieval ‘advice to princes’ tradition, such as the pseudoAristotelian Secretum Secretorum, translated from Arabic into Latin in the mid-twelfth century, and Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum (c.1280). Both texts were widely circulated throughout Europe and translated into several vernaculars. Both include in their instruction some, albeit often limited, discussion of the regulation of the king’s sexual body and the importance of royal chastity. Thus Book I of De Regimine Principum instructs its reader, in rather abstract terms, on the nature of the 3 For a comparable study of late sixteenth-century Scots poetry, see Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI (Basingstoke, 2002).

The Wooing of the King

3

passions ‘love and wrath’, while its second book addresses physical impulses in its sections on marriage, the conduct of women, the care of children, and the rule of the household. The work’s treatment of marriage contains prohibitions against incest and polygamy (both said to inflame lechery), and general counsel on the desirability of marriage as a ‘kyndelich’ (natural) state which can bring reconciliation between divided parties, and the blessings of children, if undertaken with a suitably virtuous woman and at the right age.4 The earlier Secretum Secretorum deals with all practical aspects of the king’s governance of others, such as cultivating royal virtue (prudence, discretion and mercy); choosing counsellors wisely; and all aspects of his bodily regime from clothing to appropriate foods and medicine. The surviving English versions of the text warn against physical indulgence such as idleness and gluttony which are said to lead to lechery, which in turn engenders serious ills such as avarice and pride.5 Many versions of the Secretum also include a chapter on the desirability of monarchical chastity, counselling the royal reader to resist sexual intercourse, which they claim weakens the body and virtues and reduces man to the condition of an unreasonable beast.6 That the poets described in the following chapters responded to the Secretum Secretorum is suggested by the fact that two romances, Lancelot of the Laik and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, incorporate re-workings of it into their own narratives. Late Middle English poetic refashionings of these advice texts, such as John Gower’s Confessio Amantis or Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, were also known to audiences north of the Border.7 Indeed, Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c.1386– 90), which was composed during the troubled reign of Richard II, is a particularly important precursor of the poetic combination of amatory and political discourses, and the focus on the king’s amatory self, in later Scots writing. Gower’s combining of two distinct literary traditions, that of the confessional manual and that of courtly love poetry, and his insertion of a formal speculum principis, based on the Secretum Secretorum, into the lover’s confession and the priest’s instruction, is a major and unique achievement.8 The vast majority of the tales told by Venus’s priest Genius to edify the lover, Amans, deal with the amatory misconduct of those in power, 4 See The Governance of Kings and Princes. John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs and Paul G. Remley (New York and London, 1977), especially pp. 180–89. Also see Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University (Cambridge, 1999). 5 See Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M.A. Manzalaoui, EETS, 276 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 35, 45 (the ‘Ashmole Version’). Also see Steven J. Williams, The Secret Of Secrets: The Scholarly Career Of A Pseudo-Aristotelian Text In The Latin Middle Ages (University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 7–30 (especially 23–6 on the influence of Aristotle’s Politics and Nicomachean Ethics on the Secretum’s teachings). 6 Secretum Secretorum, p. 135 (the version by Johannes de Caritate). 7 James I’s likely knowledge of Hoccleve’s work is addressed in Chapter 1. Also see Nicholas Perkins, ‘Musing on Mutability: A Poem in the Welles Anthology and Hoccleve’s The Regiment of Princes’, RES, 50 (1999), 493–8. 8 John Burrow, ‘The Portrayal of Amans in Confessio Amantis’, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Responses and Reassessments, ed. Alistair Minnis (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 5–24 (5).

4

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

and Gower significantly expands the section on royal chastity in his interpolated speculum principis to consider the brutal consequences of royal lechery and its ability to destroy a king’s power. In addition, Gower creates Amans, an immensely complex figure who represents both poet and reader within the text, in the image of a lustful and wrathful king-figure who requests to hear but then rejects Aristotle’s lessons to Alexander.9 This vast English poem was circulating in Scottish contexts throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: there are several references to copies of the poem, now lost, in Scottish ownership, and one English manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, which was in Scottish hands from the late fifteenth century, contains an excerpt from the poem in Scots orthography.10 A further manuscript of the Confessio, London, BL, Additional MS 22139, contains some corrective notes in a northern, possibly Scottish orthography. It can be associated with the Aberdeenshire ForbesLeith family in the eighteenth century.11 In addition to this, close verbal echoes of the Confessio can be found in several Scottish works, including The Kingis Quair (c.1424), The Quare of Jelusy (c.1480), and The Spectacle of Luf (1492). However, a further bridge between the popular ‘advice to princes’ tradition, the creative responses to it such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and the Scottish poetry that this book is concerned with, is the instructional prose and non-narrative poetry composed in fifteenth-century Scotland. Indeed, a Scots prose translation of the Secretum Secretorum, probably following ‘one of the abbreviated French recensions of the Secreta’,12 was made in the mid-fifteenth century by Sir Gilbert Hay. Hay’s The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis dedicates its fourth chapter to the king’s sexual body.13 Here the narrator records Aristotle’s lesson to Alexander on ‘how all princis and lordis suld eschew … all lustis of outrageous carnale appetitis’. ‘Carnale desyre’, Aristotle warns, draws ‘the mannis jnclynacioun fra gude purpos till all euill dilectaciouns’. The king who cannot control his sexual desires therefore embarks upon ‘vnrychtwis conquestis and acquisicioun of othir mennis gudis’, is regarded as untrustworthy, and deserted by his family and friends.14 Despite the relative succinctness with which the subject of desire is treated, Hay makes it clear that poor self-governance in this respect leads to a host of other moral failings, and he deals with these in more detail in the chapters on largesse, truth and sapience.

9 Compare Russell A. Peck, Kingship and Common Profit in Gower’s Confessio Amantis (Carbondale, Illinois, 1978), pp. 86–7. 10 Joanna Martin, ‘Readings of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University (2002), especially pp. 76–94. 11 I am grateful to Professor Priscilla Bawcutt for sharing her unpublished views on this manuscript. 12 Sally Mapstone, ‘The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1500’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1986), p. 63. 13 References are to The Prose works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume III: The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis. 14 Prose Works, III, p. 67.

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5

Later chapters of the work also contain reminders of the importance of avoiding any physical excesses, too much time spent in female company included.15 The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis was completed in 1456 and was probably translated for William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and Caithness. It survives with two other prose translations, The Buke of the Law of Armys (a version of Honoré Bonet’s L’Arbre des Batailles) and The Buke of The Ordre of Knychthede (from a French version of Raymond Lull’s Libre de Caballeria) in a single manuscript (now Edinburgh, NLS, MS TD 209) which was copied for William Sinclair’s son, Oliver Sinclair of Roslin in the 1480s.16 The Buke of The Ordre of Knychthede, a treatise on chivalry, is addressed to those chosen by a king to occupy the office of knighthood and who are thus ‘maid chiftane and gouernoure’17 of others. The work contains a substantial chapter on knightly virtues, many of which coincide with the royal virtues recommended in the Governaunce of Princis. This chapter also advises the knightly reader to resist the seven deadly sins through the cultivation of charity and chastity, which ‘forsablye feichtis agaynis lechery’.18 Furthermore, the knight must remove himself from worldly concerns if he is to fulfil his order’s obligations: if he ‘seis a nakit womman jn the mornyng he sall nocht do his prouffit na honoure that day – Na quhen he seis a womman kemmand hir hede nakit jn the mornyng he sall nocht haue honour jn armes that day’.19 Another prose work which is concerned with knighthood and the dangers of the erotic for those in power, is the ironic and comic treatise, the Spectacle of Luf, which survives uniquely in the early sixteenth-century Asloan Manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, 16500).20 The Spectacle is dated internally to 1492, and followed in the manuscript by a note that suggests that it was either composed, or more likely copied,21 by a G. Myll, whose identity is unclear. Its narrator asserts that his work has been ‘translatit out of latyn’, and although its exact source has not been identified,22 it seems 15 See chapters 16 and 24. 16 On the manuscript’s evolution see Jonathan A. Glenn, ‘The MS History of Hay’s Buke of the Law of Armys: A Study’, in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 39–60. 17 Prose Works, III, p. 9. 18 Prose Works, III, p. 43. 19 Prose Works, III, p. 49. 20 References are to The Asloan Manuscript: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 14, 16 (Edinburgh and London, 1923–25), I, pp. 271–98. 21 This explanation is the most plausible given that there are differences between the hand responsible for copying the text and the main hand of the manuscript. See Catherine van Buuren, ‘Asloan and his Manuscript: An Edinburgh Notary and Scribe in the Days of James III, IV and V (c.1470–1530)’, in Stewart Style, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (East Linton, 1996), pp. 15–51 (p. 27); I.C. Cunningham, ‘The Asloan MS’, in The Renaissance in Scotland. Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan (Leiden, 1994) pp. 107–35 (p. 130). 22 Most recently, Saldanha has suggested that the treatise bears similarities to a Latin poem, Fuge cetus feminarum, which warns against loving women of various different estates. See Kathryn Saldanha, ‘Thewis of Gudwomen: Middle Scots Moral Advice with European Connections?’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham Caie, R.J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone, and Kenneth Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 288–99 (p. 298).

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Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

to be based on materials from the Latin satirical tradition.23 However the text is framed by an apparently original prologue and epilogue, which are presented as the contribution of the translator, and which contain many echoes of prior English and Scottish writing, including Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and Gower’s Confessio Amantis.24 And, whatever its synthesis of Latin misogynistic materials, the treatise section of the text itself contains echoes of vernacular texts including Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. The Spectacle offers advice on how ‘to eschew þe delectatioun of þe flesche’, and consists of teachings, mainly imparted through brief exemplary stories of a decidedly misogynistic bent, which are delivered by a ‘gud anceant Knycht’ to his son, a ‘gretly amorous’ squire. The knight is said to be a paragon of chivalry, and learned in natural philosophy, but is concerned that his son’s ‘weilldoing in armes’ is being compromised by the ‘folye’ of his lechery. Comically, the son proves to be a selective and unsubtle reader, who interprets his father’s admonitory lessons in any way he will in order to justify the continuance of his amorous behaviour in an only slightly modified form. By the end of the text there is no suggestion that he has heeded his father’s warnings to love only within the ‘haly band of matermoney’. The antifeminist tone and content of the Spectacle does not detract from its overriding concern with self-restraint. The prologue is followed by a summary of authoritative moral teachings on lechery, which is in turn followed by antifeminist invective – albeit deployed with considerable self-reflexive irony. Although the knight teaches that ‘mony realmes and townis, kingis, princis & noblemen has bene distroyet & put downe throw þe wikkitnes of evill wemen’, he also declares that ‘men ar sa blyndit and flatterit’ by feminine beauty that they bear full responsibility for their downfall. Furthermore he emphasizes that the man who has succumbed to love and ‘is gouernit be a woman’ is therefore ‘nocht worth to gouerne him self nor nane vtheris’. It is men’s ‘foul delectatioun of wemen’ which the son ‘callis luf’ that leads to the destruction of the powerful. Confirming the text’s concern with ruling the self in order to rule others, the knight’s illustrative stories feature many examples of royal as well as knightly individuals who have succumbed to unrestrained and politically compromising passion. The Asloan Manuscript anthologizes other advisory works that offer perspectives on royal sexuality. For example, the devotional Contemplacioun of Synnaris of William of Touris (c.1499), appeals to ‘kingis’ (65) to remember their ‘hie professioun’ (67) and, amidst contemplative guidance, offers counsel on subjects such as the administration of justice, the importance of royal wisdom, and succinct advice on eschewing carnality for charity.25 More detailed on royal amorousness

23 See Alcuin Blamires, Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992), especially part 4. 24 This is discussed further in Joanna Martin, ‘Some Older Scots Responses to John Gower’s Confessio Amantis: The Spectacle of Luf and Rolland’s Court of Venus’, in Scottishness(es) and Middle English Culture: Proceedings of the 7th LOMERS Conference, ed. Ruth Kennedy (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 25 Asloan Manuscript, II, p. 236.

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is The Buke of the Chess,26 a verse translation of the highly influential thirteenthcentury Ludus Scaccorum of Jacobus de Cessolis, a moralized interpretation of the game of chess that glosses each piece as a member of one of the estates of society and uses short exemplary stories in this process. The poem begins with an explanation of the origins and improving value of the game of chess followed by advice to the king and queen, before moving on to address the knightly class (at length), and other members of society from merchants to the town messenger. The enumeration of qualities proper for the king includes justice, truth, and ‘humanité’ (297) towards his people, which includes tolerance and correction of those who are mislead by their passions. This idea of the king’s duty to correct those who have succumbed to excessive desire is a theme which recurs in some of the poetic texts examined in this book, especially The Kingis Quair and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. Finally the narrator comments on the importance of kings avoiding ‘lichorye’ (415). A king should have a queen and live virtuously to ensure that his heirs also follow his ‘forme of liffing’ (420). This is illustrated with the exemplary tale of the abstinence of the young Scipio Africanus who, on conquering a city, is offered a beautiful virgin by its population. But on realizing that the woman is promised in marriage to another, he returns her ‘vndefowlit’ (453), with a gift of gold, to her family. As a result of his sexual restraint and nobility towards others he is made king. The following section of The Buke of the Chess concerns the queen and her duty to act as a model of chaste virtue. However, the tale used to illustrate queenly continence is rather more negative than those which deal with the king’s body, intersecting with other antifeminist works in the Asloan manuscript such as the Spectacle and The Sevyne Sagis. The disturbing exemplum concerns a duchess, Rosamylda, who is besieged in her castle. She falls in love with her ‘fair’ enemy, the king of Hungary, and secretly invites him to marry her and have all her possessions. Her sons are killed in the ensuing battle, and her daughters only saved from rape when they conceal rotting horse flesh in their dresses. The king weds the queen but then allows his men to rape her, before killing her with his own hands. This, the narrator notes, is her punishment for being a ‘wikkit woman werray lecherous / That for hir lust this castell gaf’ (685–6). The instructional works discussed so far were probably circulated amongst minor aristocratic or urban readers. John Ireland’s The Meroure of Wyssdome was, however, written with a royal reader in mind. It was originally intended for James III, but was rededicated to his son James IV in 1490. Ireland is explicit about his educative aims and mindful of the ‘ȝoutheid & tendir age’ of his implied reader who ‘suld her and ler doctrine and sciens to gowerne eftirwart þe peple’ of his realm.27 The first six books of this prose work comprise a theological treatise, while the seventh book takes the form of a speculum principis, which draws on a number of sermons by Jean

26 References are to The Buke of the Chess, ed. Catherine van Buuren, STS, 4th Ser., 27 (Edinburgh, 1997). 27 See Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, Volume III, ed. Craig McDonald, STS, 4th Ser., 19 (Aberdeen, 1990), p. 136. The mention of James’s youth and consequent need for guidance is repeated on several occasions in the text. See also p. 161.

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Gerson (d.1429) and a variety of other sources in the tradition.28 The main part of the text provides, as Craig McDonald puts it, ‘the kind of theological training a king as but one member of the community of faith must have in order to obtain wisdom’, while the final book, ‘is a special application of that wisdom to the affairs of state’.29 Book VI of the Meroure is concerned with the seven sacraments of the church, and is concluded with two chapters on marriage. These chapters explain why God created marriage and gloss the spiritual significance of the sacrament as a symbol of the relationship between god and man: marriage is ‘a takin figur & sacrament representand and figurand þe spiritual and inuisible coniunccioun of god wt the creatur & saule of man be fre and hartlie luf betuix þame’.30 In the speculum principis that follows, the narrator defines the proper object of the king’s affections as the ‘perfit luf and amor of the realme and common proffit’, but also focuses on the rule of the king’s body. He describes what is ‘proffitable’ to kings and what is ‘disconuenient & repungnaunt’, listing carnal pleasure in the latter category as having the capacity to cause both personal shame and political confusion because of the king’s status as exemplum amongst his people: ‘for all takis tent to þe lif and Gouernaunce of the prince sua þat it þat he dois secreit is sone reuelit’.31 Ireland illustrates this warning with the popular story of Vulcan’s ‘subtile net’ in which he captured his wife Venus in the embraces of Mars ‘and did þame confusion befor the multitud of goddis’. This, he explains, signifies the ability of love to daunt royal power: ‘quhen the gret strenth of the king or prince mellis it wt wenus þat is wolupte þan he tholis scham and confusioun befor all the wys pepil of his realme’.32 Continuing in this practical vein, the royal reader is reminded that a virtuous marriage both controls the ‘fleshlie desiris’ which are so damaging to his rule, and produces the fruit of noble heirs. The address to the young and unmarried James IV becomes particularly direct at this point: ‘And þarfor Souueran lord þi hienes suld gretlie consider and awis to þi noble mariage to iune þi hienes wt a lady of hie and noble blud of farnes wertu and beute’. And in his ‘ȝoutheid and tendir age’ James is advised to ‘haue mesur’ in all aspects of his personal governance, and especially in ‘carnale operacioun wt þi tendyr lady and spous’ because the care of the body will leave him strong for the service of his people.33 As this brief survey has shown, the insular instructional prose and nonnarrative works which provide the literary backdrop to the poetry covered in this book, overwhelmingly regard unregulated sexual desire as the catalyst for other moral failings that are detrimental to good royal governance, to the military duties expected of a leader, and as damaging to the virtuous example the king should set for his people. The poetic tradition with which the following chapters (arranged both chronologically and generically) are concerned embraces some of these ideas. For example, the writers of the minority and personal rule of James V, whose works 28 29 30 31 32 33

See Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, pp. 408–51. Meroure, p. xliv. Meroure, p. 96. Meroure, p. 130. Meroure, p. 131. Meroure, pp. 135–6.

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are addressed in the volume’s epilogue, are particularly anxious that amorousness institutes a more general moral decline in the royal individual. However, these poetic works also encompass more subtle and sophisticated readings of royal amorousness. The most striking divergence from the didactic tradition occurs in a number of texts that seek to explore how sexual love can lead to virtue and wisdom and make a king more worthy of his office. They regard the experience of love positively rather than as antithetical to the religious and political virtues of reason, patience, loyalty and truth. Most strikingly, The Kingis Quair of James I of Scotland, the earliest text examined here, imagines an erotic love that can be governed by, and is wholly compatible with, reason, to the exclusion of duplicity and lasciviousness. The poet-narrator recounts how he once saw himself as a victim of political and personal misfortune, but then by falling in love became the antithesis of the usual protagonist of the De Casibus Virorum Illustrium tradition. As a lover, he steps onto Fortune’s upwardly turning wheel, rather than falling from this worldly prosperity to wretchedness. In the course of the poem’s dream sequence the narrator encounters Venus, who teaches him about constancy rather than fickleness. It is she who is responsible for sending him onwards to the instruction of Minerva and thus to patience and wisdom. The poem, which is the subject of Chapter 1, regards virtuous love as a mark of inward nobility which fits the poet-narrator for the service and leadership of others, making his amorous experience into a moral exemplum for its readers rather than an account of how the powerful are destroyed by their own desires. The Kingis Quair is a dream vision which draws on Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, but radically recasts their moral approaches to amorousness. Not all of the poem’s immediate successors, such as The Quare of Jelusy, which is anthologized in the same manuscript as James’s poem, sustained its hopeful reassessment of the role of amorousness in the public sphere. But one that does, perhaps partly as a result of its own sources and the conventions established by the romance genre,34 is Lancelot of the Laik, a free translation of part of a thirteenth-century French prose romance. In this text, discussed in Chapter 2, the protagonist’s love for Guinevere is an inspiration for martial courage and public service that results in the rescue of Arthur’s realm from an aggressor. The chivalric lover is not treated with irony or distance,35 but instead his passion is deemed ennobling. In the romance, the roles of monarch and lover are divided between Arthur and his knight. Yet, through Lancelot’s literary history, which is outlined in the poem’s original prologue to remind us of his royal birth (‘sone of Bane was, King of Albanak’, 201), and through the parallelism with which the poet describes their ordeals, Arthur’s poor government is scrutinized in the light of this knight’s amorous chivalry and the inspiring military leadership it produces.

34 See Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English Romance: Family, Marriage, Intimacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 235–52 (242). Also, Elspeth Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail (Oxford, 1986), pp. 49–78. 35 Derek Brewer, ‘Some Notes on Ennobling Love and its Successor in Medieval Romance’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 117–33.

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Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

Less idealistic than The Kingis Quair and Lancelot of the Laik, but nonetheless sanguine rather than condemnatory, is the central tale of The Thre Prestis of Peblis, told by Master Archibald (and discussed in Chapter 5). In this narrative, the sexual desires of a vigorous young king are redirected from adultery back into the proper restraints of marriage. Although the following narrative in this late fifteenth-century tale collection reminds the reader of the transience of worldly affection, Archibald’s tale accepts the inevitability of human sexual desire and optimistically suggests that the folly it may engender can be successfully corrected. It is not concerned with the repression of royal desire, merely its proper expression. Underpinning the optimistic perspective of these texts is the notion of the king’s virtuous or marital love as a metaphor for the harmonious relationship of crown and subjects.36 This is given explicit expression by writers in the period following that which concerns this study, and in particular in James VI of Scotland’s assertion in his parliamentary speech of 1603, ‘What God hath conioyned then, let no man separate. I am the husband and the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife’.37 The fifteenthcentury prose works discussed earlier in this introduction also explicitly apply the lexis of love, and particularly that of ‘amor’ rather than Christian ‘caritas’, to the proper relationship either of the king to his realm, or the knight to his chivalric duty. In The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, Hay states that the knight should be ‘of pes and concorde amorous’ (ch. 3, lines 490–92),38 while Ireland speaks of the king’s ‘amor’ and ‘luf’ for the common profit. Certainly in The Kingis Quair the narrator’s love for his sovereign lady (although this is not presented explicitly as a marriage) prepares him to be sent into the world as an exemplum of loyal service. In Lancelot of the Laik, the knight’s achievements, which are inspired by love, take place while Arthur receives instruction on the importance of winning his people’s hearts rather than fulfilling his own desires. In The Thre Prestis, the king’s penitent reunion with his queen is the final and symbolic stage of the reformation of his government, the legal and parliamentary aspects of which have been explored in the earlier sections of Archibald’s tale. However, while some of the other works explored in this book also use marriage as a metaphor for the king’s rule of his people, they do so by subverting the idealism of the analogy. In Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice (discussed in Chapter 4), it is the marriage of the protagonists that leads to the unbridling of sexual desire and the beginning of the end of Orpheus’s command of reason. Similarly, in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (the subject of Chapter 3), royal sexual misrule is not prevented by marriage.39 Even David Lyndsay’s Answer to the Kingis 36 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957), pp. 212–18. 37 See Sarah M. Dunnigan, ‘Discovering Desire in the Amatoria of James VI’ in Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Detroit, 2001), pp. 149–81 (p. 150); The Political Works of James I with an Introduction by Charles Howard McIlwain (New York, 1965), p. 272. 38 Prose works, III, p. 25. 39 Interesting commentary on this is provided in Book XIV, ch. 28 of Bower’s Scotichronicon. In this section Bower records the marriage and divorce of David II and Lady Margaret de Logie, commenting that the king selected this beautiful lady ‘not so much for the

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Flyting is ambiguous in its anticipation of the moral benefits of James V’s imminent marriage to a French bride. It figures such a marriage partner as a ‘bukkler’ or shield capable of enduring James’s strong desires. However, the metaphor suggests both that the prospective queen would be a moral restraint on the king, and perhaps also the unlucky recipient of his insatiable lusts. Indeed, most of the poems covered in this book search for a personal intellectual or moral solution, rather than just a sacramental or legislative one, to the problem of disruptive love. Although a number of the poems dealt with in this volume express anxieties about the co-existence of amorous desire and political resolve in the monarch, they rarely advocate the complete denial of love, or even regard the removal of desire from the individual as a credible possibility. For example, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour recasts its sources to make amorousness an important part of its larger advisory agenda, which is to teach all men, irrespective of status, what it is to live virtuously. Many of the love narratives which are woven into this account of imperial ambition are carefully situated in some kind of moral framework. Thus passionate encounters are often followed by the giving of advice, which in turn leads to the restraint or redirection of desire. Yet, ultimately it is Alexander’s own adulterous love, which takes place in the ambiguous and exotic orient, that remains unchecked until it is too late and which has serious political consequences. Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice depicts the young king Orpheus being overwhelmed by desire despite his best efforts to reclaim his queen through the cultivation of harmony within his own self and in the threatening world around him. However, the moralitas to the poem encourages the reader to persist in the struggle to harmonize desire and reason in the self and to be more successful than Orpheus in this quest of making peace between these faculties. Even King Hart (discussed in Chapter 6), which offers an exemplum of how a commitment to sensual pleasure in youth results in a dissolute old age, suggests that this state of affairs is largely natural and unavoidable. However, a recurrent tendency in the Scottish texts both of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century is the use of love narrative as a vehicle for considering the potential political difficulties which result from royal minority and the transition from tutelage to personal rule. The poems discussed in this book were composed against a backdrop of relative peace and economic stability (if not prosperity) in Scotland, conditions which were certainly not inimical to the growth of a rich insular literary culture. Although James I and III faced rebellions from some of their aristocratic subjects, which led to their own deaths, and while James II conducted a violent campaign against the family that had been pre-eminent in his minority, the Black Douglases, Scotland experienced no widespread political unrest of the sort that took place south of the Border. However, Scottish political life of this period was subject to the disruption of repeated royal minorities following the premature deaths of each of the Stewart kings. From the accession of James I in 1406 (at which time the young excellence of her character … as for the pleasure he took in her desirable appearance’. The Abbot notes that ‘today it is not modesty nor respect for character that lead to marriage but only regard for wealth or lust’. This is followed by several chapters on the evils of women. See Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D.E.R. Watt, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98), VII, pp. 333, 337.

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Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

king was a prisoner of the English) until that of James VI in 1567, every Scottish monarch came to the throne as minor. Several Scottish sovereigns were crowned as mere infants, and the eldest Stewart prince to succeed, James IV, was at fifteenyears-old still technically a minor when he was involved in the aristocratic rebellion that lead to his father’s death at the Battle of Sauchieburn. The control of young rulers, their proper moral and governmental education, the stability of the realm in the period before their personal rule could commence, and the smooth transition from minority to effective majority rule, was therefore of continual importance for the political classes of Scotland. Recent historians have stressed that the apparent weakness represented by repeated minorities was in many ways the kingdom’s strength, inhibiting the centralization of government and with it autocratic rule.40 During this period Scottish government remained peripatetic and dependent on the personal authority of the monarch. Indeed, the Stewart monarchs were all capable of providing successful leadership during their majorities despite their unpromising starts and their need to assert authority over the factions that had competed for power during their minorities: the Albany Stewarts during the imprisonment of James I, the Crichtons, Livingstons and ‘Black’ Douglases in the minority of James II, and the Kennedys and Boyds in that of James III. Indeed, historians have also argued that the tensions between the crown and nobility following prolonged minority rule can be overstated.41 The retribution that adult kings inflicted on over-mighty families was usually swift and conclusive, and frequently motivated by the crown’s desire to increase its revenues as well as assert its authority. Thus when James II moved against the Livingstons in 1449 he was not only curtailing the influence of one of the most ambitious families of his minority, which had recently sought a dangerous alliance with the MacDonalds, but was also trying to acquire lands which would fulfil the terms of his marriage settlement by providing an income for his queen, Mary of Guelders. Yet for contemporary observers, without the benefits of retrospection, minority governments announced prolonged political difficulties and potential instability. Perhaps further compounding the worries attendant on having a child king was the fact that the political community of fifteenth-century Scotland had a turbulent recent past to look back upon which heightened the desire for strong leadership and the thorough correction of misgovernance. The late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had been dominated by conflict with (and spells of occupation by) the English, periods of minority rule, disputed succession and Scotland’s Wars of Independence. After these difficulties, the early Stewart kings ruled with mixed fortunes. Although they did much to unify and stabilize Scotland, extending the geographical limits of royal power, ‘the age and infirmity of Robert II and III’ also deprived the kingdom of consistently strong leadership in the opening years of the Stewart dynasty.42 In 40 Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community. Scotland 1470–1625 (1981), p. 13. 41 Jennifer M. Brown, ‘The Exercise of Power’, in Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Jennifer M. Brown (1977), pp. 33–65 (51–65); Jenny Wormald, ‘Taming the Magnates’, in Essays in the Nobility of Medieval Scotland, ed. J.K. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 270–80 (279). 42 Michael Brown, James I of Scotland (1994), p. 1.

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his attempt to establish his family’s claim to the throne, Robert II had concentrated landed power and political influence in the hands of his sons, thus creating a potentially disharmonious situation in which the king’s authority could be challenged by his senior kinsmen, and the effects of these policies were to be felt throughout the fifteenth century. Even the efforts of revisionist historians to reclaim Robert III’s reign from the negative portrayals of chroniclers and earlier historians result in the verdict that his was indeed an ‘ineffectual rule’, and that the king was constantly on the defensive against bad health, past political failures and the influence of his powerful relatives.43 With the exception of Lancelot of the Laik, which nevertheless reminds its reader of the importance of kings atoning for the injustices committed during their minorities, all the royal protagonists discussed in the following chapters, fictional or historical, are young, and many of the texts give an account of the difficult transition from minority to majority. In The Kingis Quair, the narrator laments his youthful lack of reason. Both Alexander and Orpheus are wise and virtuous in their youths, but at the advent of sexual maturity in young manhood they begin to encounter destabilizing challenges to their self-governance. In the central tale of The Thre Prestis of Peblis, the youth and vitality of the king make him susceptible to heeding unwise counsel and he dedicates his court to the pursuit of pleasure. In the allegorical work King Hart the protagonist also dwells in a court dominated by youthfulness, and its attendant problems of lust and wantonness. Allegorically this signifies the danger the young self is in from its unchecked natural impulses. However, on a literal level the poem provides a convincing account of the dangers of court factionalism and the lasting consequences this can have for the mature king. Lyndsay’s early works too are troubled by the abuses the young king was exposed to by unprincipled members of his minority government. And Bellenden and Stewart also address the conflict experienced by the young monarch between following a path to sagacious government or pursuing that towards indulgence in the sexual and material delights of court. Although these Scottish poets are concerned with the impact of desire on royal rule, their blending of the themes of love and kingship augments the wide appeal of their works. By identifying the susceptibility of the monarch to his physical desires, these poets have the opportunity to remind those exalted in status of the common humanity and moral obligations they share with men of other estates. In the synthesis of the roles of king and lover throughout the texts examined in this book, we discover that while a king cannot escape fundamental human impulses, he has a particular obligation to rule himself if he is to be worthy of ruling others. Conversely, the lover-king protagonists of these poems foreground the notion that every man has an inner kingdom to oversee. This encourages the reader to explore the extent to which passion is sovereign in his own moral life, or the extent to which he can be king of his own self. A significant proportion of the fifteenth-century literature described here was not written for court-based audiences, but was instead circulated amongst professional readers (notaries public and clergy), the gentry and the educated urban 43 Stephen I. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III 1371–1406 (East Linton, 1996), pp. 302–4.

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Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

elite – in other words, those elements of society concerned with and involved in the maintenance of good government yet at one remove from the centre of power.44 In contrast, the early sixteenth-century poets, Dunbar, Lyndsay and Bellenden were writing for an audience based at the heart of Scottish political life. They address the king in their writings, and in the case of Lyndsay and Bellenden, seem to have actually included him amongst their readership. Yet these writers too attracted a much wider readership throughout the sixteenth century, partly due to the production of editions of their works by printers such as Thomas Davidson, and Henry and Robert Charteris. Many of the texts examined here survive in witnesses that were copied considerably later than their likely date of composition. The extant version of The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, for example, is dated internally to 1499, but survives in two manuscripts copied between c.1530 and c.1580. However, those responsible for compiling or owning the anthologies and miscellanies in which such texts are preserved still give us a good indication of the composition of the early audience for this literature. They were often well educated and professional, and sometimes members of the urban elite.45 Thus the Asloan Manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, 16500), which contains Orpheus and Eurydice and The Thre Prestis of Peblis, is so named because of its copyist John Asloan, an Edinburgh burgess and notary public who probably assembled the anthology for his personal use. The Bannatyne Manuscript (Edinburgh, NLS, Adv. 1.1. 6), which contains copies of Orpheus and Eurydice and Bellenden’s Proheme of the Cosmography, is named after its copyist George Bannatyne, who was born into a prosperous Edinburgh family of merchants, administrators, and legal clerics, some of whom worked for the crown. He was himself a member of the Edinburgh merchant guild.46 The less well-known anthology, Edinburgh, NAS, MS RH 13/35, which contains a version of The Thre Prestis of Peblis, was probably copied by a priest and notary, Thomas White, for the non-aristocratic Cockburn family of Ormiston. The earlier composite manuscript Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk. 1.5 which contains Lancelot of the Laik, is of obscure provenance, but its physical condition and legal and advisory content points to its origins in professional, perhaps notary or clerical, hands. The circulation of texts and the production of literary anthologies also took place in aristocratic or laird households, at some distance from court. Thus Oxford, Bodleian Library Arch. Selden. B. 24 which contains The Kingis Quair with works by Chaucer, Lydgate and Hoccleve, as well as other anonymous Scottish pieces, was compiled for Henry 3rd Lord Sinclair by a scribe who was probably working in his

44 See Sally Mapstone, ‘Was there a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?’, SSL, 26 (1991), 410–22. 45 Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘Manuscript Miscellanies in Scotland from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century’, in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 189–210. 46 See Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction Between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context’, in Renaissance in Scotland, pp. 183–225 (pp. 186–7).

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Ravenscraig Castle in Fife.47 The Maitland Folio Manuscript (Cambridge Magdalene College, Pepys Library 2553), which contains the unique copy of King Hart, is associated with a family whose members had considerable political influence during the reigns of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. Yet the manuscript was apparently compiled by family members for family use and its contents relate strongly to family interests.48 Meanwhile, NAS GD 112/71/9, a copy of The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour and Dunacn Laideus’ alias MacGregouris Testament, was owned by and probably made for Duncan Campbell, seventh laird of Glenorchy. The works with which this book opens and closes are concerned with varying degrees of explicitness with real historical monarchs – James I and V. The Kingis Quair’s manuscript attribution to James I is accepted by most scholars, but even detractors of this theory of authorship cannot deny that the poem draws attention to key events in the king’s life in its narrator’s account of his own experience. Dunbar’s Thistle and the Rose seems to have been inspired by the marriage of James IV to Margaret Tudor, but its precise connection to the celebrations of this event is unclear, and its depiction of the king and queen mediated through heraldic symbolism and allegory. Many of Dunbar’s other poems have a playful, ironic, or deliberately ambiguous relationship to the historical figure of the king. The works of Sir David Lyndsay and John Bellenden are addressed to James V and in the case of Lyndsay’s poems make specific references to the young king’s private life. The other poems examined in the following chapters give entirely fictional accounts of royal amorousness, despite the efforts of earlier critics to identify their protagonists (for example Arthur in Lancelot of the Laik or Archibald’s king in The Thre Prestis of Peblis) with real kings such as James III. Indeed, that these writers choose poetry for the discussion of royal sexuality, rather than historical or didactic prose genres, is noteworthy.49 They exploit the tension in medieval literary theory between the association of the poetic with fiction rather than truth, and the defense of poetry as a literary form which, through its affective qualities, invites the reader to uncover moral truths through the pleasurable exercise of the imagination. Some of these ideas are considered in the prologue to Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, which reminds us that ‘fenȝeit fabils of ald poetre / Be not al grunded vpon truth’ (1–2) but yet their rhetoric is pleasant to the ears of readers. In turn the ‘subtell dyte of poetry’ (13) yields some moral sentence to the diligent reader just as the earth will bring forth flowers and fruit if ‘laubourit with grit diligence’ (9) It records the clerkly opinion that ‘it is richt profitabill / Amangis ernist to ming a merie sport’ (19–20) because the mind solely engaged in the earnest study of ‘sad materis’ (26) becomes as feeble as the bow that 47 See Sally Mapstone, ‘Introduction: Older Scots and the Fifteenth Century’, in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 3–13 (p. 5). In the same volume see Julia Boffey and A.S.G Edwards, ‘Bodleian MS Arch. Selden. B. 24: The Genesis and Evolution of a Scottish Poetical Anthology’, pp. 14–29. 48 On the manuscript as a ‘family book’ see Julia Boffey, ‘The Maitland Folio Manuscript as a Verse Anthology’, in William Dunbar, “The Nobill Poyet”: Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Masptone (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), pp. 40–50 (40). 49 Sixteenth-century chronicle writers begin to use the amorousness of individual Scottish kings for exemplary purposes, but the figures they select are often drawn from the distant past.

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is always bent. Thus, for the Scots writers covered in the following chapters, poetry has become a vehicle both for indirectly asserting political and moral ideas, and a way of provoking independent moral reflection on these ideas by their readers.50 Indeed, the poems discussed here all show a self-reflexive concern with the value of poetry and of literary advice-giving more generally. Lyndsay’s attack on the corruption of the clergy, which he shows to have left a void of moral guidance in Scottish society, projects his own poetic voice into the position of authoritative commentator on personal conduct, royal virtue and the state of the realm. In the preceding decades other writers showed a similar awareness of poetry as an important agent of political, social and moral reformation. In the second tale of The Thre Prestis of Peblis for example, the wise fool Fictus employs an elaborate ruse, involving disguise and game playing, to restore the king to marital fidelity. The jape provides a metaphor for the ability of fiction to amuse and engage, and then lead its audience away from waywardness to self-examination and restraint. However, the confidence of these texts in the instructional value of literature is also qualified by awareness that literary instruction is dependent for its success on the receptiveness of its reader. Thus the clerical narrators of the first two tales in The Thre Prestis do not offer interpretations of the significance of their narratives, and it is only the third tale that introduces to the collection the idea of divine justice and charity, relying on the reader’s ability to recover the underlying connections between the tales and the spiritual meanings of the collection. The ability of poetry, through artfulness and ambiguity, to stimulate thoughtful reading and therefore involve the reader in the process of moral judgement and reflection, is further explored in Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice. The poem begins by revisiting popular late medieval arguments, often adduced in defence of chronicle writing, about the usefulness of kings learning from their ancestors’ conduct. However, it goes on to show its protagonist unable to replicate the harmony of his progenitors. The passive absorption of received wisdom does not guarantee future virtue. Henryson demonstrates this by challenging his own reader’s response to Orpheus’s story in the detailed moralitas which grafts an opaque figurative interpretation onto the preceding fable, forcing us into the demanding processes of reflection and rereading. Other texts are also articulate about the possible disjunction between literary text and the use the reader makes of it. In Lancelot of the Laik, the formal speculum principis delivered by the king’s advisor, Amytans, does not have an immediate impact on his conduct, and the path to recovery is difficult. A similar process is at work in The Buik of King Alexander, where a succession of advisory treatises, debates, lectures and letters are presented to the king and to other protagonists. Many are shown to be efficacious by the events of the ensuing narrative, yet Alexander’s growing lack of self-control in the second half of the poem is also a reminder of the king’s need to scrutinize and moderate his behaviour without the help of external tutelage. The bleakest assessment of the ability of advisory literature to precipitate moral reform comes in King Hart where the king’s well-meaning counselors with their rolls and documents have no lasting impact on his dissolute behaviour. Only in 50 See Nicola Royan, ‘Introduction’, in Langage Cleir Illumynate. Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond, 1375–1630, ed. Nicola Royan (Amsterdam and New York, 2007).

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The Kingis Quair is this anxiety about the moral efficacy of literature and the dangers of misreading resolved. The manuscript attribution of this poem idealistically brings together poetic text and king in a powerful image of the coalescence of power and wisdom. In the poem itself, the protagonist’s act of composition produces a poetic exemplum for the guidance of others, which also records his own reinterpretation of his youthful mis-governance and later growth in wisdom, simultaneously presenting him as both good reader and moral poet. It is with The Kingis Quair, and the early responses to its poetics as evinced by its place in its unique manuscript context, that this book begins.

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Chapter 1

The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy I The Kingis Quair of James I of Scotland (c.1424), is a semi-autobiographical poem that develops the personal history of its narrator into an exemplum of how youthful and passionate love generates reasoned self-rule and thus provides a way of transcending a potentially treacherous world.1 Its first-person narrator describes how, in this rather unexpected trajectory, love brings him from political powerlessness and personal wretchedness to wisdom, freedom, agency and a moral leadership of others. As the only text discussed in this book to have been written by a prince, it provides a particularly intimate and immediate response to the interrelated problems of immature kingship and the power of sexual desire. This poem’s treatment of love is perhaps also the most positive of all of those discussed in this book and, as I argue in this chapter, this optimism is underpinned by the subtle suggestions of the poet-narrator’s rank and historical identity which are worked into the narrative. This optimistic perspective is also generated through the poem’s deliberate echoes and reworking of late Middle English advisory writing on the king’s rule of his body, such as that of John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve. In asserting his literary freedom in the reinterpretation of these English writers, James’s narrating persona is also emphasizing his political independence from the Lancastrian regime that had held him captive between 1406 and c.1424. However, the Quair’s sole surviving witness, Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24,2 an anthology produced for Henry 3rd Lord Sinclair (c.1460–1513), in the late 1480s, suggests that its late fifteenth-century readers felt the need to construct a more admonitory and cautious context for its sanguinity. The second section of this chapter will consider the poem’s reception in more detail with reference to other Scottish texts contained in the Selden manuscript including The Quare of Jelusy, a poem which combines amatory complaint with advice on noble and royal conduct. 1 For an autobiographical reading see Joanna Summers, Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography (Oxford, 2004), pp. 60–89. All references to the poem are to James I of Scotland: The Kingis Quair, ed. John Norton-Smith (Oxford, 1971). 2 For a facsimile see The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the ‘Kingis Quair’: A facsimile of Bodleian Library Oxford, MS. Arch. Selden B. 24 with an Introduction by Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards and an Appendix by B.C. Barker-Benfield (Cambridge, 1997). On the dating of the codex see pp. 3–4. Selden’s first scribe copied manuscripts for other family members including Oliver Sinclair of Roslin. See Michael Chesnutt, ‘The Dalhousie Manuscript of the Historia Norvegiae’, Bibliotheca Arnamagnœana, 38, Opuscula, 8 (1985), 54–95.

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The Kingis Quair is framed in its unique manuscript as the work of a king. It is prefaced by a note in a sixteenth-century hand describing it as ‘the quair maid be King James of Scotland ye first’ (fol. 191v), and is followed by another, this time in the hand of the scribe, which again suggests this attribution: ‘Quod Iacobus primus scotorum rex illustrissimus’ (fol. 211r).3 The poem itself contains no explicit reference to the narrator as a monarch, and neither is he named within the text in the way that the narrators of Chaucerian and near contemporary English works often are.4 This reticence may in part be explained if we accept the opinion of the author of the sixteenth-century title for the poem, which tells us that the work was ‘Maid quhen his Maiestie wes In / Ingland’ (fol. 191v). Although James’s royal title had been recognized at Perth in June 1406, he remained unable to exercise any but the most superficial responsibilities of his office. As Andrew of Wyntoun explained in his Original Chronicle (c.1412), because James was ‘Haldyn all agane his will’, … he mycht on nakyn wys Take ony of his insignys As crowne, ceptoure, suerd ore ring, Syk as afferis till a king Off kynd be rycht: ȝeit neuirþeles Oure lege lorde and king he was (IX, 2669–74).5

Yet, even without solid evidence of the poem’s place of composition, the indirect treatment of his royal identity serves to foreground the changing subject positions shaped for the narrator, and these are crucial to the poem’s thesis on governance. And, although it is just short of an explicit reference to the narrator’s kingship, the helpless 3 On James’s authorship and the poem’s concern with kingship, see Sally Mapstone, ‘Kingship and The Kingis Quair’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 51–69. In the Scotichronicon, Bower refers to James as ‘another Orpheus’, perhaps celebrating his poetic as well as musical abilities. See Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D.E.R. Watts, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98), VIII, p. 305. Mapstone has also identified ‘previously unremarked acknowledgements of [James I’s] authorship of the Kingis Quair’ in unique verses found in the Perth Manuscript (NLS Adv. MS 35. 6. 7) of the Scotichronicon. See Sally Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, in Scotichronicon, IX, pp. 321–38; Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scotichronicon’s First Readers’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland: Essays Presented to Donald Watt, ed. B.E. Crawford (Edinburgh 1999), pp. 31–55 (35, 48, n. 29). In his 1521 History, John Major makes reference to James’s ‘ingenious little book about the Queen’, written while he was in captivity, and to his writings in ‘the language of his own country’. See A History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland Compiled from the Ancient Authorities by John Major, ed. and trans. A. Constable, Scottish Historical Society, 10 (Edinburgh, 1892), p. 366. 4 There is no moment, for example, as blatant as the introduction of ‘Charlis duk of Orlyaunce’ as the poet-narrator of the lyrics of London, BL, MS Harley 682 (2720, 3044). References are to ‘Fortunes Stabilnes’: Charles of Orléans’s English Book of Love, A Critical Edition, ed. Mary-Jo Arn, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 138 (Binghamton, New York, 1994). 5 The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. F.J. Amours, 6 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 63, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57 (Edinburgh, 1903–14),VI, p. 414.

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youth of the opening of The Kingis Quair is clearly identified with the Scottish prince in the biographical details supplied in lines 134 to 175. If the poem was not composed by James, it is evident that its author intended the reader to recognize the prince’s trials in the events described. The narrator relates how one spring, when he had ‘Noght ferr passit the state of innocence, / Bot nere about the nowmer of yeris thre’ (148–9), he was taken from his own country ‘By thair avise that had of me the cure’ (153), but was then seized by ‘inymyis’ (166). These lines apparently allude to the events of 16th March 1406,6 when the prince, aged about eleven, and the sole surviving son of Robert III, was being taken to France for his own safety, when he was intercepted by English pirates, and delivered into the captivity of Henry IV. The narrator relates that he was captured ‘With strong hand, by forse’ (165) thus explicitly drawing attention to his own innocence, which distinguishes him from the Chaucerian prisoners whose predicament and complaints he so often echoes: in The Knight’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite, both of the royal blood of Thebes, are pulled from a heap of corpses and imprisoned because they fought alongside the tyrant Creon. As a prisoner, James’s persona is merely ‘a wofull wrecche’ (195), an entirely powerless and decidedly un-royal captive. During his eighteen-year captivity in England, the Lancastrian kings naturally sought to ensure that James’s future political autonomy was also curtailed. Their intention was apparently to exert sufficient influence over the prince so as to eventually extend Lancastrian power over Scotland, severing its old political alliances with France, a policy for which James showed no inclination after his release. Henry IV entrusted his care to important royal servants such as Lord Grey of Codenore and Archbishop Arundel. In the early 1420s James fought beside Henry V in France against the Albany/Douglas support for the Dauphin (later Charles VII), was present at state occasions, and was made a Knight of the Garter. He was married to a royal cousin and member of the politically prominent Beaufort family before being released. Predictably James’s own views on the Lancastrian dynasty are difficult to gauge. His surviving letters to Scotland (c.1411–12) are impatient in their inference of Albany’s inactivity in relation to securing his release. Nevertheless, the young James’s correspondence, although unlikely to be explicitly adversarial towards his host, describes Henry IV as ‘more gracious than we can say or write’.7 Even the Scots chronicler Andrew of Wyntoun, conceded that Henry had received James ‘wiþe honeste’ and ‘weil ay gert him tretyt be’ (IX, 2625–6). Indeed, despite an initial stringency towards the prisoner, it is likely that the rule of the youthful Henry V, with its emphasis on self-definition and the establishment of the House of Lancaster, was also to affect James’s view of his own kingship, giving him what one historian has called an ‘education in statecraft’.8 John Shirley’s The Dethe of the 6 This date is suggested in the astrological details of lines 141–2. 7 See The Red Book of Menteith, ed. Sir William Fraser, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1880), I, pp. 284–6 (286); E.W.M. Balfour-Melville, ‘Five Letters of James I’, SHR, 20 (1922), 28–33. 8 E.W.M. Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots (1936), pp. 111, 118. On James’s captivity see pp. 28– 105. For a recent but less detailed biography see Michael Brown, James I of Scotland, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1994). For another view of the Lancastrian influence on James see A.C. Spearing, ‘Dreams in The Kingis Quair and the

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Kynge of Scotis (c.1440s) suggests similar benefits, describing James’s relationship with ‘Harry þe Fifte’ as one of filial service rather than subjection, remarking that ‘in alle þing that touchid þ’onnour & þe right of þe saide Jamez, þe king of Scottez’, Henry ‘was to him favoureable as faþer to þe sunne in alle þat touchid þaire boþe kingly estattez’.9 The contemporary views of Abbot Bower on James’s treatment by the Lancastrians are well known to be very different, and although the Abbot’s presentation of Henry IV, with the blood of the Comyns running in his veins, is often ambivalent rather than explicitly hostile, Henry V receives virulent condemnation.10 But despite such ideological differences, it is probable that James himself would have been aware not just of the successes of this usurping dynasty but also of the difficulties it experienced, against which his Scottish rule could eventually be redefined. In particular, by the time of the Quair’s composition, and its author’s release, the fragility of Henry V’s financial, domestic and foreign policies must have been apparent: England again faced minority and inter-dynastic tensions with the accession of the infant Henry VI in 1422. Bower later evoked this uncertainty when he recorded in his Scotichronicon (with palpable enjoyment) the lurid prognostication of an English hermit who, foreseeing the throne ‘alight with the flames of hell and with demons at the ready’, detailed the fall of Lancaster in a description of Henry IV’s successors, first ‘a devil; after the devil a saint; … after the saint a sword; and after the sword nobody’.11 It is significant therefore that The Kingis Quair seeks to outline a response to temporal instability and personal misfortune in its narrator’s poetic record of his maturation and cultivation of wisdom and good fortune in love. Indeed, apart from its historical allusions, the frame narrative of the poem carries other subtle suggestions of its narrator-poet’s status and his concerns with ‘governance’. Firstly, the opening of the poem intersects with and is then deliberately distinguished from English examples of the ‘fall of princes’ genre. We first encounter James’s narrating subject ‘in bed allone’ (8), sleepless and uneasy on a winter night, trying to derive comfort from ‘a boke’ (14). He has picked up ‘Boece’ – Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy – one of the most influential texts of the Middle Ages, and one that shaped the de casibus genre by defining tragedy as the fall of princes and realms from wealth, power and felicity to despair, and prescribing a pious rejection of worldly things (including physical love) as the only way to remove oneself from the influence of Fortune. There is, James learns ‘non estate nor age / Ensured – more the prince than … the page’ (60–61). The subject position and preoccupation of the reading narrator recalls not only that of the narrators of Chaucer’s dream poems, but also that of the narrator of the

Duke’s Book’, in Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 123–44. 9 See Death and Dissent. Two Fifteenth-Century Chronicles. The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis and Warkworth’s Chronicle, ed. Lister M. Matheson (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 23–56 (25). On Shirley’s translation see Margaret Connolly, John Shirley: Book Production and the Noble Household in Fifteenth-Century England (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 131–8. 10 See Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 37, 123–4, 309. 11 See Scotichronicon, VIII, p. 29.

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popular Lancastrian mirror for princes, Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (c.1411). Hoccleve’s narrator anxiously meditates on ‘The welthe unseur of every creature, / How lightly that Fortune it can dissolve’ (16–17),12 pausing, in a cautionary manner, over the recent fall of the deposed Richard II, before going on to offer the Prince of Wales (later Henry V) detailed advice on how to govern. However, James’s response to Boethius and to these narrative patterns is also troubled. He declares himself ‘ouer yong’ (46) to discuss the complexities of Boethian philosophy, and decides to leave all ‘incidence’ and return to his own ‘mater’ (49). Although he summarizes his own narrative as an account of how, after Fortune’s enmity, he ‘gat recure / Of [his] distresse’ (67–8), he is dissatisfied and exhausted, ‘Forwakit and forwalowit’ (71), rather than reassured by his reading. However, providing a further indication of James’s status, a sense of agency is gradually adopted. He moves from being a hitherto unsuccessful writer, who has in his ‘tyme more ink and paper spent / To lyte effect’ (87–8), to one who begins to write with some determination of ‘Sum new[e] thing’ (89). His burst of poetic creativity is generated by his ‘awin ymagynacioun’ (79), thus foregrounding his personal resourcefulness in a way which is important to the poem’s conclusion. At first he is beset with difficulties, the perils of prolixity and feeble wit seeming as insurmountable as the obstructive ‘wavis weltering’ (162) that faced him on that unfortunate sea journey to France. His initial trepidation as an author reflects the painfulness of recalling the personal ‘turment’ (133) of which he writes, and this is underscored by the fluidity of the Boethian tempest imagery that he applies to the writing process, to his description of his youthful vulnerability, and to his literal, dangerous sea voyage. Apprehension aside, an important aspect of this agency is the fact that his theme is self-examination, and a discussion of his own youthful misrule. His complaint to youth begins in general terms. Youth is ‘of wit wayke and vnstable’ (95), vulnerable to fortune, and lacks ‘reule and gye’ (100). But the discussion becomes self-reflexive: ‘I mene this by my self’ (106), the narrator admits.13 Despite his ‘suffisance’ (wealth), he lacked the ‘rypenesse of resoun … / To governe with [his] will’ (107–9). It is highly significant that this ethical self-analysis is made by the narrator himself, and is not directed at him by any external didactic voice. It also emphasizes his distance from the Boethian text with which he began, for while for Boethius ‘the vertew of his youth’ became the ‘ground of his delytis’ (36–7), for James the frailty of youth requires careful self-correction. A.C. Spearing argues that the narrator’s experience of love in the poem is another indication of his status: ‘in terms of the ideology of courtliness his kingly rank entitles him to be a lover and thus a poet who can write about love from experience, whereas Chaucer dreams and writes from a social level at which love must always remain a mystery’.14 Certainly, the moral transformation of the young James, and his eventual release from subjection, is presented in the poem as crucially dependent on love. Incarcerated in his ‘strong prisoun’ (169) James laments his fate, unable 12 See The Regiment of Princes: Thomas Hoccleve, ed. Charles R. Blyth, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1999). 13 This claim for self-reflexivity is repeated at line 1212. 14 Spearing, ‘Dreams in The Kingis Quair’, pp. 123–44 (129).

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to comprehend his guilt. It has long been recognized that this prison sequence was influenced by Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. However, where in Chaucer’s text the prisoners complain about their lack of freedom only after they have seen Emily, the narrator of The Kingis Quair complains most bitterly before his encounter with love, and his later love complaints are as much hopeful as they are self-pitying. The nightingale’s song of ‘lufis vse’ (228) helps him reinterpret his experience and to understand thraldom and liberty at an abstract level. Love offers him, paradoxically, the possibility of freedom: ‘May he oure hertes setten and vnbynd?’ (257). Cupid is a lord who can ‘bynd and louse and maken thrallis free’ (269), and so James determines to ‘pray his blisfull grace benigne / To hable me vnto his seruice digne (270–71). With his promise to serve love loyally, James is rewarded immediately with a vision of ‘the freschest yong[e] floure’ (277), of whose beauty and opulence of dress he begins to ‘write’ at length (316).15 Significantly, it is the lady’s possession of the attributes of ‘Wisdome, largesse, estate and connyng sure’ (347) that convince James that she is a ‘warldly creature’ (352) and promise to do his heart ‘so mich gude’ (353). James later refers on two occasions to his lady as his ‘souirane’ (1267, 1279), and according to Venus, she is of ‘hie birth’ (760), thus stressing her importance in guiding his mature self-governance and her own nobility. Joan Beaufort, whose marriage to James was instrumental in securing his liberty, was politically close to her husband throughout the reign, and a fitting realization of this poetic portrait. Although James’s vision is followed by further disconsolate complaints, his falling in love has provided him with a lesson in patience and service, and even a degree of inner harmony. His allusion, in these complaints, to the Ovidian narrative of Procne and Philomela, and his condemnation of the false, cruel, and ‘vnknyghtly’ (384) deeds of Tereus in love, is a mark of his own integrity and nobility.16 However it is the dream vision, and his meetings with Venus, Minerva and Fortune, which increases the independence and authority of his subject position and his identity as a socially integrated individual and even a ruler of others. Venus’s court, indispensable to James’s tutelage for this position, draws on comparable scenes in Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, but also perceptively invokes and reworks Book VIII of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis. Amongst the lovers gathered at Venus’s palace, James sees a company of the ‘agit’ lovers with ‘hedis hore and olde’ (578) who are paragons of constancy, ‘the folk that neuer change wold / In lufe, bot trewly seruit ... / In euery age vnto thair ending day’ (579–81). Significantly, they include once bellicose princes and learned poets, ‘Suich as Ouide and Omer’ (595) and, in accordance with the Quair’s agenda, seem to advocate virtuous love as an enriching quality for public office. Their membership strongly recalls that of the sober company of Elde, with its wise and royal elderly lovers who are seen by Amans (VIII, 2666–725), but they are also ultimately distinguished from 15 The mention of ‘flour jonettis’ on her clothes is perhaps an allusion to Joan Beaufort’s name. See Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions, ed. Julia Boffey (Oxford, 2003), p. 110. 16 This passage contains likely echoes of Gower’s telling of the tale in Book V of the Confessio Amantis (lines 5551–6052). Compare Quair, line 380 with Confessio, Book V, lines 5583, 5757; Quair, line 382 with Confessio, Book V, lines 5692–4.

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the Confessio’s more problematic amorous princes and scholars, who despondently assert that ‘the wylde loves rage’ ‘forberth non Age’ (VIII, 2773–4). In the Quair the elderly lovers show that love can inspire valour in ‘grete batailis’ (591) and become a source of stability. James addresses Venus as an ‘Appesar of malice and violence’ (689), a ‘blissfull havin’ in the ‘huge weltering wawis fell / Of lufis rage’ (696–7). The echo of the language used earlier to describe his youthful vulnerability to personal misrule and worldly duplicity is deliberate, and thus aligns love with reason, that guide so often absent in the young. In response to his petition, Venus urges James to patience and loyalty, but also conveys on him the role of exemplum and teacher. Underplaying her own queenly role, she instructs James to return to the world in a didactic capacity, a role not unlike that imagined by Bower who viewed the king as a lawmaker, ‘schoolmaster’ to himself, and guardian of his people’s education.17 When James ‘descendis doun to ground ageyne’ his duty is to lead the ‘men that there bene resident’ (799–800) away from their ‘angir’, ‘smert’ and ‘vnkyndenesse’ (806–7), and to reinstate the law of ‘trew seruis’ (756) to love. Once again, therefore, love is seen as the converse of destructive and unethical behaviour. James’s final supplication to Venus at the end of the poem for the courage, truthfulness and happiness of his ‘brethir’ ‘that seruandis ar to lufe’ (1283–4) confirms the seriousness with which he has adopted this role. Significantly, Venus’s directing of James to Minerva suggests metaphorically that the experience of love can lead one to sagacity. Indeed, Minerva, a representative of patience and wisdom, extends Venus’s ethical injunctions by warning James to stand ‘stedfast’ (918) against the ‘brukill sort / That feynis treuth in lufe’ (932–3). She also warns James that one must prove oneself to others through exemplary actions (‘thy werk’, 921) not just words. Many of her lessons seem to recall or clearly draw on some of the English advisory writing that James could well have had access to during his imprisonment. Her lessons on patience partly recall those in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. In addition, her quotation of ‘Ecclesiaste’, ‘wele is him that his tyme w[e]l abit’ (925–6) to this end, echoes Genius’s lessons to Amans to ‘Consaile thee with Pacience’ in Book III of the Confessio Amants: ‘Mi Sone ... tak this in thi witt / He hath noght lost that wel abitt’ (III, 2727, 1657–8). In teaching that man ‘Has in himself the chose and libertee / To cause his awin fortune’ (1024–5) through ‘foreknawin[g]’ (1036) Minerva also seems to revisit Gower’s doctrine from the prologue to the Confessio Amantis, that ‘man is overal / His oghne cause of wel and wo’ (546–7). But while the division that Gower sees as endemic in man seems to pre-empt any possibility of creating enduring felicity, Minerva’s Boethian lesson is more open-ended suggesting that ‘gude wit’ does generate ‘gud fortune’ (929). She optimistically sees divine love and Christian virtue as a mirror for human governance, and consequently the ground of the narrator’s affections. Strikingly, ‘loving’ (968) is 17 Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 309, 313. An act from James I’s parliament at Perth in 1428 presented the king as the final arbiter of meaning: ‘the king of deliuerans of his consale be maner of statute forbidis þat na man interprete his statutis vthir watis þan þe statutis beris …’. See The Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes, 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1814–75), II, p. 16. Hereafter APS.

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distinguished from ‘lust and bestly appetite’ (947), and is not wrong if it is true and ‘withoutin variance’ (969), and is ‘ground and set in Cristin wise’ (989). It is possible that the poems in Charles d’Orléans’s Harley manuscript, with their desire for an optimistic view of love, may have had some influence on this aspect of James’s writing.18 At the close of the ‘Iewbile’ Charles’s speaker instructs lovers that they should ‘contynew forth in stedfastnes’ (4357) through the pain and the pleasure of love ‘Rathir then ben taynt in dowbilnes’ (4358). Yet no lasting reward and no written manifestos for self-reformation emerge from the Duke’s writing as they do from James’s Quair. Minerva’s sentiments in the Quair also relate to marriage as a way of constraining the passions, looking back to the Confessio’s elusive, notion of ‘Honest love’ ‘wel grounded’ in marriage (VIII, 1993). But her advice ultimately suggests that every human ‘labour’ should be performed with heart ‘groundit ferm and stable / In Goddis law’ (960–61). Minerva links a lover’s ‘trechorye’ (937) and ‘tresoun’ to the ‘doubilnesse’ (945– 6) of the public sphere in a conflation of the amatory and political, and charges James to oppose what she sees as an ‘inconstant’ world (954). Her aspirations for concord resonate with chronicle accounts of the more successful aspects of James’s reign. For example, although Bower is not without his doubts about some of the more violent strategies employed by the royal administration of the 1420s, his enduring image of James is as a defender of order in the midst of political turbulence.19 He commends James’s establishment of ‘firm peace within the kingdom’, between magnates and freeholders within Scottish boundaries, as well as with old enemies without. The rhetoric of constancy and ‘sekernesse’ (774) as opposed to ‘felonye’ (709) in the Quair also accords with the tenor of some of the parliamentary business of the early years of James’s reign, the purpose of which was to curb the lawlessness of the recent past.20 Without wishing to force an interpretation of such legislation, Minerva’s politicized vocabulary perhaps anticipates James’s ambitions for peaceable and strong rule in Scottish society; in the words of a 1424 statute, ‘ferme and sikkir pece … throu all þe Realm’ and an end (as another statute hoped) to ‘discorde betuix the king and his pepill’ and all ‘forthocht felony’.21 The closing sequence of the Quair confirms that the moral wisdom imparted by Venus and Minerva must be supplemented by experience, part of which will be James’s steadfast affection.22 Thus, James’s encounter with Fortune, to whom Minerva has sent him, is further indicative of his growing agency, and also provides a final statement of his independent reinterpretation of prior English writing. Fortune’s question of James, ‘Quhat dois thou here?’ (1161), as she addresses him ‘be name’ (1157) and ‘smylyng … in game’ (1160), casts a glance backwards at Venus’s 18 James and Charles were both prisoners in the Tower in 1416 and in Pontefract in 1417. See Balfour-Melville, James I, pp. 67–8, n. 1. 19 Scotichronicon, VIII, p. 245; Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, pp. 321–38 (322); Michael Brown, ‘“Vile Times”: Walter Bower’s Last Book and the Minority of James II’, SHR, 79 (2000), 165–88. 20 Brown, James I, p. 117; Balfour-Melville, James I, p. 112. 21 APS, II, pp. 3, 8, 9. 22 Compare Lois A. Ebin, ‘Boethius, Chaucer and The Kingis Quair’, PQ, 53 (1974), 321–41 (334).

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amusement on beholding the old lover Amans, newly revealed as John Gower, in Book VIII of the Confessio Amantis. Famously calling the ashamed and speechless Amans ‘John’, Venus beholds him, and laughs, ‘And axeth, as it were in game, / What love was’ (VIII, 2871–2). The parallel moment of derision in the Quair is further reminiscent of Gower’s continual synthesis of the domains of the two goddesses: in the Confessio Amantis it is Venus ‘which kepth the blinde whel’ (I, 2490), the fall of princes being frequently the consequence of their ungoverned love. In the Quair the domain of this third goddess is verbally reconstructed as the world of James’s youthful misfortune – a ‘weltering’, ‘sloppar’ (1135–6) wheel, where personal destinies fluctuate. Initially the sight inspires fear in the narrator: ‘So many I sawe that than clymben wold, / And failit foting’ (1138–9). However, he then see that some who ‘were slungin’ (1149) to the ground, are then ‘up ythrungin’ (1151) once again by the goddess. Although Fortune teaches James thoroughly of the unstable nature of her wheel, she also urges him that despite his unpromising beginning, he can still ‘spend wele … the remanant of the day’ (1197). He is not to give up like those he sees falling from the Goddess’s wheel whose courage ‘to clymbe … was no more’ (1148). James needs help to climb onto the wheel (the goddess propels him upwards ‘by the ere’, 1203), but he also takes the first step on his own: And therwithall vnto the quhele in hye Sche hath me led, and bad me lere to clymbe, Vpon the quhich I steppit sudaynly (1191–3). (emphasis mine)

The image of a self newly instructed in the importance of virtue, ascending on Fortune’s wheel and coming to ‘largesse’ (1276) through love, is James’s ultimate revision of that predominant fifteenth-century anxiety, that kings, princes, even lovers, can only anticipate their imminent destruction.23 As the narrator awakes, his complaint is not immediately resolved and his ‘besy’ (1205) and ‘vexit’ (1213) spirit briefly resembles his troubled youthful self again, ‘That neuer [is] in quiet nor in rest’ (1206). But, as he learned at Fortune’s court, the teachings of the goddesses must be applied to his own experience. Thus on continuing his ‘trewe service in lufe’ (1311) with humility and hope, he is rewarded with love tidings and acknowledges that his ‘lore’ (1265) increases daily, affording him the mastery of his wits and an understanding of the compatibility of human and divine love. He is eventually able to see the benefits of enduring his ‘foos rancoure’ (1305) and the necessity of the ‘accident’ (1334) that left him imprisoned. Above all he recognizes that love has brought him freedom: he has ‘cum to largesse from thraldom and peyne / … by the mene of luffis ordinance’ (1276–7). Furthermore, the conclusion to the poem acknowledges the value of poetry for the nurturing of reason, strengthening the connection between the narrator’s personal lore and his public duty of setting an example to others. He reminds us that the interpretation of his text requires ‘pacience’ (1354): each reader has to resolve the poem’s ‘brukilnese’, to ‘reule and to stere’ (1356–7) its faults, and to apply its teachings to personal 23 James’s confidence here may also be a reaction to Charles’s Harley poems, where it is Venus who tosses the lover onto Fortune’s chariot, and so to a new love affair.

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experience, also acknowledging the greater sovereign governance of him ‘To quham we th[a]nk that all oure [lif] hath writt’ (1370). It seems likely that the resolution espoused in The Kingis Quair, with its exemplification of reasoned love as efficacious in an unstable world, is possible precisely because of James’s Scottishness and his royal status. While he shared the institutional positioning of English poets such as Gower and Hoccleve as a subject vis-à-vis a Lancastrian master for eighteen years, James could respond to their ontological and epistemological doubt with greater confidence, and on returning to Scotland insisted continually on the sovereignty of his majesty and the domestic order of his realm. However, the king’s exemplariness did not endure in the way he had intended in 1424. Only the anonymous writer of the unique poetic epitaph found in the Perth Manuscript of the Scotichronicon (Edinburgh, NLS, Advocates MS.35.6.7, written c.1460–88), recalls the idealism of James’s self-image in the Quair, describing the king as ‘cultor Amoris’, the devotee of love.24 Bower’s own inclusion of an epitaph for James in the Scotichronicon instead completes the rotation of Fortune’s wheel begun in the Quair, returning the king to the confines of the de casibus exemplum that he had revised in his poem. Fortune, Bower reports, was ‘too unfriendly to him / after pledging first that [she] would always be sunny’. Once a ‘prosperous ruler’ James ‘is now the lowest slime … / No one stays long at the summit’.25 Perhaps writing for the young James II, Bower’s cautious praise of the gifted king responsible for restoring Scottish peace is tempered with an acknowledgement of James’s less admirable policies such as heavy taxation and the ruthless treatment of his noble relatives.26 John Shirley, too, exploits the exemplary figure of James in a manner not invited by the Quair. He relates how the young James I fled the injustice perpetrated against his lustful and greedy brother, Rothesay, who unlawfully took the ‘roialle gouernaunce’ upon himself and was ‘fulle viceous in his liveing, as in depucelling & defouling of yong maydenys & in breking þ’ordre of wedloke be his foule ambycious lust of aduoutrie’.27 Shirley also records how James suffered misfortune but then himself descended into avarice and tyranny. Yet, despite his own faults, James is nevertheless depicted as wronged by the ‘traytoures’ of his realm, the rebellious ‘peple [who] ofte spekith withoute raison’ (97), and Shirley’s text is both a warning to princes of what may befall them in vice, and an anxious condemnation of resisting rightful kingship.28 The text derives an advisory purpose by being included in a manuscript alongside Lydgate’s Stans Puer ad Mensum, and Shirley’s Les 24 Scotichronicon, IX, p. 128. Compare Mapstone, ‘Scottichronicon’s First Readers’, pp. 31–55 (35, 48, n. 29). The epitaph also mentions Venus, Minerva and Fortune and refers to James’s ‘songs’. Also see Brown, ‘“Vile Times”’, 165–88 (183). 25 Scotichronicon, VIII, p. 337. 26 Brown stresses that Bower was writing ‘as a politically active and experienced participant in minority government’. See Brown, ‘“Vile Times”’, 165–88 (187). He composed his Scotichronicon for David Stewart of Rosyth, a knight and councillor of James I, who remained closely associated with Queen Joan after James’s murder. 27 See Death and Dissent, pp. 23–4. 28 See generally Michael Brown, ‘“I have thus slain a tyrant”: The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis and the right to resist in early fifteenth-century Scotland’, IR, 47 (1996) 24–44.

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Bones Meurs and Governance of Kynges and Prynces.29 It is appropriate that one manuscript in which the Dethe appears was probably owned by ‘a member of the king’s council or someone very closely associated with it’, and it is very possible that Shirley originally compiled the work as a lesson for Henry VI.30 II According to the evidence of its sole witness, The Kingis Quair was also preserved in an aristocratic milieu, though one removed from the immediate environs of the Stewart court of the 1480s. The poem would have been of personal and family interest to Henry Sinclair,31 the likely owner of the Selden manuscript. His grandmother was James I’s sister, and his great grandfather, the Duke of Orkney, was present at the prince’s capture. In addition to this, Henry’s wife Margaret Hepburn (sister of the first Earl of Bothwell), whom he married in 1489 at around the time of the production of the manuscript, had more than passing association with James I and his queen. Adam Hepburn of Hailes, Margaret’s paternal great-grandfather, had been one of the Scots sent to treat for the release of James I. He was subsequently knighted and given Dunbar Castle. It was here that the dowager queen Joan lived following her marriage to Sir James Stewart of Lorne (1439), her imprisonment by the Livingstons, and loss of the custody of her son: she died at Dunbar in July 1445. Joan Beaufort’s reading tastes are undocumented, but her daughters were book owners and poets and her English family had impressive literary credentials. Her close connections with the Hepburns may well have resulted in bequests of items of personal significance such as books. Margaret Hepburn is herself known to have possessed ‘duos libros’ when she died in 1542, and coming from a family with literary connections, may be the key to the presence of some of the texts in the Selden manuscript.32 Indeed, it is tempting to imagine that some of the exemplars for the Selden codex could be found

29 London, BL, Additional MS 5467. A seventeenth-century copy survives in Edinburgh, NLS Adv. MS. 17. 1. 22. 30 This manuscript, London, BL, Additional MS 38690, may have been owned by the first cousin of Queen Joan, Richard Neville. As Matheson states, the ‘potential political and military consequences of James’s murder would have been of major importance’ to Neville who was a major landowner in the north and warden of the West Marches between 1420–22 and 1443–53. See Death and Dissent, pp. 12–13, 14–20. 31 The manuscript’s production seems to have coincided with a number of important dynastic and political achievements for Sinclair. A royal charter of 1488 granted him Ravenscraig, ending the claims of the Roslin Sinclairs to this part of his inheritance. In 1489 he was granted a thirteen-year lease of Orkney and Shetland, the offices of Justiciar, Foud and Bailie of those Isles, and custody of Kirkwall castle. A 1488–89 parliamentary act registered Henry ‘richtwiss chief of [his] blude in tyme to cum’. In 1493–94, Henry had on his own resignation a charter to himself and his spouse of the baronies of Dysart and Newburgh, Fife. See The Scots Peerage, ed. J.B. Paul, 9 vols (Edinburgh, 1904–14), VII, p. 571; APS, II, p. 213. 32 See Notices from the Local Records of Dysart, ed. W. Muir (Glasgow, 1853), pp. 8–9.

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in the Sinclair library where they had arrived as the heirlooms of both Margaret and Henry’s kinsmen and women.33 As the manuscript survives, The Kingis Quair concludes a sequence of English poems, but it is unclear whether or not James’s poem was originally intended as a final and optimistic statement in the codex. The Quair is copied mainly by the book’s first scribe, who breaks off abruptly on folio 209v, line 14, towards the end of the text, and then reappears to copy, only casually this time, some short Scottish poems on folio 229. The second scribe then copies the end of the Quair, Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid, and the anonymous Scottish complaints, The Lay of Sorrow and Lufaris Complaynt, which respectively present female and male perspectives on the wretchedness of love.34 After these texts the scribe copied The Quare of Jelusy, which is the subject of the next part of this chapter. The work of this second scribe is less professional than that of the first: although his hand is attractive, his texts are largely undecorated and his page layout inconsistent.35 The eighteenth-century repairs to Arch. Selden. B. 24 have left it hard to ascertain the manuscript’s original collation,36 but what seems certain is that the book was assembled in several stages, and possibly over a long period of time.37 It seems likely that the Scottish poems that are found after The Kingis Quair (and Hoccleve’s The Letter of Cupid) were an unscheduled, though nevertheless appropriate, addition to the codex, perhaps suggested by someone who had not been involved in the initial stages of planning the book. If we assume that the editorial decisions about the contents of the manuscript were taken by the first scribe, probably in conjunction with its prospective owner, Henry Sinclair, it may be possible that these items indicate the participation of another family member – perhaps Margaret Hepburn, or her daughters, whose names appear in the manuscript38 – who was drawn to the shorter Scottish texts because of their thematic intersections with The Kingis Quair and the Chaucerian material in the codex. Indeed, cumulatively, these poems provide an unexpected gloss on the amatory optimism of James’s poem. The longest of these Scottish additions, The Quare of Jelusy, revisits both The Kingis Quair, and some of its English sources, and offers a more cautionary perspective 33 Julia Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 and Definitions of the Household Book’, in The English Medieval Book. Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, British Library Studies in the History of the Book, ed. A.S.G. Edwards, Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna (2000), pp. 125–34 (131). The envoy of the Lay of Sorrow (fols 217–19) dedicates the poem to ‘Princes, full graciouse and excellent’, surely addressing a ‘princess’ rather than more than one prince. 34 For editions see K.G. Wilson, ‘The Lay of Sorrow and the Lufaris Complaynt: An Edition’, Speculum, 29 (1954), 708–26, and (for the Lufaris Complaynt) The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, Michigan 2005). 35 On the obscurity of the original collation of folios 225–8 and folio 229 see Boffey and Edwards, Works, p. 5. 36 See Boffey and Edwards, Works, pp. 5–6. 37 Boffey, ‘Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden B. 24’, pp. 125–34 (128). 38 On folio 231r –v are the names ‘Elezebeth synclar’ and ‘Jen synclar’, perhaps belonging to the daughters, or daughters-in-law, of Henry Sinclair and Margaret Hepburn. See generally Chesnutt, ‘Dalhousie Manuscript’, 54–95 (87). Other family names are found on 229r–31.

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on the compatibility of love and virtue, the dangers of excessive passions in the powerful, and the capacity of poetry to inspire reform. III Nothing is known about the circulation of The Quare of Jelusy39 outside Arch. Selden. B. 24, where it occupies folios 221v–8 v, and it is impossible to be precise about the date of its composition, or the identity of its author.40 Like The Kingis Quair, The Quare of Jelusy is a deeply intertextual work with many thoughtful references to the poetry of Chaucer and Gower. It also shares with James’s poem an interest in the ability of literature to encourage self-reform, and brings together amatory, ethical, and political concerns to offer advice to nobles. Although modern commentators have shown little interest in the poem, its early readers may have been more alert to these themes. A sixteenth-century note inserted at the beginning of the Quare in the manuscript reads, ‘Here beginith ye quare of Jelusy / avise ye gudely folkis and see’. Presenting the poem as a text from which one can ‘avise’ oneself, this reader perceptively introduces the Quare’s interest in the poet’s responsibility to encourage virtue, wisdom and restraint. The rubric urges others to engage in a reflective interpretive process, ‘to bethink oneself carefully’ and to ‘take counsel’, as DOST puts it, from the poem.41 However, the Quare is less optimistic than The Kingis Quair in the belief that human love can be devoid of vice and a paradigm for other social and political relationships. Instead, its greater pessimism intersects with the Selden manuscript’s other explorations of love-tyranny and jealousy, that unwanted but almost unavoidable aspect of erotic desire. The Cuckoo’s pessimistic catalogue of the blights of romantic love in Clanvowe’s The Book of Cupid, which appears on folios 138v–141v in the manuscript, summarizes many of the negative experiences depicted amongst its amatory material. Love is … disese and hevynesse, Sorowe, and care wt mony a grete sekenesse Dispite, debate, anger and Invye, Repref and schame, vntrust and ielosye, Pride and mischeif, pouertee and woodnesse (171–5).42

39 References are to The Quare of Jelusy edited from MS Bodley Arch.Seld.B.24 e.d. John Norton-Smith and I. Pravda (Heidelberg, 1976). Also see Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, ed. Dana M Symons, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, Michigan 2004). 40 On the poem’s confusing colophon and its authorship see Quare of Jelusy, p. 16 and R.J. Lyall, ‘Two of Dunbar’s Makars: James Affleck and Sir John the Ross’, IR, 27 (1976), 99–109. 41 DOST, v. ‘Avise’. Norton-Smith and Pravda state that the note is the product of a hand that added an annotation to Troilus on folio 28r of the manuscript. See Quare of Jelusy, p. 62. 42 Quoted from Arch. Selden. B. 24 with my punctuation. For an edition see The Works of Sir John Clanvowe, ed. V.J. Scattergood (Cambridge, 1975).

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The Quare of Jelusy begins in the manner of a May love vision. As he walks out into the spring landscape, the narrator is oppressed by loneliness and anxiety. However, he refuses to divulge the cause of his ‘suffrance’ (25), because he sees no source of redress: there is ‘non that likith to support’ (28) a sufferer such as he. His complaint introduces the poem’s investigation of the power of poetry to alter the world in which it is received, and establishes its concern with the interrelationship of microcosm and macrocosm. The narrator’s ‘hevynes and wo’ (32), partakes, he claims, of a wider instability, ‘this warldis changeing and his wo’ (24), and his feeling of enforced silence and despair of amelioration is therefore disquieting.43 This personal desolation, which is never resolved within the frame of the poem,44 forges the narrator’s identification with the female figure, familiar from the French chanson de mal mariée, or complainte d’amour, whom he discovers grieving ‘among the levis grene’ (35): her complaining ‘to [his] hert sat full very nere’ (119).45 Her utterance, we anticipate, promises that complaint will become the means of seeking practical resolution or emotional consolation. Yet the narrator struggles to understand her troubles because her words are spoken ‘So sobirly’ that he cannot ‘here one word quhat that sche said arycht’ (53–5). Only gradually does he comprehend that she is cursing the ‘cruell vice of causeles Ielousye’ (56), appealing to the gods either to vindicate her innocence or deliver her from this ‘warldis chance’ in death (90). But by this time he has missed the chance to ‘counsele’ (110) her. With the exact cause of her torment undisclosed, both the opportunity for narrative development, and with it the possibility that a just resolution can be found, are removed from the poem. As if to emphasize this disempowerment both of complainant and auditor, the lady’s lament is given no structural distinctiveness through a change of stanza form or manuscript decoration,46 and is simply recorded amid the same heroic couplets as the poem’s prologue. Nevertheless, the narrator’s initial interpretive estrangement, and the deliberate ambiguity of the lady’s protests also leaves the Scots poet free to define the vice of jealousy in all-encompassing terms. Indeed in the Quare, the extended semantic range of jealousy includes social, ethical, and political definitions: love jealousy and marital disharmony become metaphors through which to examine politicized questions of social order and the duties of the upper classes as well as self-

43 Compare Kingis Quair, lines 64–5. 44 Helen Phillips, ‘Frames and Narrators in Chaucerian Poetry’, in The Long Fifteenth Century, pp. 71–97 (94, 97). 45 Anne M. McKim, ‘“Makand hir Mone”: Masculine Constructions of the Feminine Voice in Middle Scots Complaints’, Scotlands, 2 (1994) 32–46 (36). On the origins of female literary complaints, N. Dean, ‘Chaucer’s Complaint: A Genre Descended from the Heroides’, Comparative Literature, 19 (1967), 1–27. Copies of the Heroides were circulating in Scotland at an early date. A copy printed in Venice in 1481 was owned by David Guthrie, a doctor of laws; another (Lyon 1511) was owned by a chaplain, John Brown. See John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), pp. 178, 173. 46 On this tradition see Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages, Manuscript Studies, 1 (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 58–9.

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sovereignty.47 Consequently the poem also extends beyond amatory complaint to intersect with ‘complaints on the times’ with their social and spiritual overlap, and nostalgia for an idealized past, and with complaints on individual vices.48 In this broad and public focus the anonymous poet recalls the attention given to the political dangers of envy and jealousy by other advisory writers. Giles of Rome devotes a chapter of De Regimine Principum to the strife caused by a king’s jealousy of his wife, and others, such as Brunetto Latini, warn rulers to avoid envy, one of the deadly sins.49 In Scotland, Gilbert Hay’s The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, a translation of the French Secret des Secrets made for, and circulated within, the Sinclair family,50 is explicit about how ‘enuye engenderis’ detraction, which leads to hatred and ‘rebellioun’, ‘jnymytee’, ‘weirs and slauchteris’ and the destruction of ‘realmes and citeis’ (ch. 3, 29–36).51 Also extensively felt in the Quare’s ethical agenda is the influence of John Gower’s political treatment of envy and jealousy as the blight of society’s rulers in Books II and V of his Confessio Amantis. The Scots narrator introduces his own complaint with disturbing examples of tyrannical envy, and its destabilizing consequences for the community, by invoking the figures of Hercules and Nero. The summaries of their crimes given in the Quare show the influence of the Confessio Amantis where Hercules is presented as duplicitous, adulterous and vengeful,52 and Nero as a rapist.53 In the Scots poem the tyrants are condemned to ‘saile all in the deuillis barge’ (176) – a nautical curse

47 The possible meanings of jealousy covered suspicion, ill will, mistrust and cruelty. Envy implied hatred, hostility, malice, spite and ire towards another. Cf. MED, adj. ‘jelous’; n. ‘jelousie’; n. ‘envie’. DOST, n. ‘jelousy’. See sense 2) ‘suspicion, mistrust, apprehension of treachery’. 48 Compare W.A. Davenport, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative, Chaucer Studies XIV (Cambridge, 1988), p. 4. 49 See The Governance of Kings and Princes. John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C Fowler, Charles F. Briggs and Paul G. Remley (New York and London, 1977), pp. 205–6. For Latini see Medieval Political Theory – A Reader: The Quest for the Body Politic, 1100–1400, ed. Cary J. Nederman, and Kate Langdon Forhan (London and New York, 1993), pp. 92–3. 50 This text was copied for William Sinclair, earl of Orkney. Hay’s prose works survive in Edinburgh, NLS, MS Acc. 9253, a manuscript copied by the first scribe of Arch. Selden. B. 24. 51 See The Prose works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume III. The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, p. 66. The dedication to Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome comments on the importance of counsellors being ‘woid of all hatrent and jnwy’. See Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, ed. Charles MacPherson, STS, 2nd Ser., 19 (Edinburgh and London, 1926), p. 13, lines 35–7. 52 See Book II, lines 2145–307. Hercules’s envy and madness are stressed in both the Scottish and English accounts. 53 Contrast Quare of Jelusy, p. 66. The victimization of women is not emphasized in the account of Nero in the Consolation of Philosophy, II, metrum 6. In Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ (Canterbury Tales VII, 2463–550) Nero’s pride and ‘delicasie’ are mentioned, but the focus is on his crimes against his family. However, the Confessio Amantis is unusual in foregrounding his insatiable lust and his crimes of rape (VI, 1213–34).

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which is revisited in the narrator’s later condemnation of the jealous lover as one who is lacking those important qualities of ‘pitee’ and ‘discrecioun’ (204): Thy stor[my] thocht, ay walking to and fro, As doth the schip among the wawis dryve, And not to pas and note quhare to aryve, Bot ay in drede furth sailith eve and morowe – So passith thou thy worldis course in sorowe (549–53).

This description of the ungoverned self evokes the ‘feble bote’ of the youthful narrator of The Kingis Quair travelling ‘Amang the wawis of this warld’ (110–14). However, the terms of this curse also recall the sinister ‘barge Envie stiereth’ which ‘on the wawes dryve / In gret tempeste and gret debat’ of Genius’s account of ‘Falssemblant’ in the Confessio Amantis (II, 1902, 1906–7). Genius’s image specifically foregrounds the ship of the self under the evil governance of vice. False Semblant is ‘thilke flod’, upon the tides of which ‘Ther is no man so wys that knoweth / … how he sholde himselven guide / To take sauf passage ...’ (II, 1882–5). The narrator’s complaint is cast in the formal nine-line ‘Anelida’ stanza (rhyming aabaabbab), and is structured around a mini treatise on jealousy.54 While the lady ‘cursit preualy’ (55), the Scottish narrator makes jealousy’s private viciousness a matter for public consideration, fusing amatory complaint with the mode of the ‘complaint on the times’ with its focus on man’s sinfulness and social decay.55 He regards jealousy as an affliction which is now a ‘common’ (247) a part of daily experience, though which ‘in the tyme was of oure elderis’ was held ‘abhominable’ (254–5). He also insists that, like all vices, jealousy disregards social hierarchy, ‘For hie nor low is non estate to quyte’ (249). In this he recalls the conviction of The Kingis Quair that all men, irrespective of estate or age, are vulnerable to misgovernance. However, his vision also has a deliberately class-specific dimension and is aimed at rebuking those who should be exemplary in society. Jealousy is particularly shameful, he notes, for the ‘noble wy’ (256), destroying the chivalrous virtues of ‘Fredome’ and ‘gentrise’ (259). It is thus disturbing that the narrator turns in his treatise from old examples of jealousy’s destructiveness, to a more contemporary narrative set ‘in this tyme present’ (382) of a man who His lady sleuch, and syne himselfe also, In this ilk lond, withoutyn ony quhy Bot onely for his wickit gelousy (384–6)

54 The nine-line stanza is used in Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid and Orpheus and Eurydice. Compare Robert Henryson: The Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981), p. 397. It is also used in Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe, for complaints in The Wallace (II, 171–359). A tenline variation is used by Douglas for the complaint against Fortune in The Palice of Honour (16–92). 55 Compare A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge, 1993), p. 1. Compare Davenport, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative, p. 4.

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His focus is the personal ethics of the Quare’s aristocratic readers and the ‘strife, debate, slauchter and vengeance’ (379) that could arise from their jealousy. In contrast to the wrongful tyranny of the jealous, the narrator offers female self-governance as a positive exemplum, devoid of the sort of complex anti-feminist irony which colours some fifteenth-century ‘defences’ of women, including those (like Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid, and the anonymous Lufaris Complaynt) which are found in the Selden Manuscript.56 Instead the Quare poet’s concern is to create a paradigm of individual moral responsibility applicable to all. His outlook parallels Genius’s sympathy in the Confessio Amantis for wronged and exemplary women who cannot be blamed for male lechery: Bot what man wole upon hem muse After the fool impression Of his ymaginacioun, Withinne himself the fyr he bloweth, Wherof the woman nothing knoweth, So mai sche nothing be to wyte (VII, 4270–5).

The Quare’s narrator argues that a virtuous woman is full ‘of pitee and beneuolence / Humble and wise, rycht sobir and benig’ (195–6). Her ‘treuth sadnes and pacience’ (192) contrasts with the misruled fickleness of men ‘ofe euill condicioun’ (203). Women’s merciful, peaceable opposition to the wrongs of cruel and ungoverned men thus provides a paradigm of how the good should set an example for the tyrant.57 However, the Quare also draws attention to the fragility of exemplary morality before the ‘varyit tyrannyis’ (239) it depicts. Disquietingly, the poem suggests that not even the most virtuous can ‘recist agaynis tyranny’ (230), and good women ultimately only serve to demonstrate the powerlessness of ‘wailling, pleynyng and prayere’ (233).58 Indeed, as the soberly spoken complaint of the woman with which the poem began demonstrated, many such protesting voices are never heard. In sharply evoking the social reality of women’s lives, the narrator also underlines the political weakness of others who are limited in power and by status, including the poet-complainer, and thus simultaneously questions the validity of his own project. His remonstration against jealousy is stylistically aligned with that of the lady. The exclamations of despair, distressed questioning of an unjust world and familiar 56 Douglas Gray, ‘Some Chaucerian Themes in Scottish Writers’, in Chaucer Traditions. Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. R. Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 81–90 (82). On examples of anti-feminist satire presented as defences of women see F.J. Utley, The Crooked Rib: An Analytical Index to the Argument About Women in English and Scots Literature, Contributions in Language and Literature, 10 (Ohio, 1944), pp. 60, 192, 211, 269, 294. Selden presents its own anti-feminist satire in ‘Deuise proues and eke humylitee’ (IMEV 679, fols 119v–20). The poem is attributed to Chaucer here and in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fols 262v–3r). It was also printed by Chepman and Myllar (STC 7348). 57 For a detailed analysis of the Quare’s use of Gower’s Confessio Amantis see Joanna Martin, ‘Readings of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Early SixteenthCentury Scotland’, unpublished D.Phil Thesis, Oxford University (2002), pp. 113–29. 58 Ovidian female complaint is commonly seen in late medieval literature as a private discourse that tragically fails to change the violent masculine world.

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interrogative formulations in his complaint, ‘Quhat sall I say? Quhom sall I awite’ (248), read as admissions of the powerlessness of his protest and of the difficulty of remedying vice.59 The narrator’s problematic suggestion that there can be no effective resistance against tyranny reflects something of the political ideas circulating in Scotland in the mid- to late fifteenth century. Anxiety over contemporary acts of tyranny against the weak perpetrated in lieu of strong royal authority infuses other near-contemporary Scottish texts. The Scots Consail and Teiching at the Wysman gaif his sone, warns its readers against serving ‘Wndyr princis that levis by tyranny’ (281). The poet of the mid-fifteenth-century Ratis Raving, which is found in the same manuscript as the Consail,60 observes with a disturbing sense of timeliness, that he can ‘ensampil schwa / Of … men levand’, how ‘gret lordschip’ is ‘hail outran with tyrandry’ (1464– 5,1486–7).61 In his Scotichronicon, composed in the 1440s, Bower famously laments the ‘intolerable tyranny’ that followed James I’s murder. Addressing the young James II, he looks forward to the time when the ‘daily acts of tyranny’ inflicted on the poor by the over mighty can be checked by royal authority.62 Robert Henryson’s Morall Fabillis, probably composed in the 1480s, also abounds with complaints about the oppression of the poor which is unchecked by good government.63 As Roger Mason has reminded us there is no ‘evidence that theories of resistance, … and tyrannicide’ ever figured prominently ‘in the political thought of fifteenthcentury Scots’.64 In its portrayal of the oppression of the innocent by those who should be pursuing the ideals of chivalry The Quare of Jelusy shares with Bower and the Ratis Raving poet a reluctance to discuss tyranny explicitly in relation to royalty,65 and a general disinclination to propose theories of radical reformation. However, through figuring the impossibility of resisting tyrants, and highlighting the potential for good example and literary protest alike to fall on deaf ears, the Quare invests ultimate hope in the self-generated reformation of the sinful. The ‘trety’ inserted into the narrator’s complaint (lines 317–463) analyses the causes of jealousy, particularly its physiological roots.66 Its structural importance is marked in the manuscript with a decorative initial and scribal rubric (‘Here efter 59 Lee Patterson, ‘Writing Amorous Wrongs: Chaucer and the Order of Complaint’, in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honour of Donald. R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher (Newark, 1992), pp. 55–71 (56–7). 60 Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.1.5 (6). 61 Both texts are found in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, ed. Ritchie Girvan, STS, 3rd Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1939). 62 Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 147, 217–21. 63 See, for example, the ‘The Sheep and the Dog’, lines 1258–62, and ‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, lines 2707–13. 64 Roger Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998), p. 9. 65 See Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, pp. 321–38 (323, 328–9). 66 The physiological basis for human behaviour is also addressed in other Scots works such as Ratis Raving (lines 838–98), and Hay’s Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (ch. 11–13).

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followis the trety in the reprefe of Ielousye’, fol. 225r), as well as a distinct stanza form of seven lines. The Quare poet certainly knew Gower’s Confessio Amantis, with its interpolated advice book, and echoes the poem’s descriptions of jealousy as a ‘cotidiane’ (330) fever in this section.67 Furthermore, the interpolation of an advisory treatise into amatory narrative has several fifteenth-century Scottish analogues, including Book II of Lancelot of the Laik, and the ‘Regiment’ and ‘Phisnomy’ sections of The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, texts which I examine in subsequent chapters. Indeed, the Scottish narrator deliberately aligns his treatise with the ‘advice to princes’ tradition by naming as one of his sources (and indeed showing specific knowledge of) the popular didactic romance, Sidrak and Bochas.68 The text is structured as a question and answer session between the philosopher-clerk Sydrake and a powerful king, Bochus. The Quare’s narrator takes care to mention the implied royal audience (‘Bokas king’, 322) for the philosopher’s ‘doctrinis’ (322) on jealousy’s physiological basis. After examining the physical causes of jealousy, the poet enumerates its ‘diuerse’ (457) manifestations and origins in malice, pride, ‘false ymagynyng’ (355) and passion, thus illustrating the intractability of the vice. This physiological and moral complexity has the potential to divide and isolate the self. The jealous man is ‘in him self ay at debate’ (341). His anger and hatred also engage him in debate with the world as he ‘turnyth all to harm and to mischance’ (354). In the course of this diagnostic trajectory, the Quare’s treatise also explores the possibilities for the inward regeneration of the political and domestic tyrant by employing some of the standard injunctions of advisory literature. Conventionally, Christian charity is recommended as envy’s antithetical virtue.69 In addition, ‘wysedome’ (402), discrecioun’ (412) and restraint, qualities commonly advocated in advisory literature, are proposed as remedies. Claiming to know hundreds of salutary examples from old books, the narrator focuses on an exemplum of poor kingship with which to illustrate his argument. The tale concerns a pious emperor, Henry II of Germany, and his suspicion of his wife, the Empress Cunegunda, with whom he had lived for many years in chastity.70 Despite his prayerfulness and charity (‘almouse dede’, 424), Henry suddenly succumbs to the ‘gilt of Ielusy’ (432) and is only spared eternal damnation by the intercession of 67 Compare Confessio Amantis, Book V, lines 463–4. 68 The Quare’s use of the romance is discussed in Sidrak and Bochas, ed. T.L. Burton, 2 vols, EETS, ES, 311 and 312, (Oxford, 1998–99), I, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 69 Based on Matthew 22. 1–14 and I Corinthians 18. Compare Confessio Amantis, Book II – ‘Ayein Envie is Charite’ (3173). Also see Ratis Raving where the ‘madyne cheritee’ is one of the three theological virtues, and has ‘dispyt at all inwy’ (621). 70 The story is told in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea. See The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints by Jacobus de Voragine, ed. and trans. W.G. Ryan (Princeton, 1993), pp. 437–45. An early fifteenth-century Scottish version exists in St Laurence’s Vita in The Legends of the Saints, Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.II.6. This text describes Henry’s misdemeanor as ‘Ialusy’ (697). See The Legends of the Saints, ed. W. M. Metcalfe, 6 parts, STS, 1st Ser., 13, 18, 23, 25, 25, 37 (Edinburgh and London, 1888–96), I, pp. 403–25 (422– 4). Caxton printed a version of the Golden Legend in 1483 (STC 24873). Other editions by Caxton and de Worde followed (see STC 24874–80).

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St Lawrence. As this exemplum suggests, the treatise’s teachings about our chances of repudiating envy through charity and self-restraint are tentative. Simultaneously, the inadequacy of advisory literature for encouraging self-reform is intimated, and the poem ends by outlining its darkest view of human love yet. Even the lovers who ‘reule’ (454) themselves through discretion suffer from the secret anxieties fostered by envy. The narrator finally asserts that his ‘counsele’ is ‘This fantasy to leve …’ (574–5) offering his text for the ‘support’ (583) of lovers. There is no lasting hope for the self-reform of the wicked, or for love to be governed by ‘resoun’ (508) to the exclusion of envy. The narrator’s earlier vision of perfect charity is replaced by one of suffering in this life and the next. Although The Quare of Jelusy provides no infallible remedies for contemporary domestic and political tyranny, its position as the last major work in Arch. Selden. B. 24 helps to reinforce the codex’s identity as a book from which readers can ‘avise’ themselves. It is clear that for the manuscript’s intended aristocratic readership, the Sinclairs of Ravenscraig, the Quare provided more than just a pallid recapitulation of Chaucerian poetics. Rather, its condemnation of the abandonment of chivalric ideals, its stress on the ethical self-reformation of the tyrannous in the interests of social order, and lingering anxieties about the political dangers of envy, must have provided highly appropriate reading for an audience whose public duty entailed loyal service to the crown, especially in the good governance of the localities. Other minor Scottish poems copied into the Sinclairs’ manuscript by the first scribe during his main stint, and then more casually at the end of the manuscript, revisit the themes of The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy. For example, the poem, ‘This warldly Ioy is onuly fantasy’ (fol. 138r), warns against the pursuit of happiness in the form of riches or sensual pleasure – sentiments also found in the manuscript’s English lyrics such as Chaucer’s Truth, and the excerpted stanza from Walton’s translation of the Consolation of Philosophy.71 ‘Thy bagyning is barane brutulness’ (IMEV 3727.2), on folio 229v is replete with a similar Boethian pessimism, warning that ‘Quho heist clymbis most sud[anly descendis]’ (5).72 On folio 229r is ‘My frende gif thou will be a serviture’ (IMEV 2242.4), which revisits the concern of other texts in the codex that members of all estates should aspire to virtue. It petitions servants of each ‘degree quhethir … rich or pure’ to be ‘traust and obedient’ (3–4), even when ‘warldly worschip’ is waning, lessons that apply to loyal (if hard done by) servants of the king, such as the Sinclairs, as much as to the lowborn ‘serviture’ (19). Furthermore, in the courtly environment of the manuscript a ‘serviture’ is also a lover, who, if he or she is to have any happiness, should observe the rules of obedience and truth urged in this poem, as in The Kingis Quair. These Scots works distinguish Arch. Selden. B. 24 from other fifteenth-century Chaucer miscellanies, and bespeak the individuality of its compilation by suggesting the moral and practical concerns held by its owners in their specific cultural milieu. Their lessons indicate a readership who valued the promotion of the social order, 71 ‘This Warldly Ioy …’ appears in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fol. 74v), with a version of ‘Thy Begyning …’, and in the Maitland Folio Manuscript, p. 191. 72 See Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, 1939), pp. 260, 237–8.

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Christian morality and the responsibility of the ruling classes to perform their public duties sagaciously. They therefore both recontextualize the optimism of The Kingis Quair’s reflections on amorousness, society and leadership, and provide an illuminating setting for the near contemporary romance, Lancelot of the Laik, with its interest in service, and the place of love in knightly and royal duty, to which the book now turns.

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Chapter 2

Lancelot of the Laik I The Older Scots romance, Lancelot of the Laik (c.1460–79), exists uniquely in the composite manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5 (part 7), a paper codex probably copied in the later 1480s.1 The poem is a partial, and now fragmentary, reworking of the thirteenth-century French prose romance Lancelot do Lac.2 As it survives, it consists of a dream-vision prologue and three books, which draw on a small section of the French text – the account of the wars between Arthur and Galehot (named Galiot in the Scots text) in which Lancelot plays a crucial part. The poet’s selective treatment of the ‘holl romance’ (1436) transforms his characters’ experiences into compact exempla on the themes of personal and political governance, royal exemplarity and the conduct of the lover,3 which are less explicit in the long French text.4 In particular the Scottish poet is concerned with the place of desire in the political sphere and with the possibility that love can engender moral and political virtue. This ethical treatment of the amatory is complemented by the extended advisory lecture which comprises the poem’s second book, and which is significantly extended from the equivalent section of the French prose. Yet the embedding of this advisory material in a narrative of Arthur’s troubled kingship, chivalric prowess and love, also serves to remind the reader that selfreform is a complex process, dependent on the ability to apply received wisdom to one’s experience in the political world.5 1 On the poem’s date see Sally Mapstone, ‘The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1500’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1986), pp. 144–9. For a description of part 7 of the manuscript, see J. Johnston, ‘An Edition of Lancelot of the Laik’, unpublished M.Litt. thesis, Oxford University (1979), pp. 1–4. 2 References are to Lancelot of the Laik, ed. Margaret Muriel Gray, STS, 2nd Ser., 2 (Edinburgh and London, 1912). References to the French text are to Lancelot do Lac: the Non-Cyclic Old French Prose Romance, ed. Elspeth Kennedy, 2 vols (Oxford, 1980), I. Page and line numbers are supplied. The accompanying English translations are from Lancelot of the Lake, trans. Corin Corley with an Introduction by Elspeth Kennedy (Oxford, 1989). Page numbers are supplied. 3 The poem’s most recent editor overlooks this interrelationship of amorous and political themes and underplays its advisory elements. See Lancelot of the Laik and Sir Tristrem, ed. Alan Lupack, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1994), p. 5. 4 On Lancelot do Lac’s political and legal themes see Elspeth Kennedy, ‘Social and Political Ideas in the French Prose Lancelot’, Medium Ævum, 26 (1957) 90–106. 5 For a more optimistic reading of the poem see Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scots, The French and the English: an Arthurian Episode’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh

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In contrast to the other texts discussed in this book, including the Alexander romance which is the subject of the following chapter, the roles of king and lover are, superficially at least, divided between Arthur and Lancelot in the poem. However, in drawing together the political and amatory concerns of the protagonists the poet demonstrates how the ethical governance of the individual is essential for the future of the realm. The closeness of the two protagonists is made explicit through the solutions they seek for similar predicaments and also through the literary history that they inevitably bring with them.6 Indeed, in Lancelot do Lac this division of identities is shifting, for Arthur has extra-marital love affairs and Lancelot is a disinherited king’s son. In the Scottish poem, Lancelot must reconcile his amorousness with his public duty, and Arthur must set aside self-interest and earn the love of his people through good royal rule. II The linking of the matter of love to discourses of politics and governance begins in the prologue to Lancelot of the Laik. This prologue has no equivalent in the French prose, but echoes the style of the French dits amoreux and texts such as The Parliament of Fowls, Legend of Good Women, and Lydgate’s Complaint of a Lover’s Life which, as The Kingis Quair manuscript shows, were circulating in Scotland.7 It has been suggested that this prologue is a later addition to the romance, made either by the original poet revising his work, or by a subsequent writer who wished to align the poem with the conventions of fashionable English literature.8 However, it seems most likely that this section was carefully designed to prepare us for the concerns of the following narrative, and indeed, many verbal and stylistic correspondences (including a spring setting for the openings of the first and third books of the poem), bind it to the main part of the text. The prologue also contains a potted history of Lancelot’s deeds prior to the events of the translation, and so places the narrative in a comprehensible Arthurian framework, explaining the knight’s connection with Arthur’s court, his love for the queen, and the reasons for his imprisonment by the Lady of Melyhalt. It then predicts that the romance will end with a truce between Arthur and Galiot and will tell ‘how that venus’ rewards Lancelot for his ‘trauell in

International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham D. Caie, R.J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone and Kenneth Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 129–44 (138, 143–4). 6 Compare Sally Mapstone, ‘Kingship and The Kingis Quair’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 51–69 (62). 7 Seasonal prologues are popular in Older Scots works. Compare the opening of The Kingis Quair, The Book of Chess and Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. 8 R.J. Lyall’s unpublished argument to this effect is summarized in Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, pp. 144–5.

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loue’ (309–10). With at least one quire missing from Kk.1.5, it is quite possible that this résumé is an accurate account of the poem’s original state.9 The prologue rehearses the themes of service, duty and governance which appear in several permutations, royal, chivalrous and amorous, in the poem. A feudal vocabulary of bonds and obligations defines the relationship of Cupid and the narrator, and offers a commentary on kingship and service that prepares us for the narrative itself. In his dream exchange with Cupid’s avian messenger, ‘A birde … as ony lawrare gren’ (82), the narrator is presented as a disobedient and reluctant vassal, questioning the authority of his lord. Cupid, the bird tells the narrator, is not ‘content’ with the ‘seruice’ he has rendered (86). The ‘dirkness of [his] thocht’ (101) and his deafening of the birds and the trees with his complaints, which never reach the ear of his lady, are adduced as evidence of his inadequacy as love’s courtier. But in turn, Cupid is presented conventionally as an inflexible king. The narrator protests that ‘It ganyth not … / The seruand for to dispute with ye lord’ (121–2). He ‘dar makine no demande’ against ‘wot It lykith loue commande’ (191–2). The similarities of the narrator’s situation to that outlined in the prologue of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women are strong, and compounded by the poet’s reference to ‘Alphest’ (57), presumably a scribal miswriting of Alceste. Yet, while in the Legend of Good Women the queen intercedes on the narrator’s behalf, restraining the tyranny of the god of love, here the narrator must face the charges of his disobedience alone and he searches anxiously, ‘in … thocht rolling to and fro’ (196), for some literary matter with which to please Cupid and his lady. This disquiet at the nature of Cupid’s rule recalls expressions of personal unrest generated by political anxiety in The Kingis Quair and The Quare of Jelusy and prepares the reader for the critical examination of Arthur’s kingship later in the poem.10 However, despite suggestions of his royal imperiousness, Cupid’s grievance about the narrator’s refusal to accept responsibility for his predicament is not unfounded. Indeed, this lover ‘schapith no thinge of’ his ‘awn remede’ (89) and complains, ‘Vithoutine hope ore traistinge of comfort’ (25). His admission that his miserable state of unrequited love has lasted for years, and the presence of Priapus in the garden he enters, introduces suggestions of frustrated, possibly even elderly, desire.11 On Cupid’s instructions, the bird prompts the narrator’s complaint to his lady in the form of the ensuing poem (‘as tueching thine aduersytee / Complen and sek of the ramed, the cwre’, 116–17). The narrator must respond to ‘lovis charg’ and apply a new ‘bissynes’ (164–5), to his love service by writing his plaint or a ‘trety’ (145).

9 This reward is probably Lancelot and Guinevere’s kiss, rather than the consummation of their love, which comes later in the French romance. See Lancelot do Lac, p. 348. The missing section of the Scots romance is therefore roughly equivalent to pp. 314–49 in the French, but would have been as selectively treated as the material for the first three books. The poem breaks off at line 3486, the scribe having supplied a catchword at the bottom of folio 42v. 10 Compare The Kingis Quair, lines 64–5 and The Quare of Jelusy, lines 19, 23–4. 11 Priapus was often represented visually as an old man, though in literary allusions he is sometimes said to be a youth. See E. Brown, ‘Hortus Inconclusus: The Significance of Priapus and Pyramus and Thisbe in the Merchant’s Tale’, CR, 4 (1970), 31–40.

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The prologue is therefore a lesson in self-determination that provides a foil to the experiences of both Lancelot and Arthur. The narrator’s unhappy love situation, which must be remedied with busyness, anticipates Lancelot’s susceptibility to ‘louis rage’ (234), and his ‘seruice’ (229) of, but (within the bounds of this translation) unrequited desire for, Guinevere. His anxious feelings also prefigure what we shall see of Arthur’s personal misrule and paralysing ‘Infyrmytee of thoght’ (2073) which prevent him from finding a cure for his governmental problems. The romance itself opens with the focus securely on Arthur’s troubled kingship and the sense of impending crisis that predominates at Carlisle. Arthur’s peerless knights are dissatisfied in their service at court just as the prologue’s narrator was in his service to Cupid: they hear of ‘None awenture, for wich the knyghtis weire / Anoit all’ (350–51). Sir Kay has to petition the king to exercise better leadership, and this he does, in a change to the source, directly to Arthur’s face.12 This emerging portrait of the king is not coloured by the anti-Englishness found elsewhere in fifteenthcentury Scottish presentations of Arthur, such as Bower’s Scotichronicon, where he is the acquisitive and covetous aggressor of the Scottish nation.13 Yet, it is a negative portrayal and what is of immediate concern to the Scottish poet is the poor quality of Arthur’s guidance of his country and his fractured bonds with his people. Arthur’s ensuing dreams of his own dismemberment disturbingly illustrate the possible disintegration of the body politic: It semyth that of al his hed ye hore Of fallith and maid desolat; … … He thought aȝeine, apone the samyne wyss, His vombe out fallith vith his hoil syde Apone the ground, & liging hyme besid (365–6, 374–6).14

The dreams make the king ‘pensyve in his mynd’ (367) and ‘adred in to his hart’ (378), but he is unable to understand them. His lack of interpretive ability here is indicative of limited self-knowledge. Although this is in part mitigated by his desire to discover the truth concealed in his visions, his search for an explanation also reveals deeper problems in his rule. What is particularly disconcerting is the reluctance and trepidation of the clerks and schoolmen in their response to Arthur’s 12 On the French text’s handling of Arthur’s predicament see Rosemary Morris, The Character of King Arthur in Medieval Literature, Arthurian Studies, 4 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 58–60. 13 For Bower’s negative portrayals of Arthur see Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D.E.R. Watts, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98), II, pp. 65–9 (on Arthur’s birth and illegitimate claims to be king), and VI, p. 115 (on Arthur subduing the Scots). On the varied Scottish presentation of Arthur in vernacular prose and romance, see Nicola Royan, ‘“Na les vailyeant than ony uthir princis of Britane”’: Representations of Arthur in Scotland 1490–1540’, SSR, 3 (2002), 9–20; Nicola Royan, ‘The Fine Art of Faint Praise in Older Scots Historiography’, in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan, Arthurian Studies lxi, (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 43–54. 14 In the French text the dreams are less horrible. In the first dream Arthur loses his hair, in the next his fingers, and in the final one his toes.

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command that they decipher his visions.15 At first they dismiss the apparitions, and then, at Arthur’s insistence, agree to investigate his dreams, but delay making a full response. Most of all it is their ‘dred’ of the ‘kingis myght’ (461) that motivates their dangerous silence. Despite his ‘secret’ (477) clemency Arthur does indeed threaten to destroy them and locks them up until they satisfy his demands. The description of the scholars’ ‘calcolacioune’ (437) as they attempt to interpret the king’s dream is not paralleled in the French prose. Its addition to the Scots narrative reminds us that book learning is vulnerable to abuse, and does not alone provide the key to truth or to self-understanding. Indeed, the poet’s next alteration to the emphasis of his source indicates his concern to pursue this theme: in the French romance it is not clear at first that the clerks and philosophers have found anything at all, let alone anything untoward, in their explorations.16 In the Scots version it is at once certain that the clerks are hiding their grim discovery from the king rather than helping him to remedy his faults. They continue to insist that their ‘sciens’ has not yielded any ‘ewydens’ (451–2). As in the French they repeatedly sue for more time, but their greater understanding makes this continued use of delaying tactics disquieting. The tenor of the belated revelations made by these scholars is consonant with what we have seen so far to be the prospects of Arthur, a king whose knights are restless and resentful of royal apathy. The clerks tell Arthur that he must forgo all earthly honour and those he depends on shall fail him. Yet, the expertise of the clerks in revealing this is nothing more than diagnostic: they are unable to impart any clear guidance to Arthur as to whether he can ‘reforme / His desteny’, or whether it is unalterably ‘in the hewyne … preordynat’ (505–7). They provide Arthur with an obscure riddle of a Water-Lion, Leech and Flower which leaves him almost as ignorant as when he awoke from his dreams: ‘No word the king ansuerid ayane, / For al this resone thinkith bot in weyne’ (523–4). His response indicates his lack of understanding, and also reinforces the need, when human knowledge is so imperfect, for royal self-sufficiency in matters of counsel. Even though Arthur is perturbed by the news of his problems, the Scots poet emphasizes that his concern centres on ‘his honor’ (508) rather than on the discord that the realm is to suffer.17 Indeed, on hearing his clerk’s riddle, Arthur (as in the 15 Arthur’s dreams best fit into the category of the somnium, which Macrobius described as highly ambiguous and requiring skilled interpretation. See Macrobius: Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, ed. and trans. W.H. Stahl, Records of Civilisation, 48 (New York, 1952), pp. 87–92 (90). The first clerk overlooks the complexity of the king’s dream and defines it in Aristotelian terms as arising from bodily causes (‘Empris of thought ore superfleuytee’, 393). See Stephen F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 14 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 22–3. 16 The French reads, ‘Cil esproverent la force de lor san par nuef jorz, et lors vindrent au roi et distrent [que il n’avoient riens trové]’ (Lancelot do Lak, p. 261, lines 13–14) [‘They tested the power of their wisdom for nine days and then they went to the king and said that they had found nothing’, p. 208]. 17 The French simply reads, ‘De ceste chose est mout li rois esbahiz. Et puis li demande: “Or me dites … se nule riens m’an porroit estre garanz’ (Lancelot do Lac, p. 262, lines 9–10) [‘The king was greatly troubled at this; and then he asked him “Now tell me if anything can safe me from it”?’, p. 210].

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French) sets off on a hunt. A note of added ambivalence is introduced by the poet with no prompt in his source, indicating subtly how Arthur hides his anxiety in public, but remains deeply troubled: He shawith outwart his contenans As he therof takith no greuans Bot al the nyght it passid nat his thoght (525–7).

As in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Arthur’s hunting expeditions seem structurally placed to offer a powerful metaphor of his own huntedness and entrapment in selfdenial. Instead of offering a switch of focus to the fortunes of Lancelot, as in the French romance, the Scottish poet continues to strengthen the paradigmatic potential of Arthur as an imperfect ruler. He immediately turns to Arthur’s foil, Galiot, whose messenger arrives to challenge Camelot, and whose threat has the curious effect of causing Arthur to go on yet another hunt rather than rallying his troops in defence of the nation. Significantly Galiot’s courteous vassal, an ‘agit knyght, & hee / Of gret esstat’ (542–3), reflects his young master’s qualities.18 The report he gives of Galiot’s qualities ‘Of manhed, wisdome, & of hie curag’ (549) is later confirmed by one of Arthur’s own men who agrees that the king’s aggressor is ‘ful of larges and humylytee’ (607). Most importantly, and underpinning Galiot’s differences from Arthur, ‘He vith his men so louit is’ (612) and commands the loyalty of an immense army. He commences his campaign with ‘His consell holl’ (744) assembled to advise him and his actions are determined by his sense of honour and fairness. When Arthur does eventually respond to the threat to his country it is with a rashness that must be restrained by his knights, who remind him of his royal responsibilities: Shir, that is al contrare our entent; For to your folk this mater is wnwist And ye ar here our few for to recist Ȝone power, and youre cuntre to defende (657–61).

His knights tell him that he should act ‘lyk a king and lyk a weriour’ (663) and yet Arthur is seen to reject such advice and act only according to his ‘awn conseil and entent’ (678). Such a linking of chivalric valour and royal status, which is absent in such explicit terms in the French source, emphasizes that the king should be the exemplary knight in martial ability and courage as well as the figurehead for his realm. As the romance progresses, this dual, and as yet unfulfilled expectation of Arthur, forces us to compare and contrast Lancelot and his king. In the Scottish romance, much of the narration of Lancelot’s personal feats that is interwoven into the French account of the wars with Galiot, is omitted.19 18 Again this is phrased more emphatically than in the French source, where the visitor is ‘uns chevaliers d’aage qui mout senbloit prodome’ (p. 263, lines 33–4) [‘an elderly knight, who seemed to be a man of worth’, p. 212]. 19 However, the Prologue (215–94) mentions some of these feats. For Lancelot’s adventures that occur between Arthur’s dreams and Galiot’s invasion in the French prose, see Lancelot do Lac, pp. 263–75.

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Thus when the knight is introduced it is specifically in connection with Arthur’s problems. We encounter him first as a prisoner of the Lady of Melyhalt (whose lands are being overrun by the invading armies) complaining about love and fate. His lyric complaint,20 which has no precedent in the French prose,21 is metrically separate from the romance narrative, drawing on a long tradition of intercalated lyric songs or complaints, formally differentiated from the rest of their frame texts through form or voice.22 To heighten this separation, each of the four five-line stanzas that make up Lancelot’s complaint is underscored in red ink – striking in a manuscript that is otherwise sparsely decorated.23 With its emphasis on interiority, Lancelot’s complaint serves to invite comparison between the personal conduct of the knight and that of the pensive King Arthur. Incarcerated against his will, Lancelot rails against his fate. Like the fearful Arthur, he questions his destiny and sees himself as a paradigm of misfortune – an ‘example of disess’ (706): I curs the tyme of myne Natiuitee, Whar in the heuen It ordinyd was for me, In all my lyue neuer til haue eess (703–5)

In his self-pity he also shares Arthur’s lack of agency. Recalling the words of his lovesick precursor, the prologue’s narrator, Lancelot’s use of martial metaphors to describe his inner state only, emphasizes this. His heart is carved ‘by the suord of

20 Compare ‘Adew der hart / be man depart’ (IMEV 120.7), copied in a sixteenth-century hand onto a leaf inserted amidst legal material in part 9 of Kk.1.5. The lyric with its refrain ‘My luf mornis for me for me my luf mornis for me’ (fol.180r), has an analogue in one of The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, ‘Who is my loue / but God aboue?’ (IMEV 4094.3). See The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, ed. A.F. Mitchell, STS, 1st Ser., 39 (Edinburgh and London, 1897), p. 140. There are also two Middle English versions: ‘My loue she mourns for me’, in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS 1157, f.24v (IMEV 2261.2); and ‘My love sche morneth for me / For me for me’, in British Library, Additional MS 31922, Henry VIII’s Manuscript, f.30v (IMEV 2261.4). See Julia Boffey, Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages, Manuscript Studies, 1 (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 89–90 and John Stevens, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 14–15, 29, 53, 124–5, 129, 393–4. On a Catholic version of the lyric see A.A. MacDonald, ‘Poetry, Politics and Reformation Censorship in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, ES, 64 (1983), 410–21 (410–11). 21 Although Kennedy notes that the French Lancelot occasionally ‘speaks much as might a poet in a love lyric’. See Elspeth Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail. A Study of the Prose Lancelot (Oxford, 1986), p. 59; and Lancelot do Lac, pp. 345–6. 22 Lancelot’s complaint bears similarities to that of the imprisoned Wallace lamenting fortune’s cruelty in ‘his tender age’, in Book II of the poem (164–206). The Wallace (c.1476– 78) is a close contemporary of Lancelot of the Laik. See Hary’s Wallace, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid, 2 vols, STS, 4th Ser., 4 and 5 (Edinburgh and London, 1968–69), I, pp. xvi, lxxxix. 23 Compare the birds’ lyric in The Kingis Quair (232–8), which is marked simply ‘cantus’ by a later reader of MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (fol. 195r).

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double peine and wo’ (700), ‘with dowbil wo yfirite’ (725), and he views his youth as a time of ‘tempest and penans’ (712).24 Lancelot’s double misery encompasses both the public and private aspects of his life, ‘presone and … loues gret suppris’ (690). He first mourns his inability to carry out his knightly duties: he cannot go ‘To haunt knychthed, the wich he most desirit’ (724). In contrast to the practice of the French poet, the Scots writer expends little energy on the details of the prison building, and more on the ‘wo and hewyness’ (902) of the ‘carful presonere’ (910) whose self-pity is as detrimental to his chivalry as his physical confinement. Lancelot is imprisoned because of his killing, in selfdefence, of the knight of Melyhalt. He must therefore secure his return to the active life through humility (beseeching in ‘lawly wyss’, 913), asking for compassion from his gaoler, and defending his ‘honore’ against unjust charges of violence (‘that I did of werrey need’, 943–4). His bond with the Lady of Melyhalt is his first step towards showing himself worthy of his chivalric order again. Stressing his integrity he assures her that he is a ‘feithful knycht & trew’ (955). And, once out of captivity he must transform his introspection into selfless activity. As Hay confirms in his Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, ‘sa suld knycht jn tyme of nede be besy – quhen the king or his contree is our’sett with lourdanis and revaris or traytouris. or oyir wikkit misdoaris’ (ch. 6, lines 67–9).25 Lancelot’s second grievance is his affliction with the ‘smert of loues sore’ (720). As the prologue has revealed, he desires to ‘serue’ (1013) Guinevere, and his love for her is closely bound up with his chivalric reputation and thus his identity.26 But, unlike the narrator and Arthur, Lancelot comes to recognize that action is better than lamentation – ‘dare I noght complane’ (1017). When faced with Galiot’s troops, Arthur can do no more than be anxious (1147–51). In contrast, once on the battlefield, dressed in his red armour, Lancelot responds to the ‘blythfull’ (998) morning and, putting aside thoughts of adversity, love catches ‘hyme by the hart’ (1009), precipitating his internal transformation.27 As the narrator puts it, ‘He grew in to o fresch and new curage’ (997). The self-scrutiny of his lyric complaint in captivity is again evident in his moment of introspection as he looks towards the queen and addresses his heart: Bot, hart, sen at yow knawith she is here, That of thi lyue and of thi deth is stere, Now is thi tyme, now help thiself at neid And the dewod of euery point of dred (1018–21).

24 See lines 28–9: ‘My carful hert carwing can In two / The dredful suerd of lowis hot dissire’. Also see lines 35–6, ‘the Inwart peine / Of dowblit wo’. 25 See The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume III. The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, p. 35, lines 67–9. 26 As Archibald points out, the Scottish poet’s decision to write about the ‘exploits of the young Lancelot and the early stages of his love for the queen’, is unusual in insular Arthurian literature. See Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Lancelot of the Laik: Sources, Genre, Reception’, in Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, pp. 71–82 (73). 27 Kennedy notes that Lancelot’s trances ‘precede heroic activity’ while Arthur’s ‘arise from inactivity and frustration’. Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail, p. 57.

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These love-trances make him oblivious to his own injury, and his actions performed ‘byrnyng in loues fyre’ (1090) actually serve the common profit and save Arthur’s realm. This the poet makes very clear, again departing from the French source in his explicitness: That ne ware not the vorschip and manhede Of the red knycht, in perell and in dreid Arthuris folk had ben, vith-outen vere (1112–4).

Lancelot is ‘Thinking to do his ladice love to have’ (3169), but because love gives him courage and ‘strenth encresing with manhed’ (3167) it is instrumental in Arthur’s defence. When he later appears on the battlefield as the Black Knight, and preparing to emulate the injured Gawain, Lancelot reminds himself of ‘þe hour that [he] was makid knycht’, / With love aȝane quhois powar and whois mycht’ he has no strength (3269–71). Love for the queen thus makes Lancelot act ‘lyk o knycht’ (1027), just as love for his people will eventually make Arthur ‘lyk o prince, o conquerour, or king’ (2127). Thus, the exemplariness that Lancelot derives from his love becomes the means of his personal freedom from physical imprisonment, and limited self-understanding, as well as the inspiration for his courage, just as Arthur’s recognition of the importance of love and largesse in government will help him escape from being ‘Yclosit … in dyrknes of … syne’ (2036) and oppressed by a powerful enemy. The poem’s view of love is therefore quite distinct from the unforgiving perspectives contained in some treatises on chivalry such as Hay’s Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, where the knight’s subjection to physical desire leads to his loss of honour.28 The second book of the romance returns to Arthur’s problems. It opens with the king tossing and turning in bed, ‘Remembryng the apperans of his wo’ (1283) and very much in need of the lecture, delivered by his clerk, Amytans, which dominates the rest of the book. In the French prose, the clerk is unnamed, described simply as a ‘preudomme’, and his mysterious appearance at the court is thought by the king to be divinely instituted. As Mapstone has suggested, the Scottish naming of the clerk seems designed to invite comparison with Aristotle, the supposed author of the Secretum Secretorum.29 Indeed, in its inclusive scope, and predilection for formally dividing and structuring its material, this section of Lancelot of the Laik deliberately aligns itself with the Secretum tradition. This advice-giving has structural and thematic parallels to the dedication of one book of Gower’s Confessio Amantis to an advisory text based on the Secretum Secretorum.30 Its presence in the romance is also strikingly similar to the insertion of the detailed ‘Regiment’ in the near contemporary verse romance, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, which is the subject of the following chapter. In the Scots text, Amytans is Arthur’s trusted intimate, ‘Contemplatif and chast in gouernance’ (1302), and his closeness to the king makes his teachings more forceful

28 See ‘Introduction’, pp. 7–8. 29 Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, pp. 166–7. 30 On the circulation of this work in Scotland, see ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6.

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than the oblique lessons of Carlisle’s assembled clerks. His criticism of Arthur’s poor personal and political governance is uninhibited: Of al thi puple the hartis ben ylost And tynt richt throw thyne awn mysgouernans Of auerice and of thyne errogans (1519–21).

Arthur’s offence is that he has been consumed by his own excessive desires: ‘Yow haith non Ey bot one thyne awyn delyt, / Or quhat that plesing shall thyne appetyt’ (1348–9). He has neglected his people and been deaf to ‘ther complantis’ (1360).31 Indeed, Amytans’s use of the Boethian ship metaphor, which by the fifteenth century was widely used to figure both the self and the state, demonstrates that Arthur’s personal faults have grave public consequences.32 Thi schip, that goth apone the stormy vall, Ney of thi careldis in the swelf it fall, Whar she almost is in the perell drent; That is to say, yow art so far myswent Of wykkitness vpone the vrechit dans, That yow art fallyng in the strong vengans Of goddis wreth … (1316–22).

Invoking the iconography of the king arrayed with ‘Ringe, thi ceptre and thi crovn’ (1324), being cast downwards on fortune’s wheel, unseated from ‘hie estat’ (1325),33 Amytans goes on to remind Arthur of the fate of ungoverned princes.34 Pointing out that he has neglected his obligations to God, Amytans returns to the language of service, hierarchy, duty and loyalty, that has already been applied to the narrator and Lancelot: …yow aucht his biding to obserf, And at thy mycht yow shuld hyme pless and serf ; That dois yow nat, for yow art so confussit With this fals warld, that thow haith hyme Refusit And brokine haith his reul and ordynans The wich to the he gave in gouernans (1334–9). 31 This echo of Isaiah 1 is a staple of the advice tradition. 32 See V.J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485, Blandford History Series (London, 1971), p. 180. The ship image has this semantic breadth in The Kingis Quair and Quare of Jelusy (see Chapter 1). Also see John of Fordun’s image of ‘a country without a king’ being like ‘a ship amid the waves without rower or steersman’ in his Chronica Gentis Scotorum. See John of Fordun’s Chronicle of the Scottish Nation, ed. and trans. W.F. Skene, 2 vols, The Historians of Scotland, 4 (Edinburgh, 1871–72), II, p. 289 (I, p. 293 for the Latin). 33 The Scottish poet seems to be aware of the tradition of Arthur’s dream of Fortune’s wheel. See The Alliterative Morte Arthure (3218–467) in Morte Arthure: A Critical Edition, ed. Mary Hamel, Garland Medieval Texts, 9 (New York, 1984). 34 See Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927), plates 9 and 10.

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Arthur’s response to these accusations is remorseful, and he expresses a willingness to ‘mend’ (1391). But so far, he has lacked the interiority that has been so important to Lancelot’s recovery, and Amytans’s first injunction is therefore that Arthur makes a thorough confession in ‘ful contretioune’ (1414) for his sins. This moment is presented as more private than that in the French source, where Arthur assembles all his bishops and archbishops and is publicly humbled and scourged. The confessional process is also presented as more complex. Arthur is to recall all the sins he has committed since ‘the ȝeris of Innocens’ (1431), and his confession is only complete after two attempts. At this point, divine approval seems to manifest itself in Galiot’s proposal of a one-year truce which Amytans welcomes as a sign of God’s ‘bynewolans’ (1593). The changes to the source’s order of events here seem designed to encourage the notion that Arthur is already improving morally: Galiot’s messenger does not sue for a truce until the end of Amytans’s explication of the riddle of the Lion in the Water, Leech and Flower in the French text. The main section of Amytans’s lecture echoes the staples of the speculum principis tradition, explicating the fundamental royal qualities of Justice, Pity, Truth, Largess and Virtue, and thus expanding greatly on the equivalent section of French prose which is dominated by the theme of liberal giving. Throughout the lecture, Amytans also foregrounds the importance of integrity, self-responsibility and restraint if a king is to win the love of his people.35 And, although the advice he gives is conventional, some of the poet’s phrasing is inflected so as to ensure that the reader does not lose sight of its relevance to the contemporary situation. For example, in an addition to the French prose Amytans discusses the moral responsibilities that a king must embrace in the transition from minority to majority. Thus kings who have reached the ‘yheris of Resone’ (1660) have no excuse not to punish wrongdoers, and must make amends for the injustices perpetrated in their ‘tender ag’ (1657), a doctrine of considerable pertinence in fifteenth-century Scotland. In the manuscript a rubricated initial highlights the importance of this comment on the age of kings.36 Later in the lecture, flattery (a subject not broached in the French) is said to be endemic in the households of contemporary kings: ‘flatry … longith / To court and al the kinges larges fongith’ (1919–20) making ‘o king within hyme self so nyce’ (1944). The conclusion of the lecture focuses on royal virtue, and the king’s duty to provide an exemplum to his people. This king is the ‘holl maister of the scoullis’ (1990) and so must instruct and guide his subjects: Thus if o king stud lyk his awn degree, Wertwis and wys than shuld his puple bee, Only set by vertew hyme to pless, And sore adred his wisdom to displess (1975–8).

35 See R.J. Lyall, ‘Politics and Poetry in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Scottish Literary Journal, 3 (1976), 5–29 (14). 36 Rubricated initials begin the major thematic episodes of Amytans’s lecture, but the placing of an initial here is striking because this material is not actually a separate element of the discourse.

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This is a powerful notion in the literature of this period. As we saw in Chapter 1, Bower refers to James I as a ‘schoolmaster and goad to himself’ and the guardian of his people’s education, and the Kingis Quair calls attention to the didactic capacity of its narrator.37 Hay’s version of the Secretum Secretorum, The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis also suggests that ‘kingis and princis suld ger mak scolis in thair realmes’ for practical purposes, such as winning God’s favour, but also for ideological reasons – namely that the clerks might record the exemplarity of good rulers for posterity (ch. 15, line 2). That setting a good example was expected of the monarch is further embedded in the language of some of the Acts of Parliament from the reigns of James II and James III. A parliament of March 1457 held it ‘speidfull’ that the king ‘gif exempill’ in his actions as a landowner to his own barons and bishops. In 1473 parliament ambitiously required that James III’s enforcement of justice should allow that ‘þe brute & þe fame of him myt pas in vþeris contriis And þt he mycht optene Þe name of sa just a prince & sa vertews & sa wele Reuland his awne Realme in Justice policy & peax þt vþeris princis myt tak example of him’.38 This emphasis on the king’s exemplary virtue leads neatly to Amytans’s explanation of the riddle of the Lion, Leech and Flower, as respectively God the Father, Christ, and the Virgin. This places political advice firmly within a Christian context, promising the redemption of man’s imperfections. It also echoes Amytans’s earlier lesson that royal prosperity is dependent on God’s favour alone and on ‘non vthir worldly providens’ (1592). Interestingly, Amytans’s focus on the king’s wisdom, virtue and faith, is not complimented by a formal discussion of chastity, of the sort often found in advice to princes texts.39 This is perhaps even more surprising because the French prose Lancelot shows a strong concern with Arthur’s amorous relationships. The French narrative tells, for example, of the relationship of Arthur and Canile, the Saxon enchantress who seduces the king and endangers his nation, an episode which comes after the material selected from the romance by the Scottish writer. The romance then relates how the king allows himself to be tricked into falling into a deep passion for the False Guinevere. In addition, the French source makes more of Arthur’s illegitimacy: where Amytans notes that Arthur was illegitimate, and swiftly moves onto analyse the importance of his true service of God, the French ‘preudomme’ tells the king that he was not engendered in lawful marriage but in adultery (‘tu ne fus angendrez par angendrez par ansamblement de leial mariage, mes en si granz pechiez com est avotire’), and so is tainted by this transgression and the vilest of sinners.40 Furthermore, Lancelot do Lac confronts the effect that Arthur’s imperfect rule has on the integrity of his marriage. At the start of the wars, a messenger from the rival camp reports to Arthur that once Galiot has conquered

37 38 39 40

See Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 308–9: ‘se sibi prefecit petegogum et coactorem’. APS, II, pp. 49, 104. See ‘Introduction’, pp. 5–6. Lancelot do Lac, p. 283, lines 19–21.

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his lands he will also take his wife, ‘qu’il [a] oie tant prisier de biauté et de valor sor totes dames terrienes’.41 The selective methods of the Scottish Lancelot, and the natural transference of the theme of amatory self-governance onto Lancelot, are of course the main reason for the lack of specific attention given to Arthur’s marriage or love affairs. However, the accusations made against Arthur throughout Amytans’s sermon still indicate a singular and indulgent, if not licentious, strain in the king, and call to readers’ minds episodes from its popular French source. As we have seen, Arthur is told that through the avaricious pursuit of his ‘awn delyt’ (1529) he has lost his ‘pupleis hartis’ (1383). So while the roles of king and lover are divided between these two characters, the place of desire in royal rule is nevertheless carefully considered. The Scottish poet does this by developing the French preudomme’s general injunction that a monarch should aspire for honour and love from his people.42 In the Scottish romance Arthur is first told to emulate divine love: because God has made him king, ‘Efter his loue thow shuld them Reul and Stere’ (1343). Amytans’s counsel extends to the state of the king’s hear, the seat of his emotions: he who ‘vantith hart’ (1513) is as good as dead, but the good king is of ‘fre hart’ (1509) and must serve ‘god with humble hart’ (1598). In these political terms, royal munificence or largess is a virtue to be cultivated in the interests of stability: princes should not be of ‘vrechit hart’ (1766).43 The rest of the poem explores the application of Amytans’s didactic lore and its usefulness for Arthur’s kingly dilemmas in the continuing wars with Galiot. Indeed, by placing the advisory section in the midst of narrative, the poet is able to show that a passive absorption of received wisdom is not sufficient. Indeed, the end of the second book and the whole of the fragmentary third book of the Scottish romance show that the extent of Arthur’s self-reformation is uncertain and this ambiguity is only accentuated by Lancelot’s achievements. At the end of Amytans’s teaching, Arthur declares his ‘hart … In to ess’ (2053) and comforted by his teacher’s ‘sentens’ (2131), and he appears to be moving towards the productive mixture of reflection and action that has previously been more characteristic of Lancelot: ‘rycht well I have consauit, / And in myne hartis Inwartness resauit’ (1999–2000). With a new sense of his political and personal agency, the king immediately promises his teacher that he will ‘fulfill and do yowr ordynans’ (2001). The Scots poet goes on to observe that Arthur ‘holy haith conquerit’ (2156) his people’s hearts, and Book II closes with an optimistic glimpse of his ‘visdome sufficyans’ (2443), and his ‘bessy’ (2447) and diligent adherence to Amytans’s lore by giving generously and winning his subjects over to willing ‘seruice’ (2460). However, it soon becomes clear that the king’s reform is not complete. As in the French romance, Arthur falls into a ‘hewynes’ (2161), which is disturbing given Amytans’s warning that he should not be ‘pensyve’ (2162) around his people. 41 Lancelot do Lac, p. 264, lines 12–15 [‘whom he has heard so esteemed for beauty and merit above all earthly ladies’, p. 212]. 42 See Lancelot do Lac, p. 286, line 11. 43 Compare Ireland’s Meroure, Book VII: ‘The king suld luf his pepil as pe fader his barnis’. See Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, volume III, ed. Craig McDonald, STS, 4th Ser., 19 (Aberdeen, 1990), p. 120, lines 15–16.

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Further, that he rejects Gawain’s military advice in ‘matelent’ (anger or spite) (2167) shows that he is not yet completely open to counsel or ready to accept the blame for his faults: ‘Yhe have the wrang me to repref, for quhy / Thar lewith none that shuld me blam’ (2169–70). It is Gawain therefore, not the king, who takes the initiative in securing the safety of the realm when he goes to seek Lancelot’s assistance, brushing aside Arthur’s petulant objections. The third book of Lancelot of the Laik functions as a further commentary on the process of heeding and applying good counsel. Even though Arthur’s bonds of mutual service with his people have been strengthened, it is not the king who occupies a position of exemplarity. In the second battle scene it is Lancelot’s behaviour that is to be emulated. As Gawain tells the queen, Madem, of this larg warld is he The knycht the wich I most desir to see, His strenth, his manhed, his curag, and his mycht, Or do in armys, that longith to o knycht (2843–6).

It is Lancelot who is leading Arthur’s men and it is therefore difficult not to recall Amytans’s injunction at this point, that ‘so o king he schuld his puple led’ (1962). Galiot appears on the battlefield as a ‘seruand’ (2887) of his realm, and the final lines of the poem as it survives are his words of ‘good comfort’ (3484) to his men. Lancelot’s speech rallying the army is much more extensive than its equivalent in the French romance, and wins unanimous obedience from the troops who answer in ‘o woyss’ (3471). Furthermore, Lancelot’s worth has been repeatedly attested from several quarters. The Lady of Melyhalt’s erotic desire for the knight is based on his chivalric worth – ‘The knychtis worschip’ (1225). The episode in which she is pierced by ‘loues fyre dart’ and infused with ‘hot desyre’ (1226–7) is placed directly after Lancelot’s feats in the first battle, rather than after Amytans’s lesson, where it is found in the French, serving to stress from the earliest possible moment the exemplariness of the Scottish Lancelot. Now, at this crucial point in the poem, the need for such knights to be cherished by a monarch is reiterated. Surveying the battlefield, Gawain advises (in a passage much reworked from the French text) that, For well it oucht o prince or o king Til honore and til cheris in al thing O worthi man, that is in knychthed prewit (2993–5).

Arthur gradually begins to recognize this, asking Gawain, ‘Knowis yow nocht I myne housshold suld encress / In knychthed, and in honore, and largess?’ (2199– 200). But Lancelot, who is ‘the flour of knychted and of chevalry’ (2181), a title that has not been used of Arthur since the beginning of Book I,44 remains outside his ‘houshold’ (2175).45 44 See especially lines 344–5. It is elsewhere applied to Arthur’s knights, including Gawain. 45 In the Scottish romance it is Galiot, not Arthur, who rewards Lancelot’s prowess (3389–421).

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Lancelot of the Laik’s comparison of knight and king in the qualities and duties that befit them is a common element in the exploration of the social role of knighthood in the ‘service of secular authority’ by late medieval advice writers.46 This fusion of royal and chivalric qualities is found, for example, in the Scots treatise The Buke of the Chess, extant in the Asloan Manuscript (fols 41–76v), which contains a long section on ‘de milite’ (828–1309).47 The ‘worthy knycht’ should fight for the ‘commoun proffet of the land’, ‘kepe the pepill and defend’, uphold the laws of his king, be ‘werray liberall’, and be ‘richt werraye trew and leile / To thar lordis …’ (872, 1044, 986, 890–91). The author goes on to note the importance of a knight’s loyalty to his lord and to his fellow knights, Knychtis forsuth amang thaim-self suld be Off gret lufrent and of gret lawté. Richt dowtit ar knychtis in batall strang Quhen luf and lawté ryngis þaim amang (944–9).

And, while the knight should emulate all that is good in his monarch, kings are in turn to have the bravery of the finest knights. A less well-known Scots text in the Lancelot MS, CUL Kk.1.5 (part 5), Bernardus de Cura Rei Famuliaris, presents itself as a letter sent to a ‘knycht of chewalry þe ross’, detailing how he should run his household and family and cultivate kingly virtues such as ‘largeness’, temperance, ‘besy diligence’ and charity (97, 343). Gologras and Gawane, with its narrative of Gawane’s loyal fulfilment of Arthur’s commands, demonstrates the ‘pursuit of knightly honour’ being put ‘to the service of kingship’.48 Most extensively, however, Hay’s Buke of the Ordre of Kynchthede prescribes for the knightly order all those virtues that become the office of a king. In his comments on the origins of the order of the chivalry, Hay reflects that the knight was ordained to promote ‘cheritee, leautee, justice and veritee’ and to combat ‘mysreugle and misgouernaunce’ (ch. 2; lines 3, 9). Their ‘grete charge’ is ‘of justice halding … thair landis gouernyng, and of thair peple mayntenyng and of thai peceable personis defending’ (ch. 6, lines 201–4). Consequently the knight has been chosen out of many ‘tobe a gouernour of the laue’ and has a special debt to the king who selects him (ch. 2, line 32).49 Much of the recent criticism of Lancelot of the Laik has been concerned with the poem’s perennial concerns and, in particular, with disengaging it from earlier attempts to see it as an indictment of the reign of James III.50 Yet while it avoids such topicality, the romance’s concern with the relationship between the king and 46 Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven and London, 1984), pp. 143–61. 47 References are to The Buke of the Chess, ed. Catherine van Buuren, STS, 4th Ser., 27 (Edinburgh, 1997). 48 Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, Wisconsin, 1991), p. 182. 49 Felicity Riddy, ‘The Revival of Chivalry in Late Medieval Scotland’, in Actes du Douzième Colloque de Langue et de Littérature Ecossaises (Moyen Age et Renaissance), ed. J.J. Blanchot and C. Graf (Strasbourg, 1978), pp. 54–62. 50 In particular, Amytans’s lesson that the king should ‘pas … to euery chef toune, / Throw out the boundis of thi Regioune’ (1644–5) has been seen as a criticism of James III’s

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his knights is ideologically consonant with the concerns of later fifteenth-century Scottish society. Roger Mason has drawn our attention to the fact that the chivalric ideals of nobility, courage, loyalty and service, far from bespeaking an idealistic courtliness removed from reality, readily accorded with the needs of a society based securely on concepts of honour, lineage and obedience, and which equated justice with the defence of the land and maintenance of stability in the interests of the common good.51 This safeguarding of peace and justice in the localities was a matter for the local aristocracy,52 and it is little surprise that ‘It was the noble household, the lord’s kin, allies and dependents, which made up the audience for chivalric romance’, and texts on military and governmental matters.53 It is therefore important to see Lancelot of the Laik beside works such as Gilbert Hay’s translations of French instructional treatises: The Gouernaunce of Princis, the Buke of the Law of Armys, and Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, were completed c.1456 for William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, and recopied at about the same time as Lancelot of the Laik, for Oliver Sinclair, into what is now Edinburgh, NLS, MS Acc. 9253.54 As the king’s chancellor between 1454 and 1456, William Sinclair held a position high in royal favour, and was a figure of local and national importance. Even when his power was diminished by the royal acquisition of Orkney and Shetland, the demands of harmonizing local responsibilities with loyalty to the crown remained paramount for his family.55 Although Oliver Sinclair, a knight of James III during the 1480s, was not as powerful as Earl William, such advisory works would still have been highly pertinent to one in his position.56 It is very possible that the poet of Lancelot of the Laik undertook his translation and reworking of the French romance in an aristocratic household, or perhaps with the support of a patron of lesser nobility or landowning status, a class which, in the later fifteenth century, was increasingly literate and conscious of their position in the localities.57

neglect of the Justice Ayre. The view of the poem as critical of James III has been conclusively rebutted by Lyall, ‘Politics and Poetry’, 5–29 (13–16). 51 Roger Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998), pp. 10–11. On attitudes to bonds of service and lordship, see Jenny Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 34–51. 52 On magnate responsibilities see Jenny Wormald, ‘Lords and Lairds in FifteenthCentury Scotland: Nobles and Gentry’, in Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Michael Jones (Gloucester and New York, 1986), pp. 181–200 (184). 53 Mason, Kingship and Commonweal, p. 90. 54 R.J. Lyall, ‘Vernacular Prose before the Reformation’, in The History of Scottish Literature. Volume 1. Origins to 1660, Medieval and Renaissance, ed. R.S.D. Jack (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 163–82 (167–8). 55 B.E. Crawford, ‘William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, and his Family: A Study in the Politics of Survival’, in Essays in the Nobility of Medieval Scotland, ed. K.J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 232–53; Mason, Kingship and Commonweal, pp. 90–91. 56 Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, pp. 47–8. 57 On the decentralization of literary patronage see Sally Mapstone, ‘Was there a Court Literature in Fifteenth-Century Scotland?’, SSL, 26 (1991), 410–22.

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The extent of the circulation of Lancelot of the Laik is unknown. It did not join romances such as Rauf Colyear, or prose texts which deal with knighthood, and kingship such as the Porteous of Noblenes, The Buke of the Chess, and The Spectacle of Luf in Asloan’s early sixteenth-century manuscript compilation (Edinburgh, NLS, MS 16500). Neither did it catch the eye of Chepman and Myllar, who selected texts (some of which Asloan seems to have had access to) such as the Porteous of Nobless (STC 5060.5) and Gologros and Gawane (STC 11984) as commercially viable enough to comprise the earliest productions of their press. However, it does seem likely that the story of Lancelot was reasonably well known in Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Cronycle of Scotland in a Part (1461) has a reference to the pronouncements of ‘Maister Walter Map … in his buke callit Lanslot the Lake’.58 The later Complaynt of Scotland makes mention of a version of the story of Lancelot of the Lake amongst other Arthurian and chivalric tales, ‘the tail of syr euan arthours knycht, rauf collȝear, … gauen and gollogras, lancelot du lac, Arthour knycht he raid on nycht vitht gyltin spur and candil lycht, the tail of floremond of albanye … the tail of syr valtir the bald leslye, the tail of … claryades and maliades, Arthour of litil bertangȝe …’.59 As this list names Scottish texts, most of which, like Clariodus, Florimond, Gologros and Rauf Coilȝear, have only survived by chance in single copies, it is possible that Lancelot of the Laik, rather than the French romance, is indicated here.60 Although there is no evidence for the Scottish ownership of copies of the French Lancelot do Lac, manuscripts, and eventually printed copies of the work must have found their way back to Scotland,61 perhaps in the hands of the many Scots (students and soldiers) in France in the fifteenth century.62 It is possible that the poet of the Scottish Lancelot of the Laik personally acquired his source text in

58 See The Bannatyne Miscellany ed. D. Laing, 3 vols, Bannatyne Club (1827–55), III, p. 40. Also see Squyer Meldrum (1079–80), in Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 30 (Glasgow, 2000), pp. 128–74: ‘That worthie Lancelot du laik / Did neuer mair, for his Ladies saik’. 59 See The Complaynt of Scotland by Robert Wedderburn, ed. A.M. Stewart, STS, 4th Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1979), pp. 50–51. 60 See R.J. Lyall, ‘The Lost Literature of Medieval Scotland’, in Bryght Lanternis: Essays on the Language and Literature of Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Derrick J. McClure and Michael R.G. Spiller (Aberdeen, 1989), pp. 33–47 (41). Clariodus (extant in Edinburgh, NLS, Advocates MS 19. 2. 5) is, like Lancelot of the Laik, a verse reworking of a French prose original. 61 Over a hundred manuscripts of Lancelot do Lac survive. It was printed in 1488 and 1494 (twice), and 1513. See Brian Woledge, Bibliographie des romans et nouvelles en prose française antérieurs à 1500. Société de publications romanes et françaises (Geneva, 1954), p. 77. 62 Annie I. Dunlop, Scots Abroad in the Fifteenth Century, Historical Association Pamphlet, 124 (1942), pp. 5–6, 14–15; P. Contamine, ‘Scottish Soldiers in France in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century: Mercenaries, Immigrants, or Frenchmen in the Making?’, in The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967, ed. Grant G. Simpson, Mackie Monographs, 2 (Edinburgh, 1992), pp. 13–60.

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France.63 Other Arthurian material was certainly popular in lowland and highland Scotland.64 Arthurian narratives form part of the Scottish chronicle tradition from John of Fordun to Boece, Major and Buchanan.65 Wyntoun refers to ‘a gret Gest of Arthure’ and the ‘Awntyr of Gawane’ in his Original Chronicle (Book IV, 4310–12), and the Spectacle of Luf uses ‘quanour’ as an example of women’s faithlessness.66 Fradenburg has also argued convincingly for James IV’s own interest in Arthurian legend, which perhaps subsequently gave rise to the tendency of some later historians such as John Leslie and William Drummond of Hawthornden to link the king with Arthur of the Britons.67 James’s interest may be reflected in Chepman and Myllar’s printing of Gologras and Gawane in 1508, and an Arthurian tale, ‘the anteris of Gawane’, is alluded to in Dunbar’s I that in heill wes (66).68 Later in the sixteenth century, a version of ‘Arthour of Lytill Britone’ is mentioned in the 1586 will of Robert Gourlaw, an Edinburgh bookbinder, beside texts such as the ‘Vowis of Alexander’ and the ‘Mirour of Knychtheid’, ‘The Wandering Knycht’, ‘Squier of Law degrie’ and Lyndsay’s ‘The Squyer of Meldrum’.69 Furthermore, although there is no evidence of printed copies of any French or English romances in the hands of prominent fifteenth-century figures, printed editions of chivalric and advisory texts are predictably common in the libraries of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century book owners.70 Caxton’s press produced a sizeable chivalric output between 1480 and 63 Janet M. Smith, The French Background of Middle Scots Literature (Edinburgh, 1934), p. xx. Don Pedro de Ayala noted in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella that, ‘there is a good deal of French education in Scotland and many speak the French language. For all the young gentlemen who have no property go to France and are well received there’. See Early Travellers in Scotland, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1891), p. 48. 64 On Arthur in Gaelic culture see William Gillies, ‘The Invention of Tradition, HighlandStyle’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 54 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 144–56. On the Scottish romance tradition see A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Contextualising Middle Scots Romance’, in A Palace in the Wild: Essays on Vernacular Culture and Humanism in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen, A.A. MacDonald, and Sally Mapstone, Mediaevalia Groningana, ns 1 (Leuven, 2000), pp. 61–73. 65 See Royan, ‘Representations of Arthur’, 9–20. 66 See The Asloan Manuscript: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 14, 16 (Edinburgh and London, 1923–25), II, pp. 293–4. 67 Fradenburg, Marriage, City, Tournament, pp. 154–8. Also see Royan, ‘Representations of Arthur’, 9–20 (10, 17). 68 See The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 27–8 (Glasgow, 1998), I, pp. 94–7. Also see Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), p. 26. 69 Bannatyne Miscellany, II, pp. 209–17 (210–15). 70 For example, Vegetius’s De re militari, of which a partial Scottish translation exists in British Library, MS Harley 6149 and Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 161. See Diane Bornstein, ‘The Scottish Prose Translation of Vegetius’s De re militari’, SSL, 8 (1970–71), 174–83. James Ogilvie, canon of Aberdeen, owned a volume which included de Cessolis’s Le jeu des eschez moralise and Ramon Lull’s L’Ordre de chevalerie. See John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), pp. 39, 122, 179, 159, 183. On the introduction of printed

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1485, which included his version of Lull’s Libre del Ordre de Cavayleria, The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry (STC 3356.7) and the Morte d’Arthur (STC 801)71 and some of these works certainly travelled north before the end of the century. Apparently not having access to Hay’s version of Lull’s Libre, Adam Loutfut, Kintyr Pursuivant and scribe in the service of the Marchmont Herald, Sir William Cummyn of Inverallochy, made a transcription of Caxton’s translation of the work in 1494, and included it in a collection of chivalric and armorial texts, now BL Harley, MS 6149.72 The manuscript in which Lancelot of the Laik survives, part seven of Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.1.5, provides no indication as to why, and for whom it was copied in the closing decades of the fifteenth century. However, it is not a lavish production and its plainness may suggest that it was copied with a practical or commercial purpose in mind, which involved its passage between readers with such responsibilities and interests as those mentioned above.73 As Mapstone has noted, ‘Its existence in booklet form in a composite MS … suggests some degree of independent circulation’.74 What is certain is that by the seventeenth century, the manuscript, probably already bound with other Scots material, had reached the library of Richard Holdsworth, master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1590–1649). This Scots material includes extracts from law codes, a number of parental advice texts, and religious treatises: thus all of a markedly moral and advisory character.75 Part six of the manuscript includes some philosophical lyrics that are attested in other Scottish books from the Low Countries and France see Margaret Lane Ford, ‘Importation of Printed Books into England and Scotland’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, volume III, 1400– 1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 179–201 (193–201). 71 J.R. Goodman, ‘Caxton’s Chivalric Publications of 1480–85’, in The Study of Chivalry: Resources and Approaches, ed. Howell D. Chickering and Thomas H. Seiler (Kalamazoo, 1988), pp. 645–61. 72 See The Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, ed. A.T.P. Byles, EETS, OS, 168 (1926). Loutfut and Caxton’s texts are both printed here. On Loutfut see The Deidis of Armorie: A Heraldic Treatise and Bestiary, ed. L.A.J.R. Houwen, 2 vols, STS, 4th Ser., 22 and 23 (Edinburgh, 1994), I, pp.xxvii–xxxi. A close Scottish copy of Loutfut’s Harley MS is now Oxford, Queen’s College, MS 161. 73 The identity of Jacobus Loga, whose name, with that of a ‘Magister Ioannes’, is written in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century hand in part 8 of the manuscript (fol. 26v), seems now beyond our grasp. In the late fifteenth century there were a number of prominent branches of the Logan family connected with Restalrig, Craighouse in Leith, and Bonnyton. As this part of the manuscript is comprised of legal texts it is possible that the signatory was a notary public or a student. The Register of the Great Seal of Scotland contains several entries pertaining to a Jacobus Logane of Craghouse, ‘vicecomes deputatus de Edinburgh’ in James IV’ s reign, and a later Jacobus Logane of Restalrig who was a notary public in the midsixteenth century. See Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum Scotorum: Register of the Great Seal of Scotland, ed. J. Maitland Thomson and James Balfour Paul, 10 vols (Edinburgh, 1882–1914), volume for 1424-1513 (entries 3214, 3254, 3844, 3857, 3786); volume for 1513–46 (entries 68, 2211; volume for 1546–80 (entry 1748). 74 Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, p. 200. 75 For a description of the manuscript see C. Hardwick, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts Preserved in the Library of Cambridge University, 6 vols (Cambridge, 1856–67), III, pp. 558–63; Archibald, ‘Lancelot of the Laik’, pp. 79–80.

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manuscripts.76 How the codex arrived south of the Border is unknown, although the fact that part one of Kk.1.5, the beautifully produced Middle English translation of de Pisan’s political and chivalric treatise, the Livre du Corps de Policie, was apparently owned by Richard Haute son of William Haute and Joan Woodville, is of some interest. Haute, comptroller of the household of Edward V is known to have ‘participated in chivalric activities’ and was knighted in Scotland in 1482.77 Lancelot of the Laik’s treatment of the place of amorousness in the political world is more cautious than the examination of the problem in the romance of antiquity, The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, which is the subject of the following chapter. It is even more detached and diplomatic than early sixteenth-century Scottish texts, including those by Lyndsay and Bellenden, which remark upon the sexual body of the historical monarch. On the whole, in Lancelot of the Laik, desire is experienced by the narrator and Lancelot, and Arthur’s physical delight is alluded to in a circumlocutionary way and connected with the king’s disengagement from his people and excesses such as self-interest, the pursuit of worldly pleasures, and avarice. However, the poet has reworked his source so as to make the conventional collocation of love and chivalry into a way of exploring the ethical order of the self, which is a prerequisite of good kingship as well as knighthood. Furthermore, the choice of a narrative featuring Lancelot, rather than any other Arthurian hero, has provided a figure who draws together different roles – king’s son, martial hero and lover. So while Lancelot learns through the experience of passion to turn self-pity and inactivity into loyal and vigorous political action, Arthur has to be instructed on how to reform himself and be a king worthy of the love of his people.

76 The other lyrics in part 6 of the manuscript are the unique ‘Go way, Fore that may nocht awailȝhe’ (IMEV 687); Chaucer’s Truth (IMEV 809), also found in Arch. Selden. B. 24; ‘Sen trew wertew encressis dignytee’ (IMEV 3151), also in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fol. 58v), and in the 1571 Gude and Godlie Ballatis, where it appears with an attribution to James I; and the unique ‘Sen in waist nature na thinge mais’ (IMEV 3130). For the attribution to James see Gude and Godlie Ballatis, p. 202. 77 The arms of the Kentish families of Haute and Shelving are quartered on folio 1 of the MS. See The Middle English Translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie edited from MS CUL K.k. 1. 5, ed. Diane Bornstein, Middle English Texts, 7 (Heidelberg, 1977), pp. 18–19; Ethel Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, c.1410–1482: Lancastrian Poet (1961), pp. 53–4.

Chapter 31

The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour I The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour2 is one of the most substantial, but ironically perhaps the least well known, of the Alexander romances to have survived from late medieval Britain. Despite the fact that its prologue and part of the narrative of Alexander’s conception is missing in both manuscript witnesses, the text still runs to over 19,000 lines of decasyllabic couplets. Its Scottish author handles his sources with considerably more freedom than most of the Middle English writers of Alexander’s life, drawing together a wide range of prior texts in the Alexander tradition, and in addition to this, he shows a substantial knowledge of a wider English and Scots literary heritage. Like many of the medieval writers who revisited the life of Alexander the Great, the Scottish poet is acutely aware of the opportunities that this legend afforded him to reflect on the exercise of royal power. Thus he presents his poem as a ‘great storie’ (19331) that ‘treittis of wisdome and guide governance’ and of the conduct of ‘kingis and princeis’ (19339– 40).3 However, the examination of Alexander’s kingship in the romance is complex and highly sensitive to the conqueror’s rich and contested literary reputation. A striking part of the poet’s distinctive response to his inherited material is the increased attention he gives to Alexander’s status as a young king: this is a powerful reminder of the work’s genesis in fifteenth-century Scotland, a period in which the Stewart dynasty endured a succession of royal minorities. However, while for much of the romance Alexander is cast idealistically as a wise and chivalrous young monarch, the poet also problematizes this presentation of the hero by recalling and expanding on key episodes from the medieval tradition in which Alexander is also a lover. In addition, the poet skilfully elaborates on other amatory elements in the sources which involve those who surround Alexander. These love narratives, interwoven into the romance’s account of great but ultimately thwarted imperial ambition, become fundamental to the poem’s advisory agenda: love is thus the occasion for exploring difficult moral and ethical questions and for addressing the political anxieties generated by the youth of the monarch. 1 An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘“Of Wisdome and Guide Governance”: The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt and Janet Hadley Williams (Boydell and Brewer, 2006), pp. 75–88. 2 Hereafter Alexander the Conquerour. 3 All references are to The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, ed. John Cartwright 2 vols, STS, 4th Ser., 13 and 16 (Edinburgh and Aberdeen, 1986–90). A third volume of notes is forthcoming. I am indebted to the Scottish Text Society for allowing me to consult this unpublished material.

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II Much is still unclear about the circumstances of the romance’s composition and transmission and a brief discussion of these vexed questions is essential to any reading of this complex text. Alexander the Conquerour has been conventionally attributed to Sir Gilbert Hay who described himself as a ‘knycht, maister in arte and bachilere in decreis’ and ‘Chaumerlayn … to the maist worthy king Charles [VII] of ffraunce’. Hay gives these details while identifying himself as the translator of The Buke of the Law of Armys,4 but it is probable that he was also responsible for the other prose translations found with this text, The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Governaunce of Princis.5 Other extant records suggest that Hay was probably a graduate of St Andrews University and served in France for over twenty years, before returning to Scotland, where he then received payments and gifts from the king.6 However, Hay also tells us that his writing was undertaken for an aristocratic rather than royal audience – ‘at the request of ane hye and mychty prince and worthy lord, Williame [Sinclair] erle of orknay and Caithnes’ – and completed in 1456.7 The prose works exist in a single manuscript (now Edinburgh, NLS, Acc. 9253), which was copied for William Sinclair’s son Oliver Sinclair of Roslin in the 1480s, and it is consequently difficult to gauge the extent of their circulation. Nevertheless, Hay’s reputation as a writer was well established by the opening of the sixteenth century and he seems to have been connected by early readers with the composition of poetry.8 He is named as a makar in Dunbar’s ‘I that in heill wes and gladness’,9 and mentioned in David Lyndsay’s Testament of the Papyngo in a list of poets.10 However, the main evidence for the association of Alexander the Conquerour with Hay is far from conclusive, resting as it does on the rather disjointed epilogue that survives in the poem’s only two witnesses, both of which were copied in the 4 The Prose works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume II, The Buke of the Law of Armys, p. 2. 5 These are translations of, respectively, Lull’s Libre del Ordre de Cavayleria and the Secretum Secretorum. 6 Sally Mapstone, ‘The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1500’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1986), pp. 28–53. A Gilbert Hay is described in the Exchequer Rolls for 1459–60 and 1465 as ‘militi’. 7 Prose Works, II, p. 2. Mapstone describes connections between the Sinclair family and the later owners of the manuscripts of Alexander the Conquerour, the Campbells of Glenorchy, which indicate possible channels of transmission for Hay’s works to sixteenthcentury audiences. See Maptone, ‘Advice to Princes’, p. 45. 8 Mapstone also considers the possibility that ‘þe Regiment of kingis with þe buke of phisnomy’ was a version of the advisory episode that appears half way through Alexander the Conquerour. See Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scots Buke of Phisnomy and Sir Gilbert Hay’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 54 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 1–44. 9 See The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 27–8 (Glasgow, 1998), I, pp. 94–7. 10 Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 30 (Glasgow, 2000), p. 58.

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sixteenth century.11 These are London, BL, Additional MS 40732 (c.1530) and Edinburgh, NAS MS GD 112/71/9 (c.1580–90). Although there is no break in the manuscripts, the epilogue seems to fall into two sections with a change in direction and tone after a sequence of leave-taking devices. The first part of the epilogue contains the promise of the narrative voice to again rehearse, as he had apparently done in the missing prologue, his ‘awin excusatioun’ (19300) for writing the poem. However, the last section of the epilogue seems more objectively to identify Hay with ‘him that maid the first translatioun’ (19312), while also stating that the present writer, who refers to himself in the first person, ‘endit’ the poem and ‘of faltis mendit’ (19342–3) it, completing his work on the twenty-first of August 1499.12 Although the narrative voice of the epilogue promises to reveal ‘Quha causit this buike agane to wreittin be’ (19314), this information is never divulged. Given the date of Hay’s prose translations, it is likely that his version of the subsequently ‘endit’ and ‘mendit’ Alexander romance was written some considerable time before the 1499 date given in the witnesses, perhaps in about 1460.13 This dating and the epilogue’s apparent distinguishing of an original translator and a reviser suggest that Alexander the Conqerour as it survives does not represent the original work of Hay.14 Although there seems to be no reason to doubt that Hay was connected with an earlier version of the poem, the problematic nature of the evidence for authorship and composition means that here, erring on the side of caution rather than convenience, I do not attribute the poem to Hay, but simply to an anonymous Scottish poet.

11 For a controversial view of Hay’s authorship see Matthew P. McDiarmid, ‘Concerning Sir Gilbert Hay, the Authorship of Alexander the Conquerour and The Buik of Alexander’, SSL, 28 (1993), 28–54; contrast Gerrit H.V. Bunt, Alexander the Great in the Literature of Medieval Britain, Mediaevalia Groningana, 14 (Groningen, 1994), p. 64. 12 Sally Mapstone (private communication) has drawn attention to the similar wording of the colophon to the copy of Lydgate’s Troy Book and Scottish Troy Book fragments in Oxford Bodleian Library, MS Douce 148, which states that the work has been ‘writtine and mendit at þe Instance of … Thomas ewyne’. See Barbour’s des Schottischen Nationaldichters Legendensammlung nebst den Fragmenten seines Trojanerkrieges, ed. C. Horstmann, 2 vols (Heilbronn, 1881–82), II, p. 304. 13 There are similarities between the accounts of Aristotle’s bridling in The Spectacle of Luf (c.1492) and Alexander the Conquerour (lines 7163–247), but this helps little in dating the romance. See Kathryn Saldanha, ‘The Thewis of Gudwomen: Middle Scots Moral Advice with European Connections?’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham D. Caie, R.J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone and K. Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 288–99 (297–8). 14 Mapstone, ‘Scots Buke of Phisnomy’, pp. 1–44 (2).

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III The narrator of Alexander the Conquerour defends his fidelity to the ‘Lateine buik’ (18561) but also claims that the work is ‘translaittit’ from the ‘Frensche leid’ (19333– 4). The sources referred to here are the twelfth-century 2nd recension of the Historia de Preliis,15 and the thirteenth-century Roman d’Alexandre of Alexander de Paris,16 including the poems often interpolated into this French work, Li Fuerre de Gadres and Les Voeux du Paon.17 The poet treats these works with considerable freedom, the narrator asking on one occasion to be excused for not relating every event ‘Quhilk wther buikis … recordis’ (6025). These sources are also combined with other works such as the Secretum Secretorum, the Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem, Le Voyage d’Alexandre au Paradis Terrestre and materials from the exemplum tradition. The incorporation of sections from a mid-fifteenth-century Scots parental advice text contributes to the distinctive intertextuality of the work which is also rich in original speeches and passages of description and comment.18 By taking as his main sources the Historia, Roman and the Secretum Secretorum, the Scottish poet was drawing on a tradition that, although not without its ambiguities, was largely positive about Alexander, presenting him as a model of chivalry and courtoisie. Nevertheless, the poet still takes every opportunity to increase the exemplary potential of this material and its ability to sustain serious reflections on the nature of good royal governance: his romance, he says, is not merely concerned with ‘worthie deidis’ (2056) but also with ‘þe wayis of virtue and valieance’ and the ‘reull and ordour of kingis gouernance’ (2057–8). Although a subtle realignment of the poem with more negative aspects of the Alexander tradition is evident in the later stages of the text, for a large part of the narrative Alexander is an embodiment of ‘wisdome and prudence’ (4355). He not only provides a model of good conduct for readers, but he also frequently acts as an advisor to his adversaries within the text, offering them counsel with ‘mesure and sobernes’ (739) in a way that is often unprecedented in the poem’s sources. Alexander’s conquests are therefore made through the ‘renoun of gentrice and larges’ (3063) and because his ‘delite was sett in all nobilles / In wertew, honour, and in hie prowes’ (4146–7). Unlike the acquisitive Alexander of the moralists’ tradition, this Scottish protagonist only requires the ‘lufe’ (12540) of the people he conquers as a tribute, not their ‘tressoure’ (12539). In contrast, Alexander’s avaricious adversaries offer the reader powerful reminders that ‘punycioun and vengance / Cumyis oft to kingis for þare mysgovernance’ (9939– 40). Alexander’s chief enemies, Nicholas of Carthage, Darius of Persia and Porrus 15 See Historia Alexandri Magni (Historia de Preliis) Rezension J2, ed. A. Hilka (Meisenheim am Glan, 1976); The Romances of Alexander, trans. Dennis M. Kratz (New York and London, 1991). 16 See Alexandre de Paris, Le Roman d’Alexandre, trans. Laurence Harf-Lancer (Paris, 1984). 17 See generally John Cartwright, ‘Sir Gilbert Hay and the Alexander Tradition’, in Scottish Language and Literature: Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Dietrich Strauss and Horst W. Drescher, Scottish Studies 4 (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 229–38. 18 See Deborah E. van Duin, ‘ “Na Man Micht Noumber þe Riches”: The City of Segar in Sir Gilbert Hay’s Buik of King Alexander’, ES, 6 (1996), 517–29.

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of India, meet their ends desiring his favour and, with belated self-knowledge, figure themselves as ‘myrroure[s]’ (6826) of folly. A substantial part of the Scottish poem is devoted to describing Alexander’s triumph over the wild and exotic regions of the world, sometimes also magnifying the marvellous encounters he faces in this ‘wildernes’ (10831).19 However, where some versions of Alexander’s exotic travels, including the Alexandri Magni Iter ad Paradisum, depict him as beguiled by the riches of the orient and arrogant as he moves closer to the Earthly Paradise, Alexander the Conquerour sustains Alexander’s identity as ‘wise and wourthy’ (10867). Indeed, the Scottish poet goes to considerable lengths to present Alexander as a monotheist who attributes his successes solely to the ‘mekill God þat governis all’ (11359). It is telling that in this romance he is granted a glimpse of Paradise, the like of which he is not permitted in any of the sources.20 Appropriately, he desires to convert the barbarous nations from ‘ydolatrie’ (7289): For þai ar ay creuel folk and but ressoun, And werst to reule of any natioun: Thay wer presumpteous and rude and vnhonest, And als vntrew … (11365–8)

Yet he treats the peoples he encounters with pity, also accepting the limits of his power when he comes across ‘wylde folk’ (15933) who have neither ‘witt na governance’ (15934) and of whom he could never be master. He defends the extension of his rule by insisting that it is beneficial for the ‘commoun proffitt’ (16357) which would otherwise perish through the ‘devisioun’ (16353) that occurs when there are ‘sindry kingis’ (16352) in the world. ‘No wounder’, the narrator says, ‘thocht he be a conquerour’ (2048). Alexander’s wisdom is all the more remarkable because of his tender age, and his status as a puer senex is particularly important to the Scottish poet. Indeed, Hay’s version of the romance may well have been written during the minority of James III (1460–1469) and the revised version of the poem dates from the early personal rule of James IV. Its discussion of young rule is also perhaps one of the reasons why the poem retained significance for sixteenth-century readers such as the owners of its two extant manuscript copies, who witnessed the lengthy minorities of James V, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI. The subject of the accession of the young to positions of power would also have had relevance for contemporary aristocratic families, for whom the succession of a minor to an earldom could have serious implications.21

19 See, for example, the original descriptions of Alexander’s monstrous adversaries at lines 11451–68, 11607–54 and 14558–97. 20 See John Cartwright, ‘Sir Gilbert Hay’s Alexander: A Study in Transformations’, MÆ, 40 (1991), 61–72. 21 With reference to the experience of the Campbells, see Jenny Wormald, Lords and Men in Scotland: Bonds of Manrent, 1442–1603 (Edinburgh, 1985), pp. 101–2. Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy owned the two extant manuscripts of Alexander the Conquerour. This is discussed below.

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From the early stages of the poem Alexander’s opponents regard him as ‘bot ane young folt’ (1025) and a ‘conterfete’ (4518) king whose youth can only result in misrule.22 To rebut such accusations the poet gives extended accounts of how the prince ‘began sone in youthed to be wys’ (248), inclining to innate moral, as well as physical, ‘conditionis’ (267) that make him a conqueror. In a passage unique to the Scottish text (lines 250–67), Alexander is described as an ideal prince even before he goes to Athens for formal schooling.23 Not yet twelve years old, he devotes himself to his learning, puts from him traitors, protects the church and succors the poor. As details such as this suggest, Alexander the Conquerour’s discussion of minority rule is optimistic in a way that some other fifteenth-century Scottish writing on the subject is not. However, this is not to say that the romance’s examination of this sensitive topical issue is idealized to such an extent that it lacks an awareness of political realities. Indeed, despite Alexander’s own exemplariness, his childhood accession to the Macedonian empire becomes the occasion for the poet to address the question of what might be done when the rule of a young king endangers the safety of the realm. Although Philip has bequeathed his crown to Alexander, Alexander the Conquerour departs from the Latin source to have the young king call a parliament and request that his lords ‘cheis ane king with haill consent, / To quhome þair is baith wit and wisdome lent’ (2437–8). Alexander presents himself as ‘bot ane childe heir’ (2449) and places himself in the judgement of these men of ‘perfyte age’ (2447) and high prudence. The moment he steps from the throne the parliament makes him governor and protector in recognition of his humility. But still Alexander asks his lords for ‘counsall, / Sen he was young’ (2477–8) and in view of the great responsibility imposed on him by his office: yit am I nothing bot a man as ye, And rycht as I haue greter gouernall, I haue mare charge, vexatioun, and travell (2480–82)

Alexander astutely makes his request for counsel here an opportunity for him to issue his own lessons to his lords on personal responsibility. The lasting importance of this scene resides in the fact that it demonstrates the young king’s worthiness to rule both in his voluntary submission to counsel and his own pre-existing wisdom. However, it also raises the possibility of the replacement of an unfit child king when a realm is under threat – as at this point Macedonia is from Nicholas of Carthage. Although this extreme remedy for minority rule is not revisited in such explicit

22 See Joanna Martin, ‘“Had the Hous for it is myne”: Royal and Self-Reform in Older Scots Literature from King Hart (c.1500) to Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (c.1552)’, in The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c.850–c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth and the Body, ed. Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 137–54 (pp. 145–50). 23 The Middle English Wars of Alexander also expands on the account in the Historia de Preliis of Alexander’s aptitude for learning (621–44). See The Wars of Alexander, ed. Hoyt N. Dugan and Thorlac Turville-Petre, EETS, SS 10 (Oxford, 1989).

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terms, the importance of kings earning their office through public consent as well as inheritance and conquest remains a strong admonitory theme in the poem.24 Furthermore, notwithstanding the poem’s attempts to show that Alexander is wise beyond his years, the theme of tutelage and advice giving runs throughout the work. In particular, the role of Aristotle as ‘cheif of [Alexander’s] governying’ (7272) is significantly extended in Alexander the Conquerour in comparison with the sources and analogues. Despite the popularity of the Secretum Secretorum, Aristotle is usually a minor figure in the medieval romances of antiquity that deal with Alexander’s life.25 In contrast, the Scottish poet makes the philosopher a guiding presence throughout the first half of the poem, expanding the account of his spiritual and political instruction of Alexander in Athens (388–480) and his reiteration of these lessons after the conquest of Persia (7249–396). These episodes anticipate the formal Regiment and Physiognomy composed by Aristotle on the eve of Alexander’s departure for the East, which again mark a major divergence from the Historia de Preliis and Roman d’Alexandre. It is not impossible that the Regiment and Physiognomy sections originated as independent pieces by, or thought to be by, Hay.26 In the context of the romance they delay the narrative of Alexander’s oriental travels for over one thousand lines,27 but are nevertheless essential to the poem’s concerns with the good governance of young kings and are carefully integrated in to the poem. The Scottish poet then continues to present Alexander as well counselled during his travels in the East, altering his sources to make more advisory many of the famous epistles that Alexander receives during this period. Thus the letter of the queen of the Amazons is rewritten to remind Alexander of his duty to ‘succoure, favore, and defend’ (11828) women and the first epistle of Dindimus of the Brahmins includes original advice on the importance of wisdom and justice for true sovereignty. In the later stages of the poem, even Alexander’s mother writes to remind her son that ‘Now war it tyme a king him-selff to knaw’ (17579) where the sources only mention her warnings about Antepater’s treacherousness. However, despite the poet’s efforts to depict Alexander as well advised throughout his minority, he still gives considerable attention to that other potentially problematic corollary of young kingship – royal amorousness. As well as incorporating many of the amatory elements of the French Alexander romances,28 the Scottish poet increases the opportunities offered in the sources to discuss love. His treatment of this subject is typically distinctive, making amorousness fundamental to the poem’s 24 Compare lines 9425–8. Also see Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, p. 109. 25 See Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, ‘Alexander and Aristotle in the French Alexander Romances’, in The Medieval French Alexander, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm Maddox (Albany, 2002), pp. 57–73. 26 Mapstone, ‘‘Scots Buke of Phisnomy’, pp. 1–44 (21–3). 27 A similar reworking of source material to include a speculum principis is found in Book II of Lancelot of the Laik. See Chapter 2. Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle contains an extended reference to Aristotle’s ‘teching’ of Alexander in chapter LXVII, lines 955–2018. See The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. F.J. Amours, 6 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 63, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57 (Edinburgh, 1903–14). 28 George Cary, Medieval Alexander (Cambridge, 1956), pp. 218–20.

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advisory agenda. Thus the amor courtoise of the sources becomes in the Scottish poem the occasion for further examination of the themes of restraint and order. A vivid example of this dynamic is found in the interpolation of the popular exemplum of the bridling and humiliation of Aristotle by a woman ‘belouit’ by the king. The lady has enticed Aristotle to a courtly ‘herbere’ on a May morning, with the promise that ‘he sould have þare his hartis list’ (7177). She also contrives that Alexander is standing ‘in the hiest toure’ (7172) to witness the riding of his tutor, which indeed he does, smiling sardonically – ‘a litill dryly’ (7221). However, when Aristotle realizes that he has been tricked he composes for the king a ‘buke’ on ‘how lufe ourcummys all thing’ (7230–31) which leads to Alexander’s unequivocal rejection of his earlier beloved. The king’s heart is ‘halely removit’ from the woman and ‘neuir eftir plesance of hir he tuke’ (7241–2). The episode confirms that excessive passions may lead to folly, but that once experienced and restrained desire also leads to greater wisdom. When Aristotle has returned to his senses, the lady remains obediently in ‘his grace’ (7248). The importance of situating love – particularly the affections of the young – in a moral and ethical hierarchy is powerfully illustrated by the poet’s reworking and expansion of the debate d’amour from Les Voeux du Paon. In this episode, Alexander’s lifting of the Siege of Effesoun is celebrated by the young nobles of the city with the election of a King of Love to partake in a courtly game. As incumbent of this office, Duke Betis swears to give ‘richtwis iugment’ (7959) on all questions relating to love. In an elaboration of the source he poses three questions to each of his companions, before giving them the opportunity to question him in return, and as a result the Scots romance contains more than twenty demands d’amour which are not found in the French source. The most important consequences of the expansion of the scene are to enable the poet to address love from a moral perspective and to give more space to the words and experiences of the young noblewomen present. The women’s passions are strong: Dame Ydory protests that love ‘trublis all the partis of my body’ (8103) and looks forward to taking her lover ‘In armys … nakitt’ (8106). However, they also reject secrecy and contrast male unfaithfulness with their own ‘ferme and stabill’ (8064) affections: ‘woman of þare luffis ar sa fervent / Thai wald neuer change þame to þare livis end’ (8415–6). The male players go on to discuss at length the dangers of jealousy and how women should show ‘piete’ (8372) while preserving their ‘womanhede and … honoure’ (8382). They also discourse on the nature of ‘gude’ (8213) and ‘wise luffe’ (8211). The Baudriane explains that true love is grounded in wisdom and loyalty. Quhan lufe is sett in fare and gud party, Wisdome, lawte, fredome, and gude wele, Makis lufe to lest, and euer be starke as stele (8229–31).

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The distinguished knight, Cassamus of Larris, offers the young lovers an allegorical lecture on how to recognize ‘lele luffaris’ (8266), and on the dangers of disloyalty and ‘fals sembland’ (8269). Later on in the scene, Dame Ydory asks the King of Love, what ‘ar the thewis of ane gud women’ (8478) and is given an extensive lesson on ladylike moderation. His reply is in fact largely taken from sections of a midfifteenth-century Scottish parental advice text, The Thewis of Gudwomen,29 which survives in two slightly different versions in Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5 and Cambridge, St John’s College, MS g. 23.30 As other scholars have pointed out, there is some inconsistency in having a festive king of love recommending that young women abstain from ‘sangis of plesance’ (8510), and something rather comic about the injunction that his gentle audience avoids gossiping on street corners.31 But even if meant light heartedly, this interpolation from an advice text which is itself concerned with governing the young, and which directs its readers to ‘be led in vertew oure all thing’ (8566), is highly appropriate in a poem so concerned with the self-mastery of the young. Even the poem’s longest and most formal advisory section, Aristotle’s ‘Regiment’, is precipitated by an amatory episode. But on this occasion amorousness leads not just to advice on sexual self-control but also to more general wisdom on other aspects of good kingship, underlining the interconnectedness of sexual self-restraint and sagacity. Just before the Regiment, the Scottish poet adds to the narrative of his sources the well-known medieval exemplum of Alexander and the Poisoned Maiden. It is not found in the main Latin and French sources, but is included in the Gesta Romanorum and some versions of the Secretum Secretorum, though not the Scottish translation made by Hay. The Scottish poet tells how during Alexander’s conquests in the Caspian Sea region, a maiden nourished on venom is sent to seduce and kill Alexander. In this version, the sender is a queen of ‘Myddill Ynde’ (9284), rather than a queen of the North, as in some of the analogues, and this is significant given the poet’s elision of the exotic and erotic which shall be discussed in more detail later. This queen is the sister of Duke Melchis and wishes to avenge the death of her cousin Clarvus of India. Her method of assassination has been chosen because of Alexander’s known vulnerability to love: she ‘wist þat Alexander was / Richt amorus of ladyis fare of face’ (9291–2). The maiden is exceptionally beautiful and Alexander plans to have her brought to his bed. However, Aristotle notices the maiden’s ‘thirlland luke’ (9305) and urges that ‘hir maner of lyving’ (9312) is observed. An unfortunate prisoner is sent to woo her and is poisoned in her embraces: thus the king is saved from his desires and certain death. Although the incident ends with Alexander’s love again being restrained, the length and thoroughness of Aristotle’s advisory response is a mark of how serious the consequences of royal amorous could have been, especially as love has now 29 Edited in Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, ed. Ritchie Girvan, STS, 3rd Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1939). 30 Mapstone, ‘‘Scots Buke of Phisnomy’, pp. 1–44 (19–20). Lines 8573–7 of the poem are based on another poem found with the Thewis in MS Kk. 1.5, The Consail and Teiching At The Vys Man Gaif his Sone, lines 251–5. 31 Saldanha, ‘The Thewis of Gudwomen’, pp. 288–99 (295–6).

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become connected with the foreign and the unknown rather than the courtly and contained. Indeed, during Alexander’s ensuing eastern travels, his men find that the pursuit of delight with the ‘fresche and passand fare’ (15659) women of the orient is literally fatal, and later in the poem Alexander’s own exotic encounters become morally compromising. Aristotle’s Regiment, like its ultimate source the Secretum Secretorum, covers such issues as the dependence of the ‘commoun proffeitt’ (9983) on the proper exercise of royal justice. However, one of its most original passages is a complex allegory that makes explicit the connection between the moral order of the inner self, the control of desire and good political rule. The allegory employs corporeal and political imagery to describe how ‘A realme … to ane man may liknit be’ (9659). Aristotle first compares the soul ‘to ane king, / Quhilk hes ane kingrik in his governing’ (9707–8). However, the heart, which is described as ‘the corage’ (9759) or ‘ane disire and a will’ (9719), is also likened to a king. Although this king’s ‘portaris’, the five wits, guard his ‘palais’ (9730–31), he has enemies within his household which include ‘Yewthhed’, ‘Ydilnes’, ‘Lust’, ‘Wantones’, ‘Glutoney’ and ‘Covatese’ (9761–3). These, the king complains, … blyndit me, quhen I was myne allane, And all my counsallouris was fra me tane, And braik my purposis, and changit myne entent, And to þare folyis gart me þus consent (9765–8).

Inside the palace also sit the ‘Grete Counsale’ (9732) comprised of the regulatory figures Understanding, Reason and Memory. In conjunction with them, Conscience ‘schawis the hart that he hes done erroure’ (9751), calling him ‘before his Parliament’, where ‘Discretioun’ is summoned ‘for to reprufe the king’ and where ‘Ressoun’ passes ‘furth his iugment’ (9753–6). With their counsel the king is able to reform, promising to become ‘wourthy to haue þe governance’ (9774). Although the allegory specifically identifies the enemies of good governance as youth and its attendant follies of lust and wantonness, it concludes optimistically with the heart being placed in the care of reason. This allegory of the heart as a ruler whose desires must be carefully contained is particularly apt because the Scottish poet presents Alexander as rather more amorous than the protagonist of the main sources. In episodes such as the Bridling of Aristotle and the Poisoned Maiden, Alexander’s desires are successfully controlled and as a result he even helps to control the dangerously ungoverned desires of others. Indeed, despite its emphasis on self-restraint, the poem does not necessarily suggest that powerful desires can be easily escaped. The poem’s reworking of the account of the attempted assassination of Alexander from the Historia is a striking example of this. In the Latin, Darius promises land and his daughter’s hand in marriage to a man who will help him murder Alexander. In the Scottish poem, this man becomes a prince who is already ‘stressit’ (6475) with ‘the heit of luffe’ (6482) for Darius’s daughter and will do anything, however wicked or irrational, to win her. When Alexander learns of this he freely forgives his incompetent assassin, exercising the ‘clemence’ (6487) fitting for a king. But where in the Historia forgiveness is granted because of the prince’s honesty in revealing his motives, in Alexander the Conquerour Alexander

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recognizes both that the prince has been mastered by love and that love has inspired him to act with boldness and ‘gud corrage’ (6506). In his ‘mercie’ (6499) Alexander promises to help the prince further his suit in a more harmonious way: ‘to þai ladie I sall mak request / That lufe for lufe scho grant the at the leist’ (6500–501). However, despite the poem’s hopefulness about the possibility of harmonizing love and reason, the issue of adultery receives more uncompromising treatment from the poet and royal amorousness out of marriage is repeatedly linked to political difficulty. Indeed, the destabilizing effects of royal adultery provide an admonitory preface to Alexander’s own career. In the two surviving manuscripts of the poem, the full story of the exotic sorcerer king of Egypt, and Alexander’s biological father, Nectanabus, is now missing. Nevertheless it is certain that the Scottish poet followed his sources to include the outline of events related in the Historia de Preliis: Nectanabus’s flight from Egypt and desertion of his people when his realm is threatened by Artaxerxes, King of the Persians; his adoption of the disguise of a wandering fortuneteller; and his seduction of Olympias, queen of the Macedonians. In its fragmentary state the Scottish poem begins part way through the scene in which Nectanabus has magically sent a dragon to help Phillip of Macadonia against his enemy, which is part of his process of deceiving the king into believing that his queen will conceive the progeny of the god Amon. The rest of the account of Nectanabus’s deception of Phillip and that of Alexander’s birth makes a thorough, if at times distinctive, reworking of the Historia. In the Historia de Preliis Nectanabus’s motivation for going into self-enforced exile is presented with some ambiguity. The Latin text includes the prophecy of the god Serapis that the king will return in the guise of a young man to rescue his people. This is included in some of the Middle English accounts of Nectanabus’s flight, though not in the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder or John Gower’s Confessio Amantis which are much less charitable, foregrounding only Nectanabus’s cowardice.32 But, despite this momentary suggestion of Nectanabus’s good intentions, the Historia is still unequivocal about the disturbing strength of his lustful desires for Olympias and the extravagant lengths to which he goes to deceive her into believing that his nighttime visits to her are those of the deity Amon. Whether or not the Scottish poet included the prophecy of Serapis, the surviving section of this narrative similarly makes clear the sorcerer’s disruptive passions and Olympias’s innocence – that she has been ‘desauit wickidlie’ (200). The antifeminist depiction of Olympias’s desires for Nectanabus in the Roman de Toute Cheualerie and Middle English Kyng Alisaunder is completely avoided by the Scottish writer. In good faith, Olympias appoints Nectanabus as one of Alexander’s tutors and, in a change to the main sources, there arises ‘a sclander’ (288) that he is the young prince’s father. Alexander has these rumours in mind when he pushes Nectanabus to his death in an attempt to disprove the teacher’s prophecy that he will be killed by his own son, thus making his patricide less ‘accidental’ than in the sources and analogues where he merely wants to prove that his tutor is a fake for predicting that he will be 32 C. Chism, ‘Too Close for Comfort: Dis-Orientating Chivalry in The Wars of Alexander’, in Text and Territory, Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia, 1998), pp. 116–39 (127–8).

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killed by his offspring.33 In the Scottish poem Alexander intends to prove decisively that Nectanabus is not his father. The revelation of the true circumstances of his birth remains something of a problem for our otherwise positive interpretation of the young Alexander. He and Olympias conspire to conceal the truth of his parentage. Although the queen herself maintains that she was the victim of Nectanabus’s deception, she urges her son to ‘neuir speik of þis mater to þe king’ (364), and if asked, to insist that he is the offspring of a deity. Alexander concedes to her request. Recalling Philip’s stories of how Amon, in the form of a dragon, helped him on the battlefield, he promises that ‘Na father bot god Amon will I haue’ (377). At the very best this complicates the text’s insistence on its protagonist’s moral integrity and his hatred of ‘Lossingeris’ and ‘sweirnes’ (251, 260). Nectanabus’s dying speech is unique to the Scottish text and contains a lesson to Alexander on importance of marital fidelity. Now se I weill goode end sall neuir be Off generatioun gottin in adulterie And Alexander, I pray þe specially That nane sic men be in þi company; And marie ane, and keip the fra þe laue, Bot þow þame marie, as þow will wirschip haue, And keip þe weill fra tressoun of þi self, For swik of tressoun beswikis euir þe self (336–43)

The moralitas that the sorcerer-king volunteers on his conduct has clear political implications. Not only does Nectanabus warn Alexander to preserve his own integrity through sexual fidelity, but he also describes adultery as a form of sedition, and echoing conventional lessons from advisory literature, reminds Alexander that a good king should choose his company carefully, putting all such duplicitous people from him. Alexander echoes these lessons in his rebukes of other adulterers, including his foster father King Philip, the second amorous monarch in the romance.34 Indeed, the effects of Nectanabus’s morally and politically disruptive conduct are felt once again in Philip’s own transgression of his marital bond. The elderly Macedonian rejects his rightful queen and changes the succession when he hears the rumours that Alexander was conceived ‘vnlauchfullie’ (2096). He is then persuaded by the Seneschal Ionas to marry his niece Cleopatra. In retaliation, Alexander kills Ionas, publicly reproaches his father, defends his mother’s honour and his own legitimacy as Philip’s sworn heir, but then takes pity on the old man. He reasons with him that it is not befitting for a king to listen to the bad counsel ‘of a man of lycht curage’ (2217), but that one such as he should be ‘ane mirrour’ (2221) to the young, setting them an example of ‘hie prudence’ (2219) in how to ‘keip þair lawtie and þair dewetie’ (2222). However, Alexander’s own passions also become more problematic in the later stages of the poem and he is even remembered in his followers’ laments upon his 33 In Le Roman d’Alexandre Alexander has heard rumours about his parentage but is less troubled about them than the protagonist of Alexander the Conquerour. 34 Compare Alexander’s letter to the Duke of Balantyne, who has broken ‘Goddis band’ of matrimony by abducting Candace’s daughter-in-law (14987–15002).

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death as having ‘hade at lyiking mony ane fair ladie’ (18734).35 According to the medieval Alexander tradition, Queen Candace, who is encountered by Alexander during his travels in the orient, was the most important object of the king’s own desires. Thus, Alexander’s journeys into more remote and unknown spaces coincide with his movement towards moral territories which prove difficult to map. In an addition to the main sources, the poet makes it clear that Alexander willingly places himself in the ‘danger’ (15154) of the eastern queen because he ‘euer was to women swete’ (15162) and ‘knew of lufe the maledy’ (15164). These suggestions of the king’s desire and misjudgement evoke past evidence of his weakness, hitherto restrained or corrected, in episodes such as the ‘Bridling of Aristotle’ and the ‘Poisoned Maiden’ exempla, and troublingly, all of these incidents occur after Alexander’s marriage to Darius’s daughter, Roxane. Alexander’s love for Candace, which takes place in the uncharted environment of the east, is not moderated in this way. When, at the end of the poem, the narrator blames the bloodshed and discord that follow Alexander’s death on misplaced passions, it is implicitly those of Alexander, as well as of his parents, that are recalled: For oftymeis wrangous love againis þe law Garris monie ane guide man to þair ending draw, Bot namlie of forceing and adultre Garris mekle sorrow happin commounlie (19163–6)

Indeed, the affair with Candace results in the production of a child, Alior, who will displace Roxane’s child as Alexander’s sole heir, a sequence of events which leads to the violent collapse of the empire. The Scottish poet makes no attempt to excuse Alexander’s adultery with Candace by hurriedly glossing over it or laying the blame for it solely on the oriental queen, as other medieval writers did. The magnificent queen of the Historia and Roman, and the manipulative Candace of the Roman de Toute Chevalier,36 become in the Scottish romance a much more complicated figure, less calculating and more sincere and troubled. In the French and Latin sources, it is made clear that when Alexander visits Candace in disguise as Antigon, she immediately recognizes his true identity and informs him of this, rejoicing that she has single-handedly captured the most powerful man in the world. In the Scottish romance she and the man she initially supposes to be Antigon talk of her love for Alexander and only gradually does she see the likeness of her visitor to the portrait she has secretly had made of the king. She then believes that Alexander has come to her out of love and is ‘sa blayth scho tynt hir mynd almaist’ (15146). Meanwhile Alexander, still thinking himself safely in disguise, takes the queen in his arms and ‘kist hir oft-syis and hartfully’ (15167). The narrator tactfully withdraws, claiming with Chaucerian coyness, ‘And quhat þi did, na thing þareof watt I’ (15168).

35 For another Scottish reference to Alexander’s weakness in love, see the prologue to Book IV of Douglas’s Eneados where the conqueror is said to have been ‘dantyt’ by Venus (46). 36 Cary, Medieval Alexander, p. 220.

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However, in a moment of self-scrutiny which is almost entirely the invention of the Scottish poet, Candace is stricken with guilt at her cowardice in concealing her knowledge of Alexander’s identity and fears that ‘the king will neuer lufe’ (15178) her as a result. With ‘quakand hart’ (15185) she confesses all to Alexander, insisting that her behaviour was ‘for þi lufe’ (15193). Following the satisfaction of his desires, Alexander’s violent loss of self-control at her disclosure – his public identity as a king has been revealed during his most private and passionate moment – is troubling and he only forgives Candace when she falls at his feet with ‘sob and grete’ (15213). The changes to this scene seem designed to convince us of the sincerity of Candace’s affection, and perhaps to prepare us for the eventual succession of her child as Alexander’s heir. Yet, it is still difficult to escape the conclusion that if Alexander has not been conquered by a woman, he has been overwhelmed by his desires and made, at least momentarily, careless of his royal integrity. The affair with Candace prepares us for the more ambiguous presentation of the protagonist’s political career in the later stages of the poem. This change in direction is made particularly apparent by the integration into the narrative of two popular Alexander anecdotes which are not found in the main Latin and French sources.37 Immediately before the omens that presage Alexander’s death, the poet interpolates the story of his meeting with the philosopher Diogenes. The Scottish romance gives Diogenes a response to Alexander’s request for counsel which is longer than that found in most other versions of the exemplum. In it the philosopher accuses the emperor of greed and having ‘reft with wrang and wikkitnes’ (17703). At the end of the lecture Alexander sees that Diogenes has spoken ‘baith soith and fare’ (17726) but makes no other response than to pass on his way. This tale is then followed by the exemplum of Alexander and the Pirate. Alexander accuses a ‘reiffare’ (17729) of oppressing his people, but is again confronted with a lengthy criticism of his own conduct. The pirate claims that Alexander has ‘heryit’ (17742) his kin, and that such aggression ‘giffis exampill’ (17746) that piracy can bring ‘grete honoure’ (17748) to its perpetrators. He also points out that there is an essential difference between his situation and Alexander’s: ‘For nede garris me, and falt of my liffing, / Quhilk thow has nocht, for þow art borne a king’ (17754–5). Alexander takes the pirate into his service, recognizing both his self-knowledge and the ‘grete necessetie’ (17788) that has motivated his actions. However, he does not respond to the crux of the pirate’s argument that kings do not have any need to take from others. Neither of the stories is consistent with the emphasis of much of the poem that Alexander is a liberal and just conqueror whose rule is to be desired for the common good. Only Dindimus of the Brahmins raises similar objections to Alexander’s conquests and worldly desires in his letters and these are fully rebutted by Alexander who points out the moral and spiritual arrogance of this exotic race who confuse distance from temptation with proof of moral purity. Yet although both of these exempla show that Alexander is capable of recognising wise counsel, they do not show him either defending his behaviour or fully responding to the charges levelled against him.

37 Cary, Medieval Alexander, pp. 83–95, 14–19, 253–6.

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The questions and criticisms raised by these parts of the poem are compounded in the sequence that deals with Alexander’s death and its aftermath. Just before his account of the feast at which Alexander is murdered, the narrator charges his hero with overconfidence and moral dissoluteness more explicitly than at any other point in the text: … commounly before ane grete myschance Thare cummys ane blythnes, with ane arrogance And tharewith cummys a welthful wantones withall, And commounly sone eftir cummys ane fall (17946–9)

The Scottish poet then significantly extends Alexander’s dying speeches into ubi sunt laments full of unrestrained and un-princely self-pity and regret for the loss of his conquests, treasures and ‘robis ryall’ (18065), but also for the passing of all the sensual pleasure that he took from ‘ladis fare and clere’ (18070). Alexander’s other complaints in the poem – for example those made on hearing the prophecy of his untimely death,38 or his despair at the suffering of his people in the ‘Wale Perrelus’ – showed him able to move from self-pity to decisiveness or greater self-knowledge.39 But here Alexander’s despair is only ameliorated by his queen’s wisdom.40 In the Scottish poem, the practical but insubstantial Roxane of the sources, who prevents the king’s suicide and urges him to make a testament, is replaced by a far more resourceful queen. Furthermore, her reappearance at this point in the poem provides an exemplum on loyal and married love. Her tenderness towards Alexander is described at length and she is given six highly rhetorical addresses to her ‘lufe’ and ‘lorde’ (18267) in place of the brief, rather reproachful lines she utters in the sources. Between her kisses and embraces, her complaints include lines of lyrical love lament, interwoven with moral lessons from the de casibus tradition as she urges her husband to confront his tribulations with patience, remember his obligations and behave in a manner befitting his status: Suete lord, think how ye ar a king (18111) … Ye haue sic witt and knawlege of ressoun – Now at a nede schwa youre discretioun. (18114–15).

After Alexander’s death, the elegies of the douzepers remind the reader of the vanity of human achievements and worldly pleasures. ‘Quhat waillis visdome or vertew’, asks Emenedus, ‘Quhane tresoun may ane worthie prince vndo’ (18710–11). Indeed, despite the ordinance of Alexander’s testament that his people are ruled with ‘luife and iustice’ (18425), he only bequeaths to them discord. Earlier in the poem (lines 5885–90), the narrator obliquely alluded to the fact that Alexander’s conquests would never be enjoyed by his heirs and in a change to the endings of the Historia 38 See lines 13669–96. 39 See lines 14149–56. 40 See Gerrit H.V. Bunt, ‘A Wife There was for Alexander the Great’, in A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck, ed. Juliette Dor (Liege, 1992), pp. 41–8 (46–8); Jane H.M. Taylor, ‘Alexander Amoroso’, in Medieval French Alexander, pp. 219–34.

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and Roman, and the equivalent passages in English analogues,41 this situation is now focused on in considerable detail. The narrator complains that ‘It war ill to rehears’ (18881) all the ‘distrublance, and torment / Amangis the dusperis, princeis and þe lordis’ (18879–80) that follows the king’s demise. Alexander’s principal heir Alior is just a child who must be placed in the charge of Tholome as his ‘governour and tutour’ (19232). Although the poem shows the young heir heeding counsel and participating in the punishment of those who betrayed his father, a return to the earlier more optimistic account of minority rule is not to be. Rather, the regency government causes ‘great invy’ (19237) amongst Alexander’s lords, and when the rest of the empire hears that both Alior and Alexander’s half-brother Phillipone ‘war young of age and tender’ (19256) each land withdraws its tribute and adopts its own means of government. Thus the poem ends with a bleak assessment of the double blight of regicide and ensuing royal minority, a predicament that became reality more than once in fifteenth-century Scotland. IV Like much of the fifteenth-century Scottish literature examined in this book, Alexander the Conquerour does not imagine for itself an audience that is exclusively royal or aristocratic. The work, the narrator tells us, is ‘not compyillit’ only ‘For kingis and princeis and lordis þat ar mychttie’ (19275–6), but for ‘all men that richteouslie wald life’ (19277). Nevertheless the early readers of Alexander the Conquerour were well placed to appreciate its distinctive politicization of the Alexander legend. The poem’s epilogue informs us that Hay wrote the ‘first translatioun’ (19312) ‘At þe instance off Lord Erskein’ (19320), who, given the date of the prose works, is likely to have been Thomas 2nd Lord Erskine (d.1493). Erskine does not seem to have played a major role in Scottish political life, although the family had a long history of royal service.42 He is chiefly remembered for continuing his father’s legal struggle with the crown over the Earldom of Mar and Garrioch in Aberdeenshire and its seat at Kildrummy Castle, to which his family had hereditary rights, but which was gradually annexed to the crown between 1435 and 1458. The two extant manuscripts of the poem both belonged in the late sixteenth century to the Perthshire landowner and book collector Duncan Campbell, seventh laird of Glenorchy (d.1631),43 who rose to prominence during the minority of James VI.44 It is generally accepted that the later copy of the poem was made for Campbell in 41 On the sparse account of this discord in an English analogue, see Gerrit V.H. Bunt, ‘Alexander’s Last Days in the Middle English Kyng Alisaunder’, in Alexander the Great in the Middle Ages: Ten Studies on the Last Days of Alexander in Literary and Historical Writing, ed. W.J. Aerts, Jos. M.M. Hermans, and C. Elizabeth Visser (Groningen, 1978), pp. 202–29. 42 The Scots Peerage, ed. J.B. Paul, 9 vols (Edinburgh, 1904–14), V, pp. 601–7. 43 On Campbell’s books see Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘The Boston Public Library Manuscript of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes: its Scottish Owners and Inscriptions’, MÆ, 70 (2001), 80–94. 44 William A. Gillies, In Famed Breadalbane: The Story of the Antiquities, Lands and People of the Highland District (Perth, 1938), pp. 135–42; Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999), pp. 254–85.

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the 1580s from the earlier text (usually dated to about 1530) already in his possession, although significant differences in the rubrication of the manuscripts may suggest that the Campbell scribe had access to another witness.45 The Glenorchy family was a cadet branch of the immensely powerful Campbell clan, but they nevertheless had an acute sense of their own importance. Since the reign of James IV, they had been crucial to the crown’s control over the western highlands and formed an important link ‘between centre and locality in the government’s onslaught’ on rebellious clans.46 A century separates Erskine and Campbell as readers of Alexander the Conquerour and the political fortunes of the latter flourished where the Erskines had a more troubled relationship with the crown, experiencing, like several other fifteenth-century noble families, the ill effects of the Stewart dynasty’s desire to increase its own wealth. In some respects however the concerns of the two families are not dissimilar. Their interests were located on the geographical boundaries of Scotland’s Gaelic and lowland cultures and both were therefore naturally concerned with the exercise of royal power and its extension into the uncivilized regions of the nation, preoccupations to which Alexander the Conquerour speaks articulately. Apart from the interest of these two families, the extent of Alexander the Conquerour’s circulation is not clear, although sections from it may have had a wider readership. John Rolland’s The Court of Venus, composed c.1560?, contains echoes of the romance’s Physiognomy, and this section of the poem survives in two seventeenth-century manuscripts.47 However, other Alexander literature was popular in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scotland, and the sources for Alexander the Conquerour well known. We know, for example, that a copy of the Latin Historia Alexandri was in the possession of Henry Barry, rector of Collace (fl.1475) in the late fifteenth century.48 The Buik’s narrator notes that the story of Alexander ‘has oft tymes bene sene’ in ‘þis cuntrie’ in ‘buikis of þe auld translatioun’ (6027–30). The identity of this old translation is unclear, especially as it is later asserted, rather confusingly, that the Alexander legend was ‘neuir befoir translaittit in this land’ (19333): but it may be that it is a French,49 not a Scots or English work that is referred to. Indeed another lengthy Scots translation of French Alexander narratives was composed in the fifteenth century. The Buik of Alexander (1438) is a close octasyllabic rendering of Li Fuerre de Gadres and Les Voeux du Paon.50 And, when Older Scots writers 45 The later manuscript of the poem contains over twenty rubrics not present in the British Library copy. They may be the invention of the scribe of MS GD 112/71/9, but considerable planning and knowledge of the poem would have been required by him or his patron, for this to be a convincing argument. 46 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland in the Later Middle Ages, The Edinburgh History of Scotland, 2 (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 541–9. 47 Mapstone, ‘Scots Buke of Phisnomy’, pp. 1–44 (5–7). 48 John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), p. 75. 49 French Alexander romances may have reached Scotland in printed editions. See generally D.A.J. Ross, ‘The Printed Editions of the French Prose Alexander Romance’, in his Studies in the Alexander Romance (London, 1985), pp. 194–7. 50 See The Buik of Alexander or the Buke of the Most Noble and Valiant Conquerour Alexander the Grit, ed. R.L. Ritchie, 4 vols., STS, New Ser., 17, 12, 21, 25 (Edinburgh and London, 1921–29).

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such as Andrew of Wyntoun,51 and the poets of The Bruce,52 and The Wallace,53 make reference to Alexander they often show specific knowledge of episodes such as the Siege of Tyre and Foray at Gadres.54 At about the same time as the second manuscript of Alexander the Conquerour was being copied the octasyllabic Buik of Alexander was selected for publication by Alexander Arburthnot, and now survives uniquely in his print of c.1580. A 1578 inventory of books in Edinburgh Castle includes a volume of ‘Thre Lyves of Alexander the Greit & utheris nobles’.55 Copies of the ‘Vowis of Alexander’ (perhaps the Arburthnet print) are recorded in the wills of the Edinburgh booksellers and printers such as Robert Gourlaw and Henry Charteris. The latter had no fewer than twelve copies of the ‘Vowis of Alexander’ bound, and a further nine unbound, at the time of his death in 1601. This continued interest in Alexander literature speaks of the cultural importance of the hero in late medieval and early modern Scotland. The nature of the extensive reworking and synthesis of materials from this vast tradition in Alexander the Conquerour gives us an intriguing indication of the reasons for that response. In his influential work, The Medieval Alexander, Cary writes that in the medieval Alexander romances ‘the theme of love is not allowed to exceed episodic limits, and soften the heroic atmosphere of the battles or the marvellous terrors of … the East’.56 In The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, however, over a fifth of the poem is occupied with amatory material, either involving Alexander’s own desires, or having some bearing on his conduct. With its layered and complex treatment of minority rule and royal amorousness, the poem resists clear alignment with either the wholly positive or negative aspects of the Alexander tradition. It is by turns optimistic and admonitory and one of the most fascinating, if elusive, of Older Scots texts.

51 See Original Chronicle, II, pp. 83, 151; III, pp. 95–7,149; VI, p. 433. 52 Barbour’s Bruce, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid and James A.C. Stevenson, 3 vols., STS, 4th Ser., 12, 13, 15 (Edinburgh and London, 1985), Book I, 529–36; Book III, 71–87 and Book X, 706–1. 53 Hary’s Wallace, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid, 2 vols, STS 4th Ser., 4 and 5 (Edinburgh and London, 1968–9); Book X, 342–4 and Book XI, 1242. 54 The ‘Bear’s Tale’ in the Talis of the Fyve Bestes (preserved in the Asloan Manuscript) is a reworking of a popular exemplum about Alexander’s readiness to spare a besieged city at the request of his tutor. See Colkelbie Sow and The Talis of the Fyve Bestes, ed. Gregory Kratzmann, Garland Medieval Texts 6 (New York and London, 1983). There are many other references, often positive, to Alexander in late medieval Scottish literature, which I do not have space to discuss here. 55 See Buik of Alexander, I, xxvi, n. 2. 56 Cary, Medieval Alexander, p. 219. Compare Rosemarie Jones, The Theme of Love in the Romans D’Antiquité (1972), pp. 60–65.

Chapter 4

Robert Henryson’s ‘traitie of Orpheus kyng’ I The account of Orpheus’s loss of his wife, his failed attempt to reclaim her from the underworld, his mourning and violent murder, was known in the Middle Ages from three main sources: Virgil’s Georgics IV, Ovid’s Metamorphoses Books X and XI, and Boethius’ De consolatione Philosophiae Book III, metrum 12.1 The story became the focus of a rich commentary tradition from the Church Fathers to the Ovide Moralisé, with Orpheus and his queen attaining a variety of symbolic meanings as classical myth was mined for Christian wisdom. Besides these moral refashionings, the tragic lovers were absorbed into courtly romance and pageantry. Thus by the late Middle Ages Orpheus was a figure with a diverse literary history, susceptible to extensive reinterpretation, a plasticity that Henryson exploited in his late fifteenth-century poem Orpheus and Eurydice. Henryson’s account of Orpheus’s adventures, which focuses on his parentage, his love and loss of Eurydice and subsequent attempt to bring her out of Hades, is usually interpreted as ‘a defence of poetry’2 and has not been subjected to a historicized reading. Yet, Henryson’s Orpheus is clearly presented as a king, and this chapter explores the ways in which the poem uses the status of its protagonist to discuss the duties of a monarch and the personal challenges that threaten his power. In particular, the poem develops the theme of the young and passionate monarch, he who is most susceptible to the division rather than the harmony of his nature. As a lover, Henryson’s Orpheus struggles with the kingship of his own self, failing to reconcile his love and reason, and thus compromising his sovereignty. In exploring this element of Orpheus’s experience, the Scottish poet ultimately disengages his protagonist from conventional portrayals of Orpheus the civilizer. It is only possible to date the poem tentatively to somewhere between c.1460 and c.1500, but there is no reason to see it as an experimental product of Henryson’s early career. Instead it should be regarded as a sophisticated and discursive account of the dangers of immature rule, and an assessment of the odds of achieving good political and selfrule, which befits the political circumstances of the last decades of the fifteenth century. 1 On printed copies of these works owned by Scots, see John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), pp. 84, 166; 153; 34, 76, 96. 2 See Robert Henryson: The Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981), pp. cix–cx. All references to Henryson’s works are to this edition.

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Indeed, the cultural importance of Orpheus and Eurydice in this period is suggested by its transmission. The poem survives in three witnesses. It was printed by Chepman and Myllar in April 1508 (STC 13166).3 Sometime in the following two decades it was included in the Asloan Manuscript (fols 247–56v), possibly copied from a version of the text close to that of the print,4 and it was later anthologized in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fols 317v –26v). Although Bannatyne’s copy of the poem dates from the 1560s, it is also the most complete, consisting of 615 lines,5 while both the earlier witnesses share the omission of three thematically important sections of the moralitas (lines 509–14, 547–50 and 571–615) which are likely to be Henryson’s own.6 These witnesses indicate the circulation of the poem amongst burgess and non-aristocratic readers, an audience perhaps close to Henryson’s own clerical and professional associates in the royal burgh of Dunfermline,7 where he seems to have been a notary public and schoolmaster. Such an audience was well placed to appreciate Henryson’s accentuation of the political and ethical themes of the well-known legend. II The exemplary roles most commonly assigned by late medieval writers to Orpheus were those depicting him as a model of eloquence, a poet or teacher, or even a figure for the Divine Word. For example, in his Eneados, Douglas refers to Christ as ‘that Prynce, that hevynly Orpheus, / … our Saluyour Ihesus’ (I, Prol., 460, 468–70) in an

3 Although the print is now deficient, Fox regards it as the best text of the poem. See Robert Henryson, p. cx–cxii. On the print see William Beattie, ‘Some Early Scottish Books’, in The Scottish Tradition. Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant, ed. G.W.S. Barrow, St Andrews University Publications, 60 (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 107–20 (113). The names of the Martyne family of Gibliston and Dysart and Pratt, Forret and Borthwick, appear on the Chepman and Myllar prints suggesting their circulation amongst non-magnate Fifeshire families. See The Sheriff Court Book of Fife, ed. William Croft Dickinson (Edinburgh, 1928), pp. 3, 24, 29, 99, 130 etc. 4 See Denton Fox, ‘Manuscripts and Prints of Scots Poetry in the Sixteenth Century’, in Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature: Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Adam J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid and Derick S. Thomson (Glasgow, 1977), pp. 156–71 (162–3). 5 Robert Henryson, pp. 422–3. 6 The first two passages compare Orpheus’s harp to reason, and the third attacks divination, recalling Henryson’s ironic treatment of astronomy in the Morall Fabillis and Testament of Cresseid. See R.J. Lyall, ‘The Bannatyne “Additions” to Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice’, NM, 81 (1980), 416–23 (423). 7 Robert Henryson, pp. xiii–xiv, xxi–xxii. For social context see E.P.D. Torrie, ‘The Guild in Fifteenth-Century Dunfermline’, in The Scottish Medieval Town, ed. Michael Lynch, Michael Spearman and Geoffrey Stell (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 245–60. On the notary’s duties see John Durkan, ‘The Early Scottish Notary’, in The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson, ed. Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 22–40 (34).

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allusion that in fact recasts lines from Henryson’s poem.8 However, the politicization of the Orpheus legend was not uncommon, and had partly arisen from the typological relationship established between the classical harpist and King David the Psalmist (himself a ‘type’ of Christ), who was a popular royal archetype in the late Middle Ages. Thus, Lydgate’s story of Orpheus the ‘fadir off armonye’ in the Fall of Princes, is glossed as a lesson specifically pertinent to rulers, the narrator urging ‘Ye myhti Pryncis’ to eschew ‘lecherie and pride’ for ‘wit and resoun’ (I, 5818, 5879, 5895).9 Furthermore, the figure of Orpheus as representative of the ability of rulers to create political harmony was well established in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the allegory of court pageant.10 Famously, the city of Bruges welcomed the young Charles of Spain in 1515 with a pageant that depicted Orpheus surrounded by the creatures he had charmed, and keeping at bay the wild men.11 The pageant taught that the prince must ‘accorder l’instrument de sa conduyte c’est-à-dire l’institution de son regne en parfaicte consonance et melodieuse armonye de toute excellentes vertus’.12 In England, Lydgate’s The Mumming at Bishopswood contrived a similar scene with the harmonious unification of the estates around Orpheus, playing his ‘temperd herpe’.13 As late as February 1547, the young Edward VI was entertained by an interlude that included ‘a mounte with the story of Orpheus right conyngly

8 Douglas re-entitled Henryson’s poem the ‘New Orpheus’. This allusion is found in the rubric to Book I, ch. 1 of the Eneados. For an edition see Virgil’s Aeneid Translated into Scottish Verse by Gavin Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, ed. David F.C. Coldwell, 4 vols, STS, 3rd Ser., 30, 25, 27, 28 (Edinburgh and London, 1957–64). Also see David J. Parkinson, ‘Orpheus and the Translator: Douglas’s “lusty craft preambill”’, in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. A.A. MacDonald and Kees Dekker (Leuven, 2005), pp. 105–20. 9 For an edition see Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS, ES, 121–4 (London, 1924–7). 10 Orpheus’s music was not always deemed worthy of emulation by the aristocracy. In Christine de Pisan’s Epistle of Othea the reader is advised that by ‘Orpheus harpe’, ‘we may vndirstande þat þe knyȝtly spirit schulde nat be assotid ne mused in no maner of worldly felauschip’. See The Epistle of Othea: Translated from the French Text of Christine de Pisan by Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt F. Bühler, EETS, OS, 264 (London, 1970), p. 81. 11 See M. Lageirse, ‘La Joyeuse Entrée du Prince Phillippe À Gand en 1549’, in Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, v. II, Fêtes et Cérémonies au Temps de Charles Quint, ed. J. Jacquot, 3 vols (Paris, 1960), II, pp. 297–306 (301). 12 J. Jacquot, ‘Panorama des Fêtes et Cérémonies du Règne’, in Les Fêtes de la Renaissance, II, pp. pp. 413–91 (416–17). On Scottish royal entries see Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Sally Masptone and Juliette Wood (East Linton, 1998) pp. 10–37 (especially 11–15). 13 See The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, 2 vols, EETS, ES, 107 and OS, 192 (London, 1911–34), II, pp. 668–71. John Shirley records that the work was ‘sente … to þe Shirreves of London’, but some of Lydgate’s mummings were directed at royal audiences. See Lois A. Ebin, John Lydgate, Twayne’s English Authors Series, Boston, 1985), pp. 86–91.

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composed’.14 Such displays clearly intended the identification of the spectator-king with the figure of Orpheus the harmonizer dramatized before him, reminding him of the responsibilities of a ruler to cultivate virtue and work for the unanimity of society: Orpheus reflects the watching king and ruling class, becoming a literal mirror for princes. Although there are no records of Orpheus pageants in fifteenth-century Scotland, there are echoes of the Orphic theme of the royal creation of civilisation from disorder in the spectacles of late medieval Scotland.15 The wild men that appear sporting ‘hert hornis and gayt skinnis’ in the famous court pageant of 1507 and 1508 are related to those marginal figures of the continental Orpheus pageants.16 According to the records, the Scottish wodewoses appear in the company of the ‘wild knycht’, who may or may not have been James IV, and it is likely that the spectacle carried some symbolic overtones that included the representation of the passage from disorder to order that results from the king’s assuming of mature and strong personal rule.17 Indeed, key elements of James IV’s policy suggest his ambitions to rid Scotland of what Macfarlane has described as the ‘almost unsolvable disorders’ and disharmonies of the end of his father’s reign.18 In particular, he sought to pacify Highland and Island Scotland, and although Macdougall has warned against overestimating his success in this aspect of domestic policy, it is true that the reign passed with ‘little serious unrest’ beyond the troubles immediately following Sauchieburn, and the Donald Dubh affair which ensued after the forfeiture of the Lord of the Isles in 1493.19 From the beginning of the reign the atmosphere was one of reconciliation,20 the king ‘preserving … political balance’ for the good of his subjects.21 And although it was by chance rather than choice that James found himself in the role of mediator in European politics, for example in 1510 between Pope Julius II and Louis XII of France, the role of peacemaker was not an insignificant one for a prince.

14 See Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry and Early Tudor Policy, Oxford-Warburg Studies (Oxford, 1969), pp. 295–6. 15 Gray, ‘Royal Entry’, pp. 10–37 (21–2). 16 ALHTS, III, pp. 385–6. The imagery of forest and wild men is used as symbolic opposition to courtly order in the pageants of Henry VIII. Edward Hall records a pageant ‘made like a forrest’ and drawn by ‘woodhouses’ in February 1510–11. See Henry VIII by Edward Hall, The Lives of the Kings, ed. Charles Whibley, 2 vols (London, 1904), I, p. 23. 17 Compare Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 240 and 230–39. For references to the wild knight see ALHTS, III, pp. 258, 365; IV, p. 63. The Treasurer’s Accounts do not identify the wild knight as James, although the later historians, Pitscottie, Leslie and Drummond of Hawthorne, do. Fradenburg suggests that accounts of the king’s attire at these tournaments support such assumptions. 18 L.J. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431–1514: The Struggle for Order (Aberdeen, 1985), p. 191. 19 Norman Macdougall, James IV, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1997), pp. 304–6. 20 These ambitions intersected with the policies of William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen and Chancellor to James III. Cf. Macfarlane, William Elphinstone, p. 190. 21 Macdougall, James IV, p. 306.

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However, what is particularly distinctive about Henryson’s poem is that he foregrounds the politicization of the legend by presenting his protagonist, not symbolically but literally, as a king. This was clearly recognized by early readers. Indeed, in the Chepman and Myllar version of the poem the printers single Orpheus’s rank for notice on the title page of the poem: he is ‘Orpheus kyng’ and Eurydice is ‘his quene’.22 In the early part of the poem Henryson consistently describes his protagonist as ‘the king, sir Orpheus’, a ‘prince’, a ‘noble king’ (45, 63, 120). This overt naming of Orpheus as a king, and the consequent exploitation of his exemplary status, is relatively uncommon in late medieval literature, and is largely confined to the Breton Lai tradition.23 The Middle English romance Sir Orfeo tells a version of the legend perhaps derived from the now lost ‘lai d’Orphy’ or ‘sone d’Orphei’ mentioned in Floire et Blanceflor, the Lai de l’Espine, and the Prose Lancelot. In the Middle English poem Orfeo is of exalted status, ‘a king, / In Inglond an heighe lording’ (1–2), ruling over Winchester.24 The anonymous author of the romance, like Henryson, is concerned with Orfeo’s rule and his exemplification of the virtues of self-scrutiny, truth and wisdom, and his faithful love for his queen. The presentation of Orpheus as a king is sustained in the Scottish later retellings of the story that, like Sir Orfeo, belong to the ancient branch of the tradition in which Orpheus is successful in recovering Eurydice from Hades.25 The relationship between the Middle English poem and the later Scottish tradition is intriguing, and not adequately explained as the consequence of shared French or Anglo-Norman sources. Bliss has speculated that the Ashmole 61 version of Sir Orfeo may have been copied from ‘a very northerly or Scottish exemplar’, and finds philological evidence of a Northern or North East Midland dialect in the witness.26 The Auchinleck MS witness of the poem (c.1330–1340), although probably produced in London, may have been in Scotland at a relatively early date.27 Further, D. Wright has argued convincingly that the fragmentary Scottish King Orphius,28 extant in Edinburgh, NAS, MS RH 13/35 shows not only some broad similarities of plot, but also some close verbal relationships to parts of Sir Orfeo in 22 Asloan’s rubric is: ‘Heir followis þe tale of orpheus and Erudices his quene’ (fol. 247). Bannatyne’s version is untitled. 23 On Orpheus’s rank see K. Heitman, ‘Typen der Deformierung antiker Mythen: im Mittelalter: Am Beispiel der Orpheussage’, Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 14 (1963), 45–77 (58– 9). 24 References are to Middle English Verse Romances, ed. Donald B. Sands, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter, 1986). For a parallel text edition, see Sir Orfeo, ed. A.J. Bliss (1966). The version of the poem in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61 is entitled ‘Kyng Orfew’. 25 On Latin versions of the legend which end happily, see Peter Dronke, ‘The Return of Eurydice’, Classica et Mediaevalia, 23 (1962), 198–215 (200–206). 26 Sir Orfeo, p. xxv. Compare Carol Mills, ‘Romance Convention and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice’, in Bards and Makars, pp. 52–60 (57). 27 Sir Orfeo, p. x. The manuscript was in the possession of Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck by 1740. 28 For text and commentary, see King Orphius and Sir Colling, The Brother’s Lament, Litel Musgray. Poems Transcribed from Scottish Manuscripts of c. 1586 and c.1680, ed.

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its Auchinleck and Ashmole/Harley versions.29 Whatever its exact relationship to the Middle English poem, the sixteenth-century King Orphius again confirms the royal identity of the mythical musician: the poem tells of ‘orpheus ye king/ and Issabell ye worthy quine’ (79–80). Although much of King Orphius has been lost, the last one hundred lines that have survived suggest the importance of the themes of righteous kingship and loyal service to this anonymous work. The dishevelled Orphius proves to his burgess that he is ‘sib to gentill men’ for ‘sumtym I haue sein ye day/ yat gentill men vald wt me play’ (57–60). His rightness to rule is demonstrated by his ability to ‘comfort’ (84) his people with his music. The harmony he shapes prefigures the concluding social concord of the poem, where enrobed in gold cloth and with the queen at his side, his people, ‘bayt mair and les’ (143), gather around him in celebration of the restoration of their ‘richtious king’ (137). In versions of the Ballad of King Orfeo, recorded in Shetland from the late nineteenth century onwards, we find a courtly protagonist who is hunting when his queen, ‘Lady Lisa Bell’, is abducted by the King of the Fairies. As in Sir Orfeo, the king fails to protect her with conventional military might. He goes into exile for seven years before being able to rescue her through the power of his pipe playing.30 Even in the shortened form of the narrative that the ballads represent, the failure of a king to defend his own results in a period of extended self-scrutiny and the use of eloquent harmony to triumph over violence and loss. As will be discussed below, there is literary evidence that Henryson was acquainted with some form of the Orfeo/Orphius romance tradition as well as with the classical and commentary versions of the legend. But is not impossible that the circulation of Orpheus and Eurydice may itself have had some influence on the continued tradition of a ‘King Orpheus’ figure. There is evidence that the poem’s interest in the nature of sovereignty continued to be meaningful to later readers: Orpheus is evoked in The Dreme and The Monarche of Sir David Lyndsay, a poet who was very much concerned with royal conduct and the consequences of royal amorousness. The continued Scottish interest in Orpheus as a king is evinced by two mid-sixteenth-century allusions to the legend. The Complaynt of Scotland (c.1550) makes mention of ‘Opheus kyng of portingal’ in a list of other literary characters and works.31 Bawcutt believes that this is a reference to a version of King Orphius (the NAS fragment mentions ‘portingale’ in line 4), and suggests that in the complete romance ‘the setting in Portugal figured more prominently than is now evident from

Marion Stewart and Helena M. Shire (Cambridge, 1973); Marion Stewart, ‘King Orphius’, SS, 17 (1973), 1–16. 29 D. Wright, ‘From Sir Orfeo to King Orphius’, Parergon, 27 (1980), 9–11. 30 Versions of this ballad from North East Scotland, and some Danish analogues, have been recorded. See I. Spring, ‘Orfeo and Orpheus: Notes on a Shetland Ballad’, Lore and Language, 3 (1984), 41–52; The English and Scottish Ballads, ed. F.J. Child, 8 vols (Boston, 1882–98), I, p. 217 (ballad 19); P. Shuldham-Shaw, ‘The Ballad “King Orfeo”’, SS, 20 (1976), 124–6. 31 The Complaynt of Scotland by Robert Wedderburn, ed. A.M. Stewart, STS, 4th Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1979), p. 50.

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the extant fragments’.32 The second is a hitherto unnoticed but unambiguous allusion to Orpheus as a sovereign in the mid-sixteenth-century verse romance Clariodus. At the beginning of the fifth book of the romance the walls of the palace of King Philipone of England are described as being hung with tapestries, ‘riche arras …, / With auld stories depaint and figurate’ (V, 58–9).33 Beside other classical and Chaucerian lovers, including Troilus and Criseyde, the tapestries figure a portrayal of Orpheus and Eurydice: ‘Thair wes King Orphius, that out of hell / His wife did bring with harping [wondrous] sweit’ (V, 96–7). It is not clear whether the Clarioduspoet had in mind the more felicitous Orfeo/Orphius story, or the tragic one told by Henryson (which would perhaps fit better with the fortunes of the other lovers depicted on the wall hangings, although not with the happy ending to Clariodus’s own love affair). However his reference to the musician as a king is significant in the context of the romance. In several respects Clariodus’s story encourages comparisons with that of the king woven into the tapestry. He burns with youthful ardour for his lady Princess Meliades, and when separated from her consoles himself with ‘ane herp with strignis feir’ and sets ‘his ladyis ballet of amouris’ to music ‘plesant and richt sweit’ (II, 352–3, 358). Believing that his beloved has been murdered as a result of a wicked plot against himself, Clariodus dresses as a poor pilgrim, exiles himself from his followers, and has to learn humility and patience before finding her again and becoming king of Ireland and England. The resonance of Orpheus for other explicit discussions of kingship and self-sovereignty is also evident in late medieval Scottish writing. Indeed, the Thracian harpist provided the perfect metaphor for Bower’s most celebrated of Scottish monarchs, James I, in the Scotichronicon. In the concluding section of the Scotichronicon he describes James as ‘another Orpheus’ (XVI, ch. 28),34 and praises the harmony that he created in Scotland: ‘the people therefore were then settled in peaceful prosperity, safe from thieves, with happy hearts, calm minds and tranquil spirits, because the king wisely expelled feuds from the kingdom … stopped disputes and brought enemies to agreement’ (XVI, ch. 34).35 The reference to James as another Orpheus is also warranted by Bower’s description of the king’s skill in the arts. James’s musical abilities, and especially his handling of the lyre,36 are said to be indicative of his innate nobility, good judgement and his divine sanction to rule.37

32 Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘King Orphius and “Opheus Kyng of Portingal”’, Notes & Queries, 246, ns 48 (2001), 112–14. 33 References are to Clariodus. A Metrical Romance, ed. D. Irving, Maitland Club, 9 (1830). 34 See Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D.E.R. Watts, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98), VIII, pp. 304–5. 35 Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 322–3. 36 James IV was known to reward clarshach players and was himself a lutar and keyboard player. See ALHTS, I, pp. 176, 304, 326, 372, 378, etc. There are also entries recording the purchase of lutes for the king. See, I, pp. 307, 321. Also Helena M. Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland Under King James VI: Musical Illustrations of Court Song (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 3–7. 37 See Book XVI, ch. 28, in Scotichronicon, VIII, pp. 304–5.

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Elsewhere in the Scotichronicon, Bower employs the related metaphor of the king as a harpist when discussing the royal duty of upholding the law with justice and mercy.38 For example, King Duncan is said to have calmed ‘the internal disputes of his subjects … and never allowed any discord to arise among the nobles in the kingdom … but immediately … prudently restored harmony’(IV, ch. 49).39 His skills of pacification were exemplary: ‘the king, as Plutarch says, ought to be among his people like a minstrel who controls the wayward strings and reduces them to sweet harmony by loosening those that are taught and tightening those that are slack, for it is safer to loosen strings rather than to cut them. For the loose string is corrected by skill and gives out the sound it should but the string once broken no skill can repair’ (IV, ch. 50).40 However, Bower’s application of the harpist analogy in his exploration of the kingship of Duncan and James I has a bleaker dimension. These kings are ideal, but like Ovid’s Orpheus, their music is cut short by violence: both Duncan and James were murdered in their prime. The achievement of lasting harmony may elude even the greatest ruler. Bower’s king as musician analogy is also at the heart of a vernacular poem, De Regimine Principum, which concludes the account of James I’s reign in the Liber Pluscardensis, a derivative of the Scotichronicon. The positioning of this poem, possibly written by the chronicler himself, echoes Bower’s portrayal of James as a harpist who tunes his kingdom to peace and prosperity. The fact that De Regimine Principum immediately follows the chronicler’s lament on the present ‘unlettered’ ignorance of young kings which ends the Liber proper, also suggests that enduring stability is yet to be obtained for Scotland: ‘alas that our kings should so often be young men in whose time justice is often halting; and the reason of this is that they are not wise nor skilful to recognize the way of Equity and Justice’.41 The poem opens with a complex correlation of harping and kingship that sharpens Bower’s analogy. The king is imagined as ruling his realm just as the minstrel maintains his harp, but the finely tuned harp is itself a figure of the oneness of the king and his ordered kingdom: Rycht as stringis ar reulit in a harp In ane accord, and timyt al be ane uth, Quhilk as a king than curiusly thai carp, The sang is sueyt quhen that the sound is suth; Bot, quhen thai ar discordand, fals and muth, Thair wil na man tak plesance in that play: Thai may weil thole the menstrale war away (1–7).42

38 The idea of society as a harp to be tuned was popularized by Augustine in De civitate Dei. See J.H. Fisher, John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer (London, 1964), pp. 143–4. 39 Scotichronicon, II, pp. 420–21. 40 Scotichronicon, II, pp. 424–5. On Bower’s source see Sally Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, in Scotichronicon, IX, pp. 321–38 (333, n. 34). 41 Liber Pluscardensis, ed. Felix J.H. Skene, 2 vols, The Historians of Scotland, 7, 10 (Edinburgh, 1877–80), II, p. 291. 42 References to the poem are from Liber Pluscardensis, I, pp. 392–400, unless otherwise stated.

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If the harp’s strings are not ‘trev and traist’ (8) the minstrel should tune them or even (with a radicalism not in Bower) replace them. Likewise, the king is warned, he must ‘Considir weil the sounde’ (24) of his subjects. The longer version of the poem returns to the image of the minstrel-king weeding out the strings that hamper his performance: Thus sen thow hes the harp in generall A gud menstrall to rewle It be musik quhilk signifijs thy realme and pepill hale with officiaris quhilk gouernis thy kinrik Pull out thy wrast and gar þame sownd alyk As gud menstrall to play in ane accorde All men will say thow art lyk to be ane lord (295–301).43

The importance of the metaphor is confirmed iconographically by the small drawing of a harp that precedes the poem in two manuscripts of the Liber Pluscardensis.44 The symbolism of De Regimine clearly retained relevance for generations of readers. Like Henryson’s Orpheus, the poem was printed by Chepman and Myllar (STC 3307), and found its way into sixteenth-century manuscripts. It is included (in its longest form) in the late sixteenth-century Maitland Folio Manuscript, and one stanza from the work was also copied into the Bannatyne Manuscript and Maxwell’s Commonplace Book (Edinburgh University Library, Laing III. 467).45 III The royal status of Henryson’s Orpheus is accompanied by a subtle politicization of the legend, which is apparent from the poem’s opening discussion of the relationship between genealogy and true inner gentility.46 The nobilnes and grete magnificence Off prince or lord, quha list to magnify, His grete ancester and linyall decense Suld first extoll, and his genology, So that his hert he mycht enclyne thare by The more to vertu and to worthynes Herand reherse his eldris gentilnes (1–7).

43 Quoted from the Maitland Folio version, in The Maitland Folio Manuscript, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 7, 20 (Edinburgh and London, 1919–27), I, pp. 115–125 (poem XXXIX). 44 Sally Mapstone, ‘The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1500’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1986), p. 26. 45 See Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘A First Line Index of Early Scottish Verse’, SSL, 26 (1991), 254–70 (259–60). 46 Compare the Consolation of Philosophy, Book III, prosa 6, 32–51. For an ironic account of how genealogy dictates an individual’s worth see Henryson’s ‘Trial of the Fox’ (Morall Fabillis, 803–9).

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The usefulness of genealogy for supplying models of virtuous kingship is frequently asserted in contemporary chronicle and romance writing. For example, Bower’s supplement to the Scotichronicon, known as the Liber Extravagans contains a prose chronology, of the kings of Scotland from Robert I to James II, and was designed for the young James II.47 Bower explains that he intends his text to help ‘King James, who as I write is still a young man’ to ‘recall the memory of these aforesaid most distinguished princes’ and ‘copy them in moral outlook’. He may then ‘offer himself as an example of good works’ which future chroniclers will ‘transmit … to posterity’.48 Although, the matter of paternal emulation may have been a more sensitive issue in Scotland after the events of June 1488 and James IV’s participation in rebellion against his father and regicide, the idea of the correctness of the young king being inspired by his ancestors would have been a potent one in an age of repeated minorities.49 Nevertheless, Henryson’s discussion of genealogy is predominantly cautionary rather than celebratory and galvanizing. In particular, it forcefully stresses the unnaturalness of ‘gentill’ (9) men failing to follow their ancestors’ ‘worthy reule …’ (11). Henryson condemns royal degeneracy in stark terms which, as Douglas Gray has noted,50 may mask some contemporary reference: ‘A ryall renk for to be rusticate’ Henryson’s narrator observes, ‘Is bot a monster in comparison/ Had in despyte and foule derision’ (12–14). Furthermore, the threat of personal misrule is already apparent in what is revealed of Orpheus’s ancestry. Orpheus’s forefathers include the god Jupiter who we have been told ‘carnaly … knew’ (34) the goddess Memoria, an observation that introduces into the poem the theme of unrestrained passion. As the offspring of ‘quene’ (62) Calliope and Phebus, Orpheus has inherited the princely attributes of wisdom, gentility and ‘liberalite’ (65). Yet, despite these distinguishing qualities, Orpheus has one problematic quality. While at the end of King Orphius, the royal protagonist returns to play to his court as an ‘auld hairritt man’ (105), his age and hermit-like appearance indicative of the moral authority and inner harmony he exudes, Henryson’s protagonist is youthful, a ‘prince so ȝing’ (76). He is thus susceptible to the turmoil of young blood. As the speaker of Henryson’s short poem, The Praise of Age, acknowledges, such turmoil is difficult to escape: The state of youth I repute for na gude, For in that state sik perilis now I see Bot full small grace; the regeing of his blude Can none gaynstand quhill that he agit be (17–20).

47 For Bower’s views on the value of chronicles see Mapstone, ‘Bower on Kingship’, pp. 321–38 (323–6). 48 For the Liber Extravagans see D. Brown and A.B. Scott, ‘Liber Extravagans’, in Scotichronicon, IX, pp. 54–127 (103). 49 On the ideological importance of genealogy in medieval Scotland see R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland. Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland, Regents Studies in Medieval Culture (Lincoln, Nebraska and London, 1993), pp. 17–18. 50 Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson, Medieval and Renaissance Authors (Leiden, 1979), p. 229.

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The narrator of Orpheus and Eurydice has already noted in his defence of the educative value of history, that the ‘yong and insolent’ (‘immoderate’, 20) are in particular need of guidance from ‘ancient and sad wyse-men of age’ (19). Orpheus’s renowned physical beauty (he is ‘Of statur large and farly fair of face’, 72) and chivalric reputation (‘His noble fame’, 73) bring Eurydice’s proposal of marriage, and thus also the sort of moral difficulties experienced by the other immature literary monarchs in the Older Scots tradition examined in this book. The ensuing account of Orpheus’s maturation seems to have caused some problems in the course of the poem’s textual transmission. The complex Asloan reading of line 71, rejected by Fox as corrupt,51 ‘Quhen he was auld sone to manhed he drewe’, is replaced in the Bannatyne copy by the more straight-forward reading, ‘Incressand sone to manhed vp he drewe’.52 A.A. MacDonald has defended the integrity of the earlier Asloan variant on the grounds that the use of the word ‘auld’ is intended to ‘express an intellectual sense of senex’ and to imply the outstanding wisdom already possessed by Orpheus as a child suckled by Calliope, and that the beginning of sexual awareness in Orpheus is the beginning of a spiritual and intellectual decline.53 MacDonald’s defence of the intriguing early reading seems in some respects appropriate. However, according to the MED ‘auld’ was also used to describe those who have reached the end of childhood or adolescence as well as those advanced in years.54 Further, the issue here seems rather to be that even if Orpheus is ‘old’ in terms of the received wisdom he inherited as a boy nourished on the ‘sweit licour of … musike’ (70) he lacks experience and has yet to reach true inner maturity. His boyhood wisdom was unchallenged by the inevitable tests encountered in ‘manhed’, which is emphasized as a time of his physical perfection, chivalric prowess and sexual maturity. Henryson is thus concerned to show that not even the most gifted in wisdom are immune to complex and disruptive human impulses, and that self-knowledge is a quality to be acquired through experience. In the young Orpheus the roles of king and lover are synthesized, yet they also coexist in an uncomfortable interdependence.55 They are both inseparable and incompatible, demonstrating that, in his humanity a monarch cannot escape fundamental human emotions such as desire even though they have the power to impair his rule. Orpheus’s royal birth is explicitly rehearsed as we have seen, yet it is on the occasion of his marriage to Eurydice that he becomes king of another realm, ‘sir Orpheus, / … throu his wyf was efter king of Trace’ (45–6). And it is because 51 Fox, Robert Henryson, p. 396. 52 This line is part of the material missing from the Chepman and Myllar print. 53 See A.A. MacDonald, ‘Robert Henryson and the Puer Senex Topos’, in In Other Words: Transcultural Studies in Philology, Translation and Lexicography Presented to Hans Heinrich Meier, ed. J.L. Mackenzie and R. Todds (Dordrecht 1989), pp. 117–20. Compare The Wallace where the hero is ‘Sad of contenance … bathe auld and ȝing’, ‘wys, curtas and benyng ’, Book I, lines 201–2 in Hary’s Wallace, ed. Matthew P. McDiarmid, 2 vols, STS, 4th Ser., 4 and 5 (Edinburgh and London, 1968–89). 54 MED, adj. ‘olde’. Compare Ratis Raving’s description of the third ‘eild’ in which the ‘rutis of resone’ are laid, but full wisdom is not reached (1152, 1276–7). 55 On Orpheus as a romance hero, see John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970), p. 147.

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this prince is ‘so glorius’ (79) in his manhood that he is an object worthy of love in the first place: in an accepted convention of romance Eurydice approaches Orpheus ‘Requyrand him to wed hir and be kyng’ (77) and they are soon ‘at accord’ (84).56 Paradoxically, however, it is at the point of his union with Eurydice and the description of their wedding festivities that our sense of Orpheus’s kingship begins to alter: Henryson’s epithets of ‘prince’ and ‘king’ gradually fade out. Even the ennobling title of ‘sir’ ceases to be used. The introduction to his complaint on the loss of the queen is the last occasion in the poem where Orpheus is specifically referred to as a king. In the second half of the fable therefore, Orpheus the lover is foregrounded, his reputation as a civilizer tested to its limits by the internal challenges initiated by desire that he faces. As ‘king and lord’ (83) of Thrace, Orpheus enjoys ‘myrth, blythnes, gret plesans and gret play’ (88). The intensity and physicality of the love between the young king and the queen is strongly accentuated. Theirs is a ‘wardlie ioye’ (89) which ‘couth kendill and encres’ (87), and the fire imagery used to describe their passion here carries negative overtones. In The Testament of Cresseid, it is Troylus who burns with ‘Ane spark of lufe’ which ‘kendlit all his bodie in ane fyre’ (512–13) for the memory of Cresseid. And it is he who remains uncomprehending and selfpitying while Cresseid develops through self-scrutiny to a greater acceptance of the nature of human existence and her own faults. The amorous elderly narrator of the Testament, with his own memories of past love and present sexual aspirations, finds that ‘Thocht lufe be hait, ȝit in ane man of age / It kendillis nocht sa sone as in ȝouthheid’ (29–30). He too remains unaware of the extent of Cresseid’s inner growth, and in his reductive moralization of the tale he is ultimately denied any moral authority. Eurydice’s ‘blenkis amorus’ (81) also provokingly anticipate those of Cresseid and Venus in the Testament. Here Troylus recalls the ‘amorous blenking / Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling’ (503–4). Venus, Fortune-like in her demeanor, is said to be ‘Prouocatiue with blenkis amorous’ (226) but at the next moment ‘suddanely changit and alterait / Angrie as ony serpent wennomus’ (227–8). When Eurydice steps on a ‘serpent wennomus’ (105), Orpheus’s experience of love becomes the unstable and anguished one also represented by the goddess. We are left with no illusions about the transience of such affection, which will be as fragile as Eurydice herself: ‘Lyke till a flour that plesandly will spring, / Quhilk fadis sone, and endis with murnyng’ (90–91). Orpheus’s amorous youth, like that of Cresseid, is cruelly cut short. Arystyus’s lustfulness, which leads to the queen’s deadly swoon, again reminds us of the potential destructiveness of unregulated passion. The dense echoes of the Sir Orfeo tradition in this passage also bring with them the secularity and excess associated with courtly romance: the ‘Maii mornyng’ (93) on which Eurydice walks to ‘se the flouris spring’ (95) is evocative of the May outing of Herodis and her women to an orchard in Sir Orfeo. The panic stricken lamentations of the Scottish 56 Because of her association with sensuality, Eurydice’s forwardness was traditional. On the convention of the sexually confident romance heroine see J. Weiss, ‘The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol Meale (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 149–61.

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maid on the capture of the queen, and the devastation of the king after the disaster, also allude to the romance tradition. That Eurydice is snatched by Proserpine and ‘with the fary tane’ (119), is another ominous romance detail.57 The existence of a fairy court suggests the challenge of an uncivilized opposite to the harmonious upbringing of King Orpheus, one with which the king is ill equipped to cope. In the face of personal tragedy, inner harmony and restraint are tested to their limits in this young king. Henryson’s description of Orpheus’s un-princely and bestial anger is extreme. ‘This noble king’ Orpheus is ‘inflammit all in ire, / And rampand as ane lyoun ravenus’ (120–21). This reaction has a disturbing parallel in the rage of the Lion King in the Morall Fabillis which prevents him from acting ‘according to ressoun’ (1504). But the emphasis in Orpheus and Eurydice is on the great disruption caused by amorousness in the kingly self. The prince of Thrace has lost his reason – he is ‘Half out of mynd’ (129), his heart nearly bursting for ‘dule and wo’ (128). At the end of the poem such uncontrolled ‘suoun and extasy’ (399) of grief and disappointment will ultimately negate all Orpheus’s kingliness and agency in the world. Orpheus’s formal complaint both reveals his limitations and constitutes the first step to his recuperation of reason. The young king exiles himself in a wood, away from the ordered material world, traditionally the locus for the dissolute lover’s lament in lyric poetry and romance, and begins to play his harp.58 In the lament, Orpheus, like the captive lion in the Morall Fabillis (also bemoaning his fate in a woodland setting), is highly conscious of his status as a ‘lord and carefull kyng’ (137). He is fixated with the nature of his physical loss, his ‘hart … sa apon his lusty quene’ (149). A change of stanza form introduces his lament and sets it apart from the rest of the narrative, bringing the action to a temporary halt, formalizing and thus indicating the force of the young king’s grief and the singularity of his perspective. The rhyme royal stanza of the body of the text gives way to ten-line stanzas with a tight rhyme scheme of aabaabbcbc further suggesting the intensity of the king’s self-absorption. The formality of Orpheus’s mourning is heightened further by the framing of the lyric lament with the introduction, ‘thusgate he maid his mone’ (133) and conclusion, ‘Thus king Orpheus with his harp allone / Sore wepit for his wyf Erudices’ (182–3).59 By bearing testimony to a depth of desolation in King Orpheus that impairs his self-understanding, the lament also presents our protagonist as a fallen prince of the de casibus tradition. Orpheus laments that in losing his love he has also ‘losit … in erd all his lyking, / And … game’ (138–9). In the Testament the ‘Complaint of Cresseid’ records the same stultification and sorrow for the loss of the temporal:

57 Compare Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’ (2225–319) where Pluto and Proserpine are named as king and queen of ‘fayerye’. In Clariodus ‘Queine Proserpina’ is mentioned ‘with hir Court of Fari’ (V, line 974). 58 See D. Kessel-Brown, ‘The Emotional Landscape of the Forest in Medieval Love Lament’, MÆ, 59 (1990), 228–47 (229); Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden (Cambridge, 1993), p. 137. 59 Henryson uses the same formula to introduce the complaints in ‘The Lion and the Mouse’ (Morall Fabillis, 1530), and The Testament of Cresseid (406).

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Cresseid mourns the passing of her beauty, security, reputation, and ‘gay garmentis with mony gudely goun’ (422). Both Orpheus and Cresseid resort to the repetition of their miseries and to the Ubi Sunt formula to catalogue their losses: Orpheus repeatedly asks, ‘Quhar art thow gane, my luf Erudices?’(143, 153, 163); and Cresseid, ‘Quhair is thy chalmer wantounlie besene’ (416), ‘Quhair is thy garding with thir greissis gay’ (425). Henryson’s complaining Lion King employs the same formulae: ‘O lamit lyoun, liggand heir sa law, / Quhair is the mycht off thy magnyfycence’ (1531–2). However, although Orpheus never progresses to as full a knowledge of self as Cresseid achieves, he does make some tentative advances away from his introspection. Indeed, Orpheus uses his lament as an attempt to comfort himself and it is significant that, although there is a stasis to his emotional and selfpitying state, his harping has something of the traditional effect on the world around him: Him to reios, ȝit playit he a spryng, Quhill all the foulis of the wod can syng, And treis dansit with thar leves grene (144–6)

Indeed, in his ‘Fair weill’ to his palace, his ‘plesance and play’, and his ‘rob ryall … riche array’ (154, 157), Orpheus rejects the superfluous material trappings of kingship.60 His plaint echoes the king’s self-imposed exile and reincarnation as a ‘wild knight’ in Sir Orfeo and the Shetland ballads. He no longer aspires to the regal ‘figure’ in which Henryson’s lion in the Morall Fabillis claims that his authority is invested, bearing the ‘prent off [his] persoun’ (1452). In their place he accepts wilderness and poverty. The forest and the bleakness of hell’s topography are therefore expressive of the king’s desolation, but also of his new introspection away from the opulence of his wedding. This experience of withdrawal gradually allows Orpheus to re-encounter the harmony on which he was nourished, giving him a richer knowledge than the received wisdom he had at the opening of the poem. His elegy alone does not provide him with solace, but it does precipitate the more positive action of his search for Eurydice and so generates narrative movement.61 In Boethius’s account, Orpheus merely ‘pleynid hym of the hevene goddis that weren cruel to him’ (Boece, III, metrum 12, lines 17–18).62 However, Henryson’s Orpheus appeals to his father Phoebus to illuminate his quest and to Jupiter for strength. Then, ending his ‘sangis lamentable’ (184) he sets forth to search heaven and hell. On this expedition his harp is his sole instrument of rule allowing him to tame the wild landscapes through which he passes.

60 Compare ‘The Lament on the Soul of Edward IV’ in London, BL, MS Harley 4011 (IMEV 2192) where the king laments Fortune’s deceptions using Ubi sunt formulae. See Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, ed. C.F. Brown (Oxford, 1939), pp. 250–53 (item 159). 61 Compare Louise O. Fradenburg, ‘“Voice Memorial”: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry’, Exemplaria, 2 (1990), 169–202 (172). 62 All references are to The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson and F.N. Robinson, 3rd Edition (Oxford and Boston, 1987).

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Orpheus’s stylized song of grief intersects with forms of late-medieval memento mori literature which enjoyed popularity in Scotland, such as intercalated laments in romance, and formal elegies for the deaths of those of high rank.63 The combination of irrational grief and passion in Orpheus’s royal planctus, and the moral consequences of these feelings, are explored in a near-contemporary poetic complaint copied into the Liber Pluscardensis just before De Regimine Principium. According to the Liber Pluscardensis chronicler, the elegy was commissioned by James II on the death in 1444 of his sister, Margaret, wife of the Dauphin: it is therefore synthesizes the losses of two princes.64 It is a reworking of a French original, the anonymous Complainte pour la mort de Madame Marguerite d’Escosse, daulphine de Viennoys preserved in Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, MS 3523.65 Like Henryson the anonymous poet of this elegy uses complaint to illustrate the moral constraints of despair, converting elegiac stasis into Boethian didacticism.66 The vernacular poem, cast in ten-line stanzas rhyming aabaabbcbc, a form similar to that of Orpheus’s plaint, is entitled ‘Lamentacio domini Dalphini Franciae pro morte uxoris suae, dicta Margaretae’. In Henryson’s poem, Orpheus’s in his ‘petuous’ (167) plaint tells his harp to ‘Turne all thi mirth and musik in murnyng’ and ‘wepe with me’ (135). In the Lamentacio, we hear a prince’s ‘petwys playnt’ (9) on the loss of his peerless princess. He calls upon the ‘michti Makar of the major munde’ to allow all of nature to ‘weip with [him] this wofull waymentyng’ (1, 8). As Orpheus begs his celestial father and grandfather for pity, the speaker of the Lamentacio asks for divine ‘rew’ on his unhappiness. Like Orpheus he too is the most ‘carefull’ of princes: ‘Quhill we haue murnyt the dule of our mastres, / Lat nature thole, na kyng leife heire gladly’ (58–9). And, just as Orpheus’s lament prompts his journey to find his wife, the Lamentacio demonstrates that the mourner must move on and seek comfort from reason. After five stanzas of complaint, a prose note interjects to inform the reader that while there is ‘mare of this lamentacioun, xviii coupill’, it is more efficacious that the ‘Ansuere of Resoune’ to the complainer is given instead, ‘for the complant is bot feynit thing’. The ensuing consolation of Reason extends to eighteen stanzas and is clearly Boethian in conception, counselling patience and understanding. It confirms that there is no help to be found in anger because all men, including the princely speaker, are ‘subject till all humain passioun’ (66). However, it also counsels that as 63 Compare laments inserted into narrative settings in The Buik of Alexander (II, lines 71–86; IV, lines 9580–94), The Wallace (XII, lines 1109–28) and Clariodus (III, lines 1557– 92). See generally Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Laments for the Dead in Medieval Narrative, Duquesne Studies, Philological Series, 8 (Pittsburgh, 1966), pp. 29–49; A.M. Kinghorn, ‘Death and the Makars: Timor Mortis in Scottish Poetry to 1600’, ES, 60 (1979), 2–13. 64 On Margaret’s literary reputation and the laments on her death, Priscilla Bawcutt and B. Henisch, ‘Scots Abroad in the Fifteenth Century: The Princesses Margaret, Isabella and Eleanor’, in Women in Scotland, c.1100–c.1750, ed. Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen M. Meikle (East Linton, 1999), pp. 45–55 (45–8). 65 See Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘A Medieval Scottish Elegy and its French Original’, Scottish Literary Journal, 15 (1998), 5–13. 66 For the text of the poem see Liber Pluscardensis, I, pp. 382–8. The poem survives complete in two manuscripts: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 8 and Brussels, Royal Library, MS 4628.

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a ‘man resonabile’, given ‘vyt and knawlige’ (72–9) the prince should deal with his grief in accordance with philosophical teachings. Inconsolable despair, the prince’s ‘raving’, is designated a thing of ‘nature bestiall’ (75), as was Orpheus’s rage at his loss of Eurydice. Instead, man’s uniquely given ‘Discrecioune schawys the deferans veritabile / Betueix resoune and sensualite’ (76–7). Thus the Lamentacio brings into play, in terms similar to those used to recast the fable of Orpheus by its moralitas, the struggle between reason and sensuality, suggesting that sorrow at the loss of worldly passion is a vain emotion. Everything, the voice of reason reminds, takes place according to the ‘wisdome and resoun’ (109) of the creator, who ‘maid this warld nocht to be ay lestande’ (100). After discovering that complaint fails to provide him with a remedy, Orpheus’s quest to find Eurydice becomes one of self-discovery, offering a commentary on his own previously disharmonious behaviour. As MacQueen and others have observed, Orpheus’s celestial journey is reminiscent of the heavenly expedition of that ‘other Orpheus’, James I, in The Kingis Quair.67 The lovelorn James is transported ‘fro spere to spere’ (526) to the courts of Venus and Minerva to be tutored in patience and fidelity before descending to Fortune’s residence. Indeed, as the heavenly search undertaken by Orpheus seems to be Henryson’s own embellishment of the narrative with no satisfactory parallel in other versions of the legend, it is possible that the Quair, as well as authoritative texts such as the Somnium Scipionis, played a part in developing this section of Orpheus and Eurydice.68 Arriving at Venus’s court, Orpheus assures the goddess that there is ‘In lufe nane lelare’ than he, her ‘avin trewe knycht’ (206–7). But where the young prince James is offered a lesson on faithfulness and virtuous love, Orpheus is rebuked. He gleans no grace or ‘knaulage’ (214) from the deities on this part of his journey. The erotic love represented by Henryson’s Venus problematically appears to be no more than a dead end in Orpheus’s quest. Instead it is on his passage ‘fra the hevyn … doun to the erde’ (217) that Orpheus is allowed some enlightenment: ‘Yit by the way sum melody he lerde’ (218). Here we are explicitly told, in complex technical detail that combines Macrobian, Pythagorean and Platonic theories of world harmony, that Orpheus ‘lerit’ the ‘tonys proportionate’(226) of this music, not normally audible to mortals.69 This unique education gained though his experience of sound reaffirms his affiliation with harmony, and, with his ‘wofull hert’ (215) emboldened, his own powers of self-control are renewed as he continues his search. Just as the narrator of The Kingis Quair needs only to be reacquainted with the representative figures of his inner strengths, Good Hope and Patience, in order to win his love virtuously, so Orpheus needs no more assistance as he proceeds on his journey than his own understanding of such sublime harmony. Indeed, he is ‘Wyth-outyn gyde, he and his harp allane’ (246). 67 John MacQueen, ‘Poetry – James I to Henryson’, in The History of Scottish Literature. Volume 1. Origins to 1660, Medieval and Renaissance, ed. R.S.D. Jack (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 55–72 (68). 68 See Gray, Robert Henryson, p. 231. 69 On Henryson’s musical theory see Robert Henryson, pp. 400–403. Also see John MacQueen, ‘Neoplatonism and Orphism in Fifteenth-Century Scotland. The Evidence of Henryson’s “New Orpheus”’, SS, 20 (1976), 69–89.

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In the Boethian tradition of the legend all the inhabitants of hell are ‘abasschid of the newe song’ (Boece, III, metrum 12, line 33) played by Orpheus. As Henryson’s harpist descends to hell this scene is reworked to show how the king’s enriched royal qualities are evident in his dealings with the discordant creatures he finds there. When Orpheus encounters Cerebus, he begins ‘tobe agast’ (254) yet overcomes his fear and the danger the animal presents, through his harping. When he encounters the Furies, ‘Turnand a quhele’ (265) the ‘ioly spryng’ (268) he plays lulls the sisters to sleep and stops the whirling wheel so that Ixione can get off. Orpheus’s mastery over the turning wheel, which recalls that ‘quhirlyng’ wheel (1150) spun by Fortune over a ‘pit, depe as ony helle’ (1129) in the Kingis Quair, shows him as the master rather than the victim of change.70 Finally, Orpheus feels ‘reuth’ (286) for the sufferings of Tantalus and Ticius. This pity, like his ability to calm the agents of disorder, befits his princely status. As he descends further into ‘hydouse hellis house’ (307) the eternal consequences of royal misgovernance become evident. The inhabitants of the underworld include rulers, ‘mony carefull king and quene’ (317), who have been governed by their unrestrained passions. Orpheus described himself as a ‘carefull kyng’ (137) at the moment of his loss, and thus his past behaviour is reinterpreted through this comparison to the inhabitants of hell. Still in their royal regalia these fallen monarchs, who were ‘rycht maisterfull’ (319) while alive, stand as exempla on the dangers of self-indulgence and tyranny for those in high office. Hector of Troy and Priam are joined by ‘Alexander for his wrang conquest’ (322). Julius Cesar, Nero, Pilate Cresus, Pharoh and Saul are punished for cruelty, injustice to their subjects and avarice. However, crimes of passion have also condemned kings to this ‘dolly place’ (310). First, Orpheus finds ‘quene Iesabell’ (335) who deviously had Naboth killed so that she could please her husband Acab with the prophet’s vineyard. Then, more disturbingly the young king also discovers ‘Anthiocus thare for his foule incest’ (323), and Herod Antipas, apparently for an incestuous relationship with his brother’s wife which is condemned in the Gospels (Mark 6: 17–18). As Elizabeth Archibald has argued, Henryson’s reference to Nero’s ‘iniquitee’ (326) may allude to his rumoured incest with his sister, briefly mentioned by Chaucer’s Monk.71 Archibald also contends that the allusion here to an incestuous Antiochus is surely intended to recall the Apollonius of Tyre legend, in which King Antiochus Seleucus abuses his daughter, told in the Gesta Romanorum, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis.72 Henryson’s insertion of this reference to an incestuous king is striking both in its extremity (incest being the worst sort of lust, transgressing family and social boundaries) and in its originality: Antiochus is an unusual addition to this 70 Compare The Kingis Quair, lines 1142–6. The connection between the wheels of Ixion and Fortune was traditional and is made explicit in the moralitas to Henryson’s poem. Cf. Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1927), p. 167. 71 See Elizabeth Archibald, ‘The Incestuous Kings in Henryson’s Hades’, in Scottish Language and Literature: Medieval and Renaissance, Scottish Studies 4, ed. Dietrich Strauss and Horst W. Drescher (Frankfurt, 1986) pp. 281–9 (281). 72 Elizabeth Archibald, Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations (Cambridge, 1991), p. 48.

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catalogue of the dammed.73 Thus Antiochus’s presence here is a powerful warning to amorous monarchs who fail to regulate their desires and consequently bring about their own destruction. The moment had sufficient resonance for David Lyndsay to add ‘the creuell kyng Antiochus’ (5748), along with Pharaoh, Nero and Herod, almost certainly by way of allusion to Henryson’s poem, to the judgement section of his advice to princes text, The Monarche.74 Further, in The Dreme of Schir Dauid Lyndesay hell is populated by ‘mony cairfull kyngis’ (170), rulers who have sinned sexually in ‘publict adultrye, and incest’ (249), ‘Delyting so in plesour sensuall’ (251), as well as having oppressed their subjects. Queens and empresses who are charged with ‘tyisting men to lechorye’ (273) accompany these lascivious kings.75 In Henryson’s poem, even the king and queen of Hades are overshadowed by their literary reputation for sexual crime. In the exegetical tradition they were commonly glossed as sensuality and avarice, even as the devil and the wayward human soul.76 Pluto’s abduction of Proserpine (related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book V), which condemns her to spend half of each year in the underworld, was sexual in motivation. And the rape was also incestuous: Proserpine was, according to legend, Pluto’s own niece.77 Pluto’s response to King Orpheus’s sorrow at Eurydice’s physical decline is oblique and disturbing: the king of the underworld assures him that his elf-like queen will ‘fure als wele dayly as did my self, / Or king Herode, for all his cheualry’ (361–2). These strange comparisons hardly promise a happy or harmonious end to the relationship of Orpheus and Eurydice, and their violent suggestiveness again echoes the Sir Orfeo tradition.78 Eurydice’s own enigmatic reply to her husband’s lament on her ‘dedlike body’ is itself an indication of the perils of this hell and its wicked royal inhabitants: she is too afraid to reveal the causes of her suffering – ‘I dar noucht tell, perfay, / Bot ye sall wit the cause ane othir day’ (357–8). Henryson’s hell with its own disturbing rulers, and its resident lustful kings and dice-playing, lecherous and financially corrupt churchmen, offers an indictment of the leaders of society, spiritual and temporal, who have neglected their obligation to moral exemplariness. However Orpheus, at least momentarily, triumphs over the terrible kingdom. His music transcends the darkness of Hades and it is significant that as Orpheus differentiates himself from this group of unexemplary figures, Henryson again introduces the technical language of musical theory to demonstrate the inner and outer harmony developed by the young king during his solitary quest:

73 Archibald, ‘Incestuous Kings’, pp. 281–9 (282). 74 For an edition see The Works of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, ed. D. Hamer, 4 vols, STS 3rd Ser.,1, 2, 6, 8 (Edinburgh and London, 1931–36), I. 75 In Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 30 (Glasgow, 2000), pp. 1–40. 76 See M.A. Dalbey, ‘The Devil in the Garden: Pluto and Proserpine in Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale”’, NM, 75 (1974), 408–15 (409–11). 77 E. Simmons-O’ Neill, ‘Love in Hell: the Role of Proserpine in Chaucer’s “Merchant’s Tale”’, MLQ, 51 (1990), 389–407 (392). 78 In Sir Orfeo the Fairy King threatens to tear the ‘limes all’ from Herodis if she resists abduction (145–50). This violence reemerges in Orpheus and Eurydice in the episode describing the queen’s heart as ‘ryf’ into ‘pecis small’ (108) by fairy venom.

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Than Orpheus before Pluto sat doun, And in his handis quhite his harp can ta, And playit mony suete proporcion, With base tonys in ypodorica … (366– 9).

In the Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo memorably proves his inner development by the speculum principis advice he delivers to the King of Fairy: ‘gentil King, / … nedes thou most thy word hold’ (439–44).79 Orpheus’s lesson in Henryson’s poem is of a similar quality: he fleetingly inspires in these cruel figures the transcendent royal virtues of ‘reuth and grete pitee’ (371). Yet the harmony is indeed short-lived. The reunited couple walk, ‘talkand of play and sport’ (385), and the narrator, with foreboding, comments that Orpheus, ‘wyth inwart lufe replete, / So blyndit was in grete affection / Pensif apon his wyf and lady suete’ (387–9). To describe the prince as ‘blyndit’ with affection unavoidably suggests his ethical shortcomings, according with similar statements in Henryson’s Fabillis and the Testament.80 Orpheus’s joy indeed makes him careless of the bargain and Proserpine imposes her ‘hard condicion’ (390). In his final planctus the young king confronts the paradoxes of his experience: Quhat art thou lufe? How sall I the dyffyne? Bitter and suete, cruel and merciable; Plesand to sum, til othir playnt and pyne; To sum constant, till othir variabil; Hard is thy law, thi bandis vnbrekable … (401–5).

Here the lover recalls Virgil’s bereft Orpheus questioning his fate (‘quid faceret?’), raging and singing in vain after the loss of his wife, whose backward glance is a sign of the irrationality of lovers.81 Indeed, his persona is here defined wholly as that of a lover, not as that of a king. Orpheus’s attempts at self-governance have ebbed away in the final moment of his passion. This is the last we hear from the protagonist: Henryson cuts short the classical story never allowing us to witness how Ovid’s Orpheus channels his misery into his famous acts of charming nature, let alone his eventual reunion with Eurydice in the next world. The prince’s parting complaint is reminiscent of Troilus’s interrogative attempts to understand the nature of human love in Book I (400–434) of Troilus and Criseyde, part of which is excerpted to form an independent lyric in the Bannatyne Manuscript ‘Gife no luve is / O god quhat feill I so’ (fol. 230r–v). In fact, in the Bannatyne Manuscript Orpheus’s lament on the dangers of romantic love finds several other echoes amongst the ‘luvaris ballatis’ (fol. 211v): the unique ‘Quhart art thow / luf for till allow’ (fol. 248) is especially close in tone, lamenting the loss of delight, expressing the desire to seek for the beloved and juxtaposing the ‘pane & wo’ of love 79 The Ashmole and Harley versions of Sir Orfeo add even more emphasis to this moment than the Auchinleck text. See Sir Orfeo, pp. 40–41. 80 The blinding of reason is a prominent theme in Henryson’s Morall Fabillis (see especially lines 1020–21, 1305, 1903, 1906–7). 81 Cited in W.S. Anderson, ‘The Orpheus of Virgil and Ovid: “flebile nescio quid”’, in Orpheus: The Metamorphosis, pp. 25–50 (29, 30).

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with its brief but exceptional joy.82 For a sixteenth-century reader of the Bannatyne Manuscript the anguish of Orpheus’s love and its pejorative effect on the prince’s self-rule may have encouraged a more moralized perspective to be adopted in the re-reading of this cluster of thematically related love lyrics. Orpheus and Eurydice appears in Bannatyne’s ‘fyift pairt of this buik contenyng the fabillis of Esop with diuers vþir Fabillis …’ (fol. 298r), a corrective to the ‘ballatis’ of love that go before. It has been argued that Bannatyne’s manuscript was compiled with an interpretive design that gradually encourages a repudiation of earthly love for divine, and Bannatyne’s own editing of works such as the ‘Maying and Disport of Chaucer’ encourages such a view.83 In many ways Orpheus and Eurydice encapsulates this moral patterning in itself. Orpheus’s last plaint looks back to Boethius’s comments on the bargain of the gods, the lover’s subsequent backward turn, and the inevitability of tragedy given the nature of earthly love: ‘Love is a grettere lawe and a strengere to hymself than any lawe that men mai yyven’ (Boece, III, metrum 12, lines 53–5).84 This troubling notion pits the philosophical moralitas to Boethius’s ‘fable’ (that ‘whoso sette his thoughtes in erthly thinges’ loses the ‘noble good celestial’),85 against the reality of man’s experience of his passions. Thus with his second loss Henryson’s Orpheus is beyond consolation, regarding himself as ‘expert’ (411) in suffering, and a victim of all of all that is variable in love, just as Cresseid does at the outset of her journey to understanding.86 He can only read his loss in terms of one backward glance rather than in terms of his costly loss of judgement and fidelity in abandoning the conditions made by Proserpine – ‘Bot for a luke my lady is forlore’ (412). Once again we see him ‘chydand on with lufe’ (413) just as Cresseid is found ‘chydand with hir drerie destenye’ (470) after her very first complaint of self-pitying anguish. As Henryson’s narrative closes, it becomes clear that Orpheus’s inner growth is not as penetrating as that experienced by Cresseid in the Testament: the prince never moves beyond lamentation. Thus the romance of Orpheus’s love for Eurydice ends with considerable ambivalence. At the opening of the narrative Henryson stressed the importance of adhering to examples of virtue from the past. Orpheus’s own received wisdom 82 Compare other examples of lament in this part of the manuscript, such as ‘My sorufull pane and wo for to complene’ (fol. 224r–v), ‘My wofull werd complene I may rycht soir’ (folio, 226r–v), ‘Quhair luve is kendlit confortles’ (fol. 243r–v). 83 Compare A.A. MacDonald, ‘The Printed Book that Never Was: George Bannatyne’s Poetic Anthology (1568)’, in Boeken in de late Middeleeuwen, ed. Jos M.M. Hermans and Klaas van der Hoek, Verslag van de Groningse Codicologendagen 1992 (Groningen, 1994), pp. 101–10 (108–9). The extracted twenty-one stanzas from the ‘Maying and Disport’ (Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight) is edited so as to be composed almost entirely of material from the knight’s complaint, foregrounding his lack of prudence and reason. 84 Compare ‘The Knight’s Tale’, line 1164. Also see Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, I, lines 5802–3. 85 Boece, III, metrum 12, lines 65–9. 86 The narrator of the Testament professes to be ‘expert’ (35) in the hot love of the young and the dead ‘curage’ (32) of the old. In both poems the suggestion seems to be that such ‘expertise’ blinkers one in the obsessive pursuit of desire.

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provided by his upbringing was enriched by the experience of loss and the search for reparation, which confirmed the importance of harmony as an inner virtue for a ruler who has to create consonance in the world around him and teach others of morality. In this he thus exemplified an ideal young king. However, as a lover Orpheus loses an aspect of his kingship. In his youth he is witness to the strength of love’s law, and the harmony that he creates, like that of kings Duncan and James, is transitory. Despite his musical powers, his fidelity and perseverance, a happy resolution is denied him – the romance quest has been frustrated, as Orpheus seems to have gained nothing of enduring value. Orpheus the lover and Orpheus the harmonizer cannot be reconciled – the two aspects to his character are finally mutually exclusive, giving a pessimistic conclusion to this account of a king’s management of his desires. The moralitas which brings Orpheus and Eurydice to a close is based on the popular commentary on Boethius’s text by the Dominican Nicholas Trivet (1265– 1334?), and has provoked unsympathetic responses from modern critics.87 However this final section of the poem should not be quickly dismissed, and indeed the twopart structure it gives to the work serves to reflect the dualities in man’s nature, the body and soul, intellect and sensuality, which are to be explained by the gloss. The challenge of reading of the moralitas mimics the difficulties of harmonizing such disparate elements within the self. The stanzaic form used up until now is replaced by rhyming couplets which themselves echo the dichotomies Henryson explores. Thus Orpheus and Eurydice embodies the divisions it discusses at this very basic structural level. Further, Henryson highlights the seminal nature of the gloss by noting that Boethius composed his Orpheus metre for ‘oure doctryne and gude instruction’ (418), and that Trivet’s commentary applies to it ‘gud moralitee’ (423). Similarly, throughout the Morall Fabillis we are reminded that fables, though pleasurable to read, are didactic in agenda, and ‘may weill be applicate / To gude morall edificatioun’ (1892–3). The earliest copies of Orpheus and Eurydice make clear the significance of this structure, by clearly distinguishing the appended moral from the body of the romance: ‘Moralitas fabule sequitur’. Bannatyne simply adds the heading ‘Moralitas’ as an introduction to this section of the poem, but his placing of Orpheus and Eurydice in his manuscript is suggestive of the importance attached to the moral gloss by early readers, and the perceived structural similarity of the poem to other didactic texts.88 He clearly responded to Orpheus’s self-characterization as a ‘feyneit’ (419) fable, its meaning ‘hid vnder the cloke of poesie’ (420), and placed it in a run of the Morall Fabillis.89 Following Trivet’s allegorization of the main characters, the marriage of sapience and eloquence, in narrative terms Phoebus and Calliope, results in the creation of the ‘part intellectiue / Of mannis saule and vnder-standing’ (428–9), Orpheus. Accordingly, Orpheus’s music, and his ability to learn from celestial melody have shown him to be a figure of ‘parfyte reson’ (445). Meanwhile, separate from this 87 See Gray, Robert Henryson, p. 240. 88 A later reader has written in the margin of folio 317v of the Bannatyne Manuscript, ‘Fable IV, Orpheus & Eurydice’. The explicit to King Orphius in NAS RH 13/ 35 reads ‘finis huius fabulae’. 89 Compare Morall Fabillis, lines 15–18.

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intellectual aspect of the soul is sensuality, ‘oure affection’ (431), represented by Eurydice. However, this interpretation is far from clumsily superimposed onto the romance, but has been carefully anticipated throughout, and verbal echoes bind together fable and moralitas.90 In the fable itself, details such as Eurydice’s ‘blenkis amorus’ (81), her stepping on the serpent, now equated with ‘dedely syn’ (441), and her languor in hell, fit comfortably with the moralized reading. The narrative left us in no doubt of the very worldly nature of the union between the king and queen. That Eurydice is so attractive to Orpheus is understandable, because our sensuality is, by its very nature, easily mislead – ‘Be fantasy oft movit vp and doun’ (432). It is susceptible, much to the consternation of reason which aspires to the ‘lyf contemplatyve’ (448), to be tempted from virtue and ‘oppressit doun / To warldly lust’ (443–4). Thus the fable is repackaged as an allegory of the conflict between reason and sensuality, what happens when love is wilfully misdirected from the heavenly to the worldly. As in the moralitas to ‘The Paddock and the Mouse’, the dynamic described is the movement of ‘The spreit vpwart’ while ‘the body precis doun’ (2959). In other respects, though, Henryson exploits the tensions between the two parts of the poem in order to be more intellectually demanding of the reader. For example, the detail expended on decoding the individual exempla of the inhabitants of hell makes our reading experience sometimes dismayingly exacting, playing out the struggle of our reason to overcome our will. To review the Virgilian figure Arestyus as ‘noucht bot gude vertewe, / Quhilk besy is ay to kepe oure myndis clene’ (436–7) is wholly traditional, but in Henryson’s poem is still a problematic act of reinterpretation given the emphasis in the fable on the shepherd’s unprovoked and destructive lustfulness as he sought to ‘oppres’ (102) Eurydice.91 And the interpretation of Orpheus as man’s intellect, who mourns when our appetite is mislead, places a different emphasis on the Orpheus of the fable who was ‘Half out of mynd’ (129) with passion and grief, and whose complaints showed his struggle to gain a moral perspective on his loss. Thus it is clear that the fable, with its interwoven patterns from romance and complaint literature, generates important lessons that are not further elaborated in the moral gloss that follows it. Importantly the explanations given for the terrors Orpheus faced in hell, which develop into a series of miniature narrative exempla, serve to enrich our experience of the narrative by reflecting back on the quality of the protagonist’s kingship. While in the fable the monsters and raging elements were physical dangers to be overcome by Orpheus, in the gloss we learn that the young king’s mastery was of a more inward nature, a triumph over the ever-present possibilities of personal misrule. Orpheus’s subduing of the three-headed dog Cerebus represents our need to ‘draw oure will and oure affection, / In ewiry elde, fra syn and foule delyte’ (472–3), to compensate for the inexperience of our years by striving to govern the self in every age, ‘tender yong barnage’, ‘medill age’ and ‘grete elde’ (465–7). This drawing together of the will and reason can only occur when our minds are ‘myngit with sapience’ (469). 90 Compare the diction of lines 89 and 439/510, 94 and 438, 102 and 443, 105–7 and 442, 303–5 and 600, 414 and 627. 91 On the interpretation of Arestyus see Robert Henryson, p. cvii.

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The Furies are now said to represent ‘wickit thoucht, evill word, and frawart dede’ (478), the inner corruption that leads to deadly sin.92 In overcoming these, Orpheus had thus shown his ethical self-mastery and love of virtue. The wheel that the three sisters were turning when Orpheus came upon them is now specifically glossed as representing the workings of Fortune. It signifies that, … warldly men sum tyme ar castin hie Apon the quhele in grete prosperitee, And wyth a quhirl, vnwarly or thai wait, Ar thravin doun to pure and law estate (485–8).

In explaining the meaning carried by the wheel’s unfortunate victim, Ixione ‘on lyve brukle and lecherouse’ (491), Henryson’s narrator again calls attention to the consequences of unrestrained desire. It was Ixione’s lust for Juno, an ‘inward crabbing and offense’ (503), that condemned him to be spun on the wheel by the three sisters. Such ‘grete violence’ (504) and immoderation identifies the individual with the destructive workings of Fortune. The glossing of Tantalus, a king in some versions of the legend, though here a ‘gay hostlare’ (520), provides the occasion for another self-contained exemplum that is familiar from speculum principis texts. Like the incestuous kings of the underworld, Tantalus has violated the order of family affections and slain his son for pure avarice. He thus ‘Betakenis men gredy and couatouse’ (532), whose material acquisitiveness prevents the attainment of selfknowledge. Meanwhile Ticius is being punished for the presumption of his attempts to usurp the power of divination, providing a warning against the misuse of human wisdom in witchcraft and astrology. Orpheus, wishing to harmonize his will and reason, cultivating sapience despite his tender age, overcoming sins such as lust and covetousness, and standing against instability, exemplifies royal worth indeed. The cumulative lesson of the moralitas is one of self-knowledge and the need to ensure that ‘oure desire wyth reson makis pes’ (617). However Henryson does not believe that this state of inner regulation is achieved easily. The ‘dully streit’ (600) which Orpheus takes to hell is revealed as ‘nocht ellis bot blinding of the spreit’ (601) with ignorance and the worldly. It intimates that the experience of living morally will not be uncomplicated while sensuality is so easily drawn from virtue. To ‘kene the self’ (605) is a princely necessity,93 but also one which, in accordance with the broadening of the perspective in the moralitas of Orpheus and Eurydice, also befits the king’s subjects: as Henryson teaches in ‘Wolf and the Wether’, men of ‘euerilk stait’ must learn ‘To knaw thame self …’ (2609–10).94 In many respects the conclusions to the poem are more demanding than those of the Testament of Cresseid. Cresseid, diseased, dying and rejected by society, faces few 92 Trivet glosses them more explicitly as cupidity, lust and anger. 93 Compare Hay: ‘a man shuld ken hym self and namely a prince’ (Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, ch. 35, lines 1–2). See The Prose works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume III: The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, p. 112. 94 Self-knowledge includes knowledge of the divine. See DOST v. ‘ken’.

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choices. With the possibility of further human affection and worldly luxury removed, her mature perspective comes slightly more easily. But Orpheus and Eurydice urges a philosophical transcendence during life, and a reconciliation of the most disparate elements of the human self. Thus the pessimistic end to the fable of Orpheus, which seemed to suggest that the pursuit of love brings only failure and unhappiness, even in the wisest of individuals, is mitigated by the exhaustive didacticism of the moralitas. This extended process of glossing consciously underwrites the possibility of the peaceful co-existence in human beings of reason and affection and the rule of man’s inner realm, despite the obstacles in his path. The moralitas demands that we re-read the fable and extract its moral fruits so that we can live in greater sapience. Like the Morall Fabillis, Orpheus and Eurydice ends with an entreaty for divine help to stand firm amidst the many tribulations of the world that may come between the individual and self-knowledge. The prayer acknowledges that post-lapsarian man is naturally inclined to failure, but nevertheless also offers hope for the resolution of his inner struggle: Now pray we God, sen oure affection Is alway prompt and redy to fall doun, That he wald vndirput his haly hand Of manetemance, and geve vs grace to stand … (628–31).95

It is tempting to assume that Henryson’s poem was printed by Chepman and Myllar in 1508, at the height of James IV’s reign, because of its perceived relevance to contemporary discussions of royal virtue. The device adopted by Walter Chepman for the title page of the poem (and for Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe and Ballade of Lord Barnard Stewart) show his interlaced initials on a shield hanging from a tree that is flanked by two youthful wodewoses, one male and one female. Although the wild people have hairy bodies entwined with roses and foliage, their faces are serene and they have adopted courtly and refined poses. Their heads are crowned with woven leaves and as a result they appear regal.96 Chepman’s device (based on Pierre Pigouchet’s design) was probably chosen by him because of the popularity of similar designs amongst continental printers, but Chepman also had connections in the literary circles around James IV’s court and it is conceivable that he regarded the image as meaningful in other ways. Indeed, the woodcut is politically and ethically suggestive, the figures seeming to represent a meeting of order with desire and the uncontrolled. It is therefore a particularly appropriate image with which to preface Henryson’s exploration of the young sovereign Orpheus and his vulnerability to the inner disharmony of love, and its final lesson to the reader of perseverance in their ongoing struggle to reconcile the disparate elements of their moral beings.

95 Compare Morall Fabillis, line 1947. 96 See F.C. Avis, ‘The Wodewose Device in Early British Printing’, Gutenburg Jahrbuch 1971 (1971), 116–21.

Chapter 5

The Thre Prestis of Peblis As is the case for many of the poems discussed in this book, situating The Thre Prestis of Peblis1 in a precise historical context is challenging.2 Internal evidence for its date of composition is unsatisfactory,3 and attempts to read the poem as a satire on the reign of the unpopular James III, and the tribulations of the 1480s, are unconvincing.4 The text’s earliest witness is the Asloan Manuscript, c.1515–30, where the framing device and part of the first tale, are preserved (fols 257–62). The loss of leaves from the manuscript at this point make it impossible to tell how much of the poem the manuscript originally contained, but it seems likely that it once held the complete text as Asloan entitles the work ‘þe buke of þe thre prestis of Peblis [and] how þai tald þar talis’.5 The other two witnesses, a partial copy in the Edinburgh, NAS, MS RH 13/35 (c.1582–86),6 and Robert Charteris’s complete print of 1603 (STC 19528), are significantly later than the Asloan version, and perhaps around a century later than the poem’s date of composition. Yet the poem’s combination of political and amatory themes has an ideological consonance with the other late 1 References are to The Thre Prestis of Peblis, ed. T.D. Robb, STS, 2nd Ser., 8, (Edinburgh and London, 1920). Robb’s edition includes the Asloan and Charteris texts of the poem. Quotations are from the Charteris version in Robb’s edition, except for those from lines 226–302, 1226–1344 where the Oxford print breaks off. These sections are quoted from the facsimile of the National Library of Scotland print, The Thrie Tailes of the Thrie Prestis of Peblis, English Experience, 106 (Amsterdam and New York, 1969). 2 Theories of authorship are discussed in Sally Mapstone, ‘The Advice to Princes Tradition in Scottish Literature, 1450–1500’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1986), pp. 318–22. 3 See The Thre Prestis, pp. ix–xiv. McDonald locates the poem’s date in relation to the completion of John Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome in 1490, a text with which The Thre Prestis shares two exempla. Craig McDonald, ‘The Thre Prestis of Peblis and The Meroure of Wyssdome: A Possible Relationship’, SSL, 17 (1982), 153–64. 4 R.J. Lyall, ‘Politics and Poetry in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, Scottish Literary Journal, 3 (1976), 5–29 (11–13). Contrast Norman Macdougall, James III: A Political Study (Edinburgh, 1982), pp. 269–72. 5 The Asloan Manuscript: A Miscellany in Prose and Verse, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 14, 16 (Edinburgh and London, 1923–25), II, p. vii. Compare I.C. Cunningham, ‘The Asloan Manuscript’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture Offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan (Leiden, 1994), pp. 107–35 (118). 6 For the NAS extract see Sally Mapstone, ‘The Thre Prestis of Peblis in the Sixteenth Century’, in A Day Estivall: Essays on the Music, Poetry and History of Scotland and England and Poems Previously Unpublished in Honour of Helena Mennie Shire, ed. Alisoun GardnerMedwin and Janet Hadley Williams (Aberdeen, 1990), pp. 124–42.

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fifteenth-century texts explored in this book – a consonance which, as its manuscript and printed witnesses suggest, was recognized by early readers. The frame narrative of The Thre Prestis sets up the poem as a tale-telling contest between three priests, Masters John, Archibald and William. The first tale tells of a king who summons a parliament in order to discover what has caused the ills that afflict his realm. The middle tale told by Master Archibald consists of three separate stories dealing with the subjects of good governance and royal amorousness. The final tale tells a version of the ‘Everyman’ narrative in which a man is summoned to meet his master and tries to persuade his three friends to make the journey with him. Despite the differing subject matter of the exempla told by the priests all the narratives in the collection are interconnected. Their interdependence is signalled by the repeated folk-tale openings to each narrative, only the third of which is slightly varied: ‘A king thair was sumtyme and eik a Queene, /As monie in the land befoir had bene’ (63–4, 451–2, cf. 1013–14). This couplet anticipates the perennial nature of the stories told and the poet’s desire for relevance, if not precise topicality. Furthermore, between them the exempla attend to the king’s whole person and in so doing extend the scope of the poem from kingly conduct, in all its private and public forms, to the inner moral and spiritual kingdom of each individual. The first narrative examines the dependence of the ‘heid’ of the realm on the ‘bodie’ politic (105). The second story deals with the king’s sexual body, and the third with his spiritual destiny. But each story also deals with some kind of desire from financial greed and the participation in worldly pleasures, to sexual proclivity, and then the spiritual understanding of ‘lufe’. The first two tales discuss kingship and royal amorousness with considerable optimism, hopeful that political reform is possible and that, if properly regulated, natural passion need not disrupt royal rule. The final tale, in contrast, retreats from this confident stance, introducing a cautionary eschatological perspective to remind us of the transience of affection and the human tendency to avoid self-scrutiny until it is almost too late. Together the narratives also provide a detailed discussion of the utilitas of poetry – in particular its ability to encourage political reform and to facilitate the moral improvement of its readers. This metatextual impulse emerges in the ‘comic incongruence’7 between story and teller, frame narrative and exemplum, and echoes the hermeneutic strategies of earlier English tale collections such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Its priestly speakers are to varying degrees unreliable narrators, boasting ecclesiastical office but also preoccupied with worldly concerns. The frame narrative describes how the priests meet in Peebles for a preLenten feast and enjoy ‘thrie fed capons’ (13) and ‘vther sindrie dyuers meis’ (14). They choose ‘ane priuie place’ (4), keeping themselves from ‘rangald’ (disorder, 6), ‘ladry’ (ribaldry, 17) and bad company. But they are not described without irony. They sit luxuriantly, ‘richt soft and vnfutesair’ (5) and ‘ful easilie and soft’ (9), and their conversation is a mixture of ‘jangle and jak’ (20) as well as more serious matters. They compare their learning and travel competitively, having ‘drunken 7 For this phrase see James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 25 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 135–8.

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about a quarte’ (29). Archibald is comic in his feigned humility, ‘Presumpteouslie’ thinking ‘not to presume’ (47) to tell the first tale, but still boastfully making a point of mentioning his many pilgrimages. Indeed, he will not ‘tyre’ (37) of telling tales, but outdoes John and packs three stories into his turn. John has been to ‘monie vncouth Land’ (51), and an impressive list of his destinations follows, but whether or not he spent his time converting the heathen kingdom of Spain is tellingly not revealed. Further, the tales given by the friends, even William’s more spiritual contribution (‘To grit clargie I can not count nor clame’, 40), are political rather than prayerful in theme. It is unclear whether these priests are fulfilling the exemplary spiritual duties of their estate, as outlined in John’s tale. Within the context of the poem, secluded ‘Fra cumpanie’ (16), they are certainly disengaged from their pastoral roles. The first two speakers make no effort to gloss their secular stories in order to turn them into allegories of the Christian life in the Gesta Romanorum tradition, as might be expected of churchmen, and the reaction of each to the contributions of his colleagues is noncommittal. The poet therefore encourages the reader’s independent responsiveness to the moral nuances and interconnectedness of his tales, each of which is highly developed in terms of plot and character far beyond what is expected of the traditional exemplum form. In Archibald’s tale a wise fool who is suggestively named Fictus, provides a more reliable moralizing voice from within the text. As we shall see, Fictus reminds us of the didactic importance, one of the potential advantages of poetry, of combining pleasure with seriousness. He also confirms that wise counsel often comes from unexpected quarters. Yet Archibald’s exemplum nevertheless seems to accept the ubiquity of human passion without offering a means of escaping such potentially damaging experiences. And, despite his wisdom, even Fictus’s motives seem obscure, rather than altruistic. He resolves the king’s amorous problems after first having received an offer of ‘gude, gold, Lordships and Land’ (946), as well as a bishopric, as a reward. Significantly, it is not until the moralitas of William’s tale that the lustfulness of Archibald’s young king receives any censure. Master John’s Tale Master John’s tale uses estates satire to explore the relationship of the king and his subjects and to examine the issue of personal responsibility. The narrative tells how its protagonist king poses a question to each of his estates in turn, merchants, lords and bishops, and then on the following morning returns accompanied by ‘ane Clark with ink paper and pen’ (168) to hear and record their replies.8 However, instead of 8 This may be significant for establishing the date of, and original audience for, the poem. Cf. R.J. Lyall, ‘Materials: The Paper Revolution’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall, Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing History (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 11–29 (12–13). Lyall states that around half of all manuscripts were written on paper by the late fifteenth century. The poet’s image of the king using paper is striking because parchment was still overwhelmingly used for copies of statutes and texts for aristocratic audiences in the early sixteenth century. In contrast paper was increasingly used ‘in the keeping of town records’ and in the ‘mercantile environment’.

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finding that the estates are alone to blame for their shortcomings, the king of the tale also finds himself exposed to scrutiny and correction from his subjects. Indeed, in response to the king’s desire to know the reasons for the imperfections of each estate, their three wise representatives refocus attention on royal misgovernance. Although the description of the estates here is neither historically accurate nor demographically detailed,9 the idea of three estates co-operating in advising the king is highly resonant in ideological terms.10 Nicholson notes that the expression, ‘the three communities’ or estates (from the French tres communitates) had, by the early fifteenth century, all but replaced the less precise phrase ‘community of the realm’ in political discourse.11 The parliamentary statutes for the period reveal that the concept of the ‘þe thre Estaitis of oure souerane lordis parliament’ was well established.12 The formulation presenting statutes as ‘Ordanit be the aviss & counsall of the thre Estatis’ is especially prevalent as a preface to the acts made by the parliaments of James III and James IV.13 But above all, estates satire allows the poet to scrutinize the general failings of all the classes of society and the inharmonious self-interest of their members, even though he ultimately makes clear that it is the king, via his personal virtue and the quality of his governance, who carries the final responsibility for the state of the realm. Throughout the tale, the theme of misplaced and ungoverned desires is recurrent, preparing us for the more personal focus of Archibald’s tale. The burgesses are the first estate addressed by the king of Master John’s tale. The king’s claim of affection for them (they are his ‘beild and blis’, 85) duly reflects the well-established political importance of this wealthy section of the urban population in Scotland.14 However, he also makes clear that he regards the abundant riches that they generate as the sources of his own pleasure and welfare:15 Quhen ȝe fair weil I may na mirthis mis; Quhen that ȝour ships halds hail and sound, In riches, gudes and welfair I abound; ȝe ar the caus of my lyfe and my cheir (86–9)

The repetition of the first person pronoun throughout this passage shifts the emphasis firmly onto the king’s personal gain, rather than on to the importance of mercantile 9 See Alexander Grant, Independence and Nationhood, Scotland 1306–1469, New History of Scotland, 3 (London and Baltimore, 1984), pp. 167–8; Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1999), p. 20. 10 On the three-part division of the estates in Scottish writing, see Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Massachusetts Studies in Modern Culture (Amherst, 1994), p. 116. 11 Ranald Nicholson, Scotland in the Later Middle Ages, The Edinburgh History of Scotland, 2 (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 166. 12 APS, II, pp. 133, 143 etc. 13 APS, II, p. 211, cf. pp. 212, 213 etc. 14 See Nicholson, Scotland, p. 166. Successive Stewart kings and parliaments supported the merchant-burgess communities above other burgh citizens, and by the mid-fourteenth they were securely represented in the new concept of ‘three estates’. 15 Similar ideas are expressed in The Buke of the Chess (1562–82). See The Buke of the Chess, ed. Catherine van Buuren, STS, 4th Ser., 27 (Edinburgh, 1997).

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activity for the common profit. The king is therefore eager to know why this prosperous estate is now unable to govern itself and he asks, echoing a well-attested proverb,16 ‘Quhy Burges bairns thryues not to the thrid air / Bot casts away it that thair eldars wan’ (94–5). The burgesses’ answer is one of self-accusation, disclosing their imperfections in terms familiar from the sermons ad status tradition, which typically complained of mercantile avarice and singularity.17 However, in outlining their cumulative problems, unchecked by secular authority, the burgesses divulge avarice and a love of display which clearly mirrors, and has been bred by, that of the king. Their reply reveals that merchants’ sons ‘cast away’ (180) the winnings of their elders because, unlike their forbears, they have had no experience of ‘work nor wa’ (228). Complacency and vice was also fostered in earlier generations, during their rags to riches ascent from peddler to importer and exporter of goods ‘ouer the Sey’ (207).18 The tradesman who has ‘wox a grund rich’ and ‘verie potent man’ full of ‘warldis welth and win’ also becomes ostentatious and proud (200, 205, 209). He wears ‘Riche … gownis with vther garments gay: / For Sonday silk, for ilk day grene and gray’, and his wife is ‘cled in Scarlet reid’ (213–15), suppressing his humble origins out of a concern for ‘degrie’ (236). The flouting of contemporary sumptuary legislation suggested here typifies the self-interest and disregard for the common profit amongst members of this class.19 In all, therefore, the answer of the burgess class exposes corruption more deeply imbedded in the estate, and more damaging to society, than the king had ever imagined. Of his lords, the king next asks the reason for their decline in chivalry: Quhairfoir and quhy and quhat is the cais Sa worthie Lords war in myne elders dayis, Sa full of fredome worship and honour, Hardie in hart to stand in euerie stour, And now in ȝow I find the hail contrair? (117–21) 16 Compare Caxton’s introduction to ‘the book called Caton’ (STC 4853): ‘in this noble cyte of london it [the renown of merchant families] can unnethe contynue unto the third heyre or scarcely to the second … fayre ne wiser ne bet bespoken children in theyre yongthe ben nowher than ther ben in London but at their ful rypyng ther is no carnel ne good corn founden but chaffe for the moost parte’. See The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.J.B. Crotch, EETS, OS, 176 (London, 1928), pp. 77–8. Another version of this proverb is found in Brunne’s Handlyng Synne (9485–6), where it is again adduced with criticisms of mercantile activity: ‘The threde eyre selleþ alle away’. See Handlyng Synne. Robert Mannyng of Brunne, ed. Idelle Sullens, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 14 (Binghampton, New York, 1983). 17 G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, 1961), pp. 352–3. 18 The Scottish merchants of the east-coast ports exported to France, the Low Countries and the Baltic Ports. 19 An act of 1471 limited the wearing of silk to certain classes, especially prohibiting mercantile extravagance: ‘na man sal weir silkis in tyme cummyng in gown doublate & clokis except Knychtis menstrallis &heraldis’, APS, II, p. 100. A statute of James II’s reign (1457) also sought to regulate the wearing of ‘sumptuoss clething bat of men and wemen and in speciall wtin burowis’, again targeting those that live ‘be merchandice’. APS, II, p. 49. Cf. APS, II, p. 18. This legislation was intended to control excessive consumption. See F.J. Shaw, ‘Sumptuary Legislation in Scotland’, Judicial Review, 24 (1979), 81–115 (81–3).

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An ‘agit Lord’ (262), the sort of man who should ideally assume the role of counsellor to the monarch as we shall see in Archibald’s tale, articulates the reply of the noble estate. His answer turns attention more conclusively onto the deficiencies of the king, while also introducing another element of estates satire, the censure of corrupt men of law – a theme with much contemporary resonance.20 The old nobleman tells the king that his judges are ‘Sa covetous and ful of auarice’ (277), pardoning the guilty in return for money while the innocent suffer injustice – a problem which will be considered again in Archibald’s tale. And, continuing the theme of generational decline in the burgesses’ reply, the knight records that the lords are impoverished by selling their ‘Sonnes and aires for gold & gude’ (308) in marriage to families who ‘wist neuer ȝit of honour nor gentryse’ (310). Desire for financial gain is thus figured as damaging in the private family sphere as well as in the public arena. In response to this analysis the king shows recognition of his faults and remorse for the injustices perpetrated as a result of them. He systematically considers each of the points that have been made and distils from his advisors’ words an even more precise account of what is amiss in his realm. His moment of self-realization replicates the forthright language of advisory literature: ‘weil I wait thair can be na war thing / Than couetyce in Justice or in King’ (347–8). To place in the mouth of the king himself an acknowledgment of the neglect of justice, oppression of the poor, and loss of true nobility in his aristocratic servants, is particularly striking. This is no prophetic onlooker speaking, only the monarch himself looking inwards on his own self-governance and the causes of disorder in the realm, and then proposing to instate a ‘Doctour in the Law’ (343) to help him reform. The poet assures his reader that these good intentions have immediate effect: ‘sa did this King but chessoun’ (351). The spiritual lords are the third estate to be addressed by the king. He reminds them that in the past churchmen were men of ‘literature’ and ‘science’ (418–19) who achieved ‘gude warkes’ (154) through their prayerfulness. His first concern is therefore their loss of exemplariness: ‘Quhairfoir may not ȝe as thay did than?’ (163). The clergy appoint ‘ane cunning Clark’ (358) to voice their main complaint to the king which addresses the issue of avaricious royal interference in clerical appointments. The objection to this blurring of temporal and spiritual boundaries is conventional, and yet its relevance to late fifteenth-century Scotland is no less pronounced for this. James I was famous for urging the resurgence of monasticism in 1425, but he and successive Stewarts also took a keen interest in the resources of the Scottish church in order to advance the crown’s rights and income.21 An indult of April 1487 granted by Pope Innocent VIII to James III actually confirmed the right of the Scottish crown to nominate who should fill key ecclesiastical positions worth

20 Compare R.J. Tanner, ‘Outside the Acts: Perceptions of the Scottish Parliament in Literary Sources before 1500’, Scottish Archives, 6 (2000), 57–70 (66–8). 21 D.E.R. Watt, ‘The Papacy and Scotland in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R.B. Dobson (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 115–32 (119–20, 121).

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more than two hundred gold florins a year.22 The indult gave the king eight, rather than six months, to make his application, in which time he could be drawing on the revenues of the vacant temporalities. Both James IV and V continued to extend their control over church finance and regularly interfered in clerical appointments.23 Such royal meddling provokes the fictional bishops of The Thre Prestis to warn the king not to compromise the church’s pastoral work. The king’s candidate is never a shepherd but instead a greedy ‘tod in ane Lambskin’ (413–14),24 For now on dayes is nouther riche nor pure Sal get ane Kirk al throw his literature; For science, for vertew or for blude Gets nane the Kirk, bot baith for gold and gude (417–20).

In response to the clergy’s complaint the king immediately promises to act, calling on God, crown and country as his witnesses that ‘With Kirk gude sal I neuer haue ado’ (434). Thus the three answers to the king’s questions identify singularity and covetousness as pervasive and corrupting forces in the community. Most troublingly, the king has placed personal financial gain above encouraging virtue in the realm, allowing decline to remain unchecked. However, despite this, the ending to John’s tale is strikingly optimistic. John’s nostalgic king who wishes to right the ills of society and recreate lost perfection has a particular humility. This was illustrated in his initial summoning of the estates: he chooses not to rule without the participation of his subjects and accepts the need to listen to his people.25 Further, where other Scottish texts such as King Hart are ambivalent about the efficacy of documents of princely instruction, John’s tale literalizes and sanctions advisory texts. The king writes his own ‘Buik of rememberance’ (354), in which he records constructive criticism and is thus seen to be the generator of his own regulation. He writes a mirror for princes for himself, and, in this closed and perfect exemplum world, acts upon what he learns, ensuring that his lords love him, his subjects live in peace, his Kirk is free, and his merchants thrive. At the end of the tale this ‘nobil king’, is said to rule ‘lang in tyme and space’ (437).

22 Ian B. Cowan, The Medieval Church in Scotland, ed. J. Kirk (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 193–211 (193). 23 Norman Macdougall, James IV, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1997), pp. 213–14; Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–42, ed. N.A.T. Macdougall, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1998), pp. 261–2. 24 For a similar use of this image to denote the corruption of authority see Dunbar’s ‘This hindir nycht in Dumfermeling’ and ‘In vice most vicius he excellis’ in The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 27–8 (Glasgow, 1998), I, pp. 245–7, 111–12. 25 Cf. Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, 1996), p. 138.

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Master Archibald’s Tale John’s focus on societal corruption inculcated by the king’s pursuit of personal pleasure, and on the importance of counsel for remedying royal self-interest, is important preparation for Archibald’s tale. This tale is the central episode of The Thre Prestis and, structurally and thematically, the most complex. Its three parts – the exempla of the wounded men and the flies, of the pardoned murderer, and of the king’s bedfellow – imitate the tripartite formation of the whole poem, drawing attention to the tale’s importance in the overall construction of the work. Above all, it is significant that this, the longest tale of the poem, as well as that which forms the midpoint of the collection, is concerned with the troublesome subject of royal selfrule, in particular the sexuality of young kings, as well as with the more practical aspects of kingship. The tale opens with a couplet identical to that which introduced John’s tale, but Archibald’s king is characterized in more detail. He is full of vitality, ‘fair in persoun, fresh and fors’ (453). He has physical strength and youthful confidence and his court is dedicated to ‘sport and play’ (461). The fictional king, with his enthusiasm for the courtly activities of tournament, hunting and hawking, embodies the ideal that a ruler should be a paragon of vigour and chivalry, an image certainly cultivated by James IV.26 Yet the poet tells us that this king also has ‘feil falts’, all of which are related to his predilection for immature companions and the resulting lack of wise guidance at court (455). Hee luifit ouer weil ȝong counsel; ȝong men he luifit to be him neist; ȝong men to him thay war baith Clark and Preist. Hee luifit nane was ald or ful of age, Sa did he nane of sad counsel nor sage (456–60)

Archibald’s trio of tales therefore revisits a perennial theme, but one that was of particular concern in the early years of James IV’s rule: that of the dangerous combination of young kings and young counsel. In the early parliamentary acts of James’s reign, the desire to ensure that the sovereign was well advised for his future rule is palpable.27 An act of 1488 proposed ‘at þar be prelatis Erlis Lordis & baronis & vtheris persons of wisdome prudence & of gud disposicioun & vnsuspect to his hienes … dayly about his nobil persoun to the gud giding of his realme’.28 In 1489 it was decided that lords spiritual and temporal be elected to form ‘oure Souerane lordis secret consale for the … furthputting of þe kingis autorite in þe administracioun of Justice’.29 In 1503 parliament concluded that ‘þar be ane consale chosin’ which ‘sall sitt continually in Edinburgh or quhar þe king makis residence’.30 26 Macdougall, James IV, pp. 294–5. 27 Macdougall, James IV, pp. 81–2; J.H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship. Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1996), pp. 94–5. 28 APS, II, p. 210. 29 APS, II, p. 220. 30 APS, II, p. 249.

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This theme also dominates the seventh book of the near contemporary prose mirror for princes by John Ireland, The Meroure of Wyssdome. Originally intended for James III, Ireland rededicated it to the young James IV in 1490, ‘sene þi hienes is of tendir age risand to strenth and wisdom’.31 In particular, Ireland stresses that ‘gif þe king be ȝong and wantoune he suld trow to wis men þat wauld weill counsale him for his persoune and realme’.32 Interestingly, Ireland prefaces this section with a discussion of royal marriage and sexuality noting that if a prince ‘lat passiounis regne and haue dominacioun in him he can nocht reule him self’.33 The triplicate formation of Archibald’s tale is sustained with the linking device of the figure of Fictus, a ‘Clark / Of greit science’ (463–4) who returns from overseas and simulates the role of court fool in order to gain access to court. There is no satisfactory source for Fictus’s part in Archibald’s tale,34 but the oxymoronic figure of the wise fool who exposes the idiocy of those who purport to be wise or grand and offers them true sapientia, extends back to classical and biblical examples. Medieval sermon literature offers numerous examples of wise fools or fools who are emblematic of the ubiquity of sin in contemporary society.35 One of the most striking of these is found in the un-moralized tale of the ‘Sage Fool’s Testament’ preserved in a fifteenth-century miscellany, London, BL, MS Harley 2252, which has several possible sources, including a version in the Summa praedicantium (c.1330–40) of John Bromyard.36 In this text the sage fool exposes the moral failings that endangered the soul of his much loved master, hoping to ensure that the master’s son does not emulate his father’s vice. When the old master dies, the fool feigns sickness and makes a testament, leaving his soul to the devil, his body to the grave, his hood to his master’s cruel steward, his bauble to his greedy almoner, and his money to his new young master. When asked the reason for his bequests, the fool replies that he wishes to follow his deceased master to Hell and that his gifts suit the corruption of their recipients. Even the fool’s leaving of his bed to the queen is, he explains, because of her sloth and lasciviousness. Whether or not this lesson leads to the son’s reformation is not made clear in the Harley sermon, but in an earlier version in the Fasciculus morum, a promise of future virtue is exacted from the young master.37 The lessons of this unnamed fool are different to those issued in Archibald’s tale, but 31 Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, volume III, ed. Craig McDonald, STS, 4th Ser., 19 (Aberdeen, 1990), p. 161, lines 5–6. 32 Meroure of Wyssdome, p. 157, lines 6–7. 33 Meroure of Wyssdome, p. 121, lines 18–20. 34 On fools in other Scottish texts see Sandra Billington, ‘The Fool and the Moral in English and Scottish Morality Plays’, in Popular Drama in Northern Europe in the Later Middle Ages, ed. F.G. Andersen (Odense, 1988), pp. 113–33 (pp. 117, 122 , 127–33). 35 S. Wenzel, ‘The Wisdom of the Fool’, in The Wisdom of Poetry: Essays in Early English Literature in Honour of Morton Bloomfield, ed. L.D. Benson and S. Wenzel (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1982), pp. 225–40 (225); Sandra Billington, A Social History of the Fool (New York, 1984), pp. 12, 225–40. 36 On the different versions of this text see Wenzel, ‘Wisdom’, pp. 225–40 (227–30). For an edition of the Harley version, A Booke of Precedence with Essays on Italian and German Books of Courtesy, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS, ES, 8 (London, 1969), pp. 77–8. 37 Wenzel, ‘Wisdom’, pp. 225–40 (228).

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Fictus nevertheless employs just such a clever pretence as a means of communicating his lesson and tactfully re-directing the master’s lapsed ways. Nevertheless, fools offering religious guidance are only partly related to Fictus, who is neither a holy innocent nor a ‘natural’ imbecile, and whose concerns are not only with the spiritual well-being of his employer.38 Thus, although Fictus does impart some wisdom of a religious nature, for example advising the king’s illicit beloved of the value of virginity, his advice is predominantly political, fitted to the court setting in which it is given, and so to the particular needs of government. Indeed, his final achievement is the creation of inner reconciliation in king and within the royal household, and outer ‘concord’ (902) in the realm. As we shall see, these triumphs align him with the ability of fiction (as his name suggests) to encourage reform and harmony.39 Fictus’s political function of redirecting royal policy and precipitating the king’s personal reform has only a small number of analogues.40 Wenzel records the presence in a fifteenth-century sermon collection of a Latin Advent homily which tells of a fool in the Neville household in the north of England, who asks to distribute alms on behalf of his master. Neville and his court observe the fool as he goes about his task and see that he gives alms to those who have plenty, and nothing to the poor. When asked the reason for this unconventional behaviour, the fool’s reply exposes the king’s own foolish avarice: ‘Lord, in truth I do as you do, for if one of your clerics has a good church, you give him a prebend; if he has nothing you give him nothing, just as to minstrels who know how to acquire much you give robes and money and to the poor at your gates hardly anything or nothing at all.’41 Fictus is even more closely related to the wise fools who feature in the advisory poetry of Gower and Hoccleve, and who perform a didactic function in a political context. Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes contains a version of the exemplum of the pardoned murderer in which a wise fool dispenses advice to the king – a very close analogue to the second part of Archibald’s tale.42 Also significant are the sage fools who feature in exempla in Book VII of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c.1390). The ‘Tale of the Roman Triumph’ (VII, 2355–411), part of a lesson against flattery, tells how, amidst the pomp and vanity of the triumphal marches of conquering 38 The fool as ‘the mouthpiece of the spirit’, rather than as purveyor of political sense, has attracted most scholarly interest. See Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History, (New York, 1961), p. 76; Billington, Social History, p. 20. 39 The acrostic FICTIO is woven into a stanza of Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, introducing the narrator’s meditation on Chaucer’s authority at lines 58–64. See William Stephenson, ‘The Acrostic “Fictio” in Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (lines 58– 63)’, CR, 29 (1994), 163–5. 40 Jack suggests Franco Sacchetti’s Il Trecentonovelle, in which Parcittadino, disguised as a jester, gives advice to Edward III, as a possible source for Fictus. See R.S.D. Jack, ‘The Thre Prestis of Peblis and the Growth of Humanism in Scotland’, RES, 103 (1975), ns 26, 257–70 (259). More satisfying analogues are discussed below. 41 Wenzel, ‘Wisdom’, pp. 225–40 (233), citing Cambridge University Library, MS Kk. IV. 24, folios 236v–237r. (Wenzel’s translation). 42 See R.J. Lyall, ‘The Sources of The Thre Prestis of Peblis and Their Significance’, RES, 123, ns 31 (1980), 257–70.

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emperors, it was customary for a ‘Ribald’ to be seated in the imperial chariot.43 This fool acted as a ‘Sothseiere’ (VII, 2348), reminding the powerful emperor of his mortality, of his vulnerability to fortune, and his duty to oversee the administration of justice. Above all the fool instructs his master that to ‘know thiself’ is essential. (VII, 2386–94) In ‘The Courtiers and the Fool’ (VII, 3945–4026), a tale about royal wisdom, King Lucius asks his chamberlain and steward about the reputation he has amongst his people, and demands that they ‘telle it plein’ (3968–9). On hearing their untrue flattery, the king’s fool, who sits ‘be the fyr upon a stol’ playing with his ‘babil’ (VII, 3953–6), offers a corrective lesson: if the king were virtuous, his ‘conseil scholde noght be badde’ (VII, 3994–7). The ‘foles evidence’ provokes the king to examine ‘the lack / Withinne his oghne conscience’ (VII, 4000–4002), and he at once begins to improve his governance of the realm. In The Thre Prestis, Fictus exploits the close relationship that traditionally existed between the court fool and his master.44 Seeing that the young king and his court ‘wald al sadnes set on syde’, ‘With club and bel and partie cote with eiris / He feinȝeit him ane fule’ (468–70).45 He engineers the perfect setting for their first meeting, approaching the king in ‘the kirk’ (473), an intrusion certain to prove his disregard for propriety and his disruptive appeal to the young monarch. With his traditional costume, reminiscent of the garb of many fools at the Stewart court, his boisterous laughter and riddling greeting of the king, Fictus easily wins his position at court. Gradually, we learn that the young king has become ‘amorat of his fule’ (899). Fictus stands outside the hierarchy of the three estates represented in John’s tale and his separateness from conventional forms of authority makes him all the more influential. Indeed, when he eventually becomes recognized for his wisdom, it comically takes a meeting of these estates to approve his advice as sound. Furthermore, Fictus illustrates the disturbing fact that the opposition between a king and his fool is never a simple binary. As he greets the young king, the fool remarks, in an analogy lost on his audience, that I am to ȝow als sib as seif is to ane riddil. Betwixt vs twa mot be als mekil grace As frost and snaw fra ȝule is vnto Pace (476–8)

43 Lydgate tells of the Roman Triumph in The Fall of Princes, IV, lines 512–72. However, the advisor is a ‘wrech’ (IV, 565) not a fool. The tale also appears in Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium and the Latin versions of the Gesta Romanorum (tale 252). See Gesta Romanorum, ed. H. Oesterley (Berlin, 1972). 44 John Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Frome and London, 1998), pp. 1–4, 62. Southworth notes that Henry VII was one of the first English kings who was accompanied by his fool (the ‘folyshe Duke of Lancaster’) on his progress. Curry regularly accompanied James IV on progress. The ALHTS record constant provisions for his transport and care (ALHTS, I, pp. 331, 336, 370, 375, 380; II, p. 98; III, p. 465). 45 The ALHTS record that ‘ane fule callit Hammiltoune’, ‘Sande fwle’, Curry (the court fool after 1495), Norne, ‘Cristofer’, and ‘Cudde fule’ were regularly supplied with wardrobes of parti-coloured clothing (cf. ALHTS, I, pp. 174, 253; II, pp. 305, 318 etc; III, pp. 98, 100, 155 etc; IV, pp. 333, 355). James IV was also entertained by ‘Gentil Johne the Inglis fule’ and John, fool of Aberdeen (ALHTS, I, pp. 95, 104, 112, 119; III, p. 168; IV, p. 51). Lyndsay’s ‘Flatterie’ in Ane Satyre is decked out in ‘sindrie hewis’ (603) reminiscent of a fool’s costume.

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Through his ‘feigning’, Fictus occupies a metafictional role within the poem, glossing the faults of those around him. That he ‘coppyit weil the king on his best wyse’ (498) draws attention to his self-appointed specular function in the court, mimicking the young monarch in order to reflect his true moral identity. And beyond this, Fictus actually creates the didactic fictions, the riddle of the sovereign’s identity, the flycourtier analogy and the bedroom farce, that lead the king to understand who is really the ‘Fuil of fuiles’ (494). It is the king’s gradual comprehension that Fictus is ‘not sik ane fule’ (638) as he pretends, that signals his growing self-knowledge. The final exchange of Fictus’s fool’s ‘coate’ for a ‘clarkly goun’ (993–4) at the king’s instigation marks the completion of this process.46 The first two sections of Archibald’s tale continue the public theme of John’s tale, in particular examining the issue of counsel and the quality of royal justice. However, the immaturity of the king-protagonist, and his tendency to allow personal feelings to influence his judgements remain at the forefront of the exempla. The first of these, that of the wounded man and the flies, has several analogues, for example in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Josephus’s Antiquitates Judaicae, Latin versions of the Gesta Romanorum, John Bromyard’s Summa praedicantium, and John Gerson’s Vivat Rex.47 There are also two Scottish versions of the story, both of which are found in kingship contexts: the first is the near-contemporary retelling in Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome, Book VII, and the second is found in Book XII of Boece’s Scotorum Historiae a prima gentis origine (Paris, 1527), and Bellenden’s translation of this work.48 Ireland’s version of this tale, originally taken from Gerson, focuses on the problems of ‘þe changeing of officiaris’ at court.49 The adaptation is compact in relation to that found in The Thre Prestis, with only two characters, the victim, and the passer by who tries to help by driving the flies away. There is no fool, and no king figure actually located within Ireland’s exemplum, only the king-reader for whom the whole text is intended, James III or IV. The moral of the tale (the same as that given in The Thre Prestis) is also external to its action, for it is the narrating voice of the Meroure who briefly clarifies the analogy that ‘sa is of þe new officiaris þat ay wil be fillit of the substaunce of þe pur pepil’.50

46 Fictus’s apparent elevation to a bishopric is echoed in Lyndsay’s Satyre, where Folie, in a response to an act passed by the parliament which allows only those qualified to preach to become bishops, delivers his own sermon on the ‘folie’ of ‘Earles, duiks, kings and empriours’ (4514). 47 Lyall, ‘Sources’, 257–70 (260–2). 48 Sally Mapstone, ‘Shakespeare and Scottish Kingship: A Case History’, in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Sally Masptone and Juliette Wood (East Linton, 1998), pp. 158–89 (161–2). See The Chronicles of Scotland Complied by Hector Boece, Translated into Scots by John Bellenden, ed. R.W. Chambers, E.C. Batho, and H.W. Husbands, 2 vols, STS, 3rd Ser., 10 and 15 (Edinburgh and London, 1938–41), II, p. 160. As in earlier versions it is a ‘tod’, not a man, who is covered with flies, illustrating a ‘better the devil you know’ moral. The ‘fabill’ is told by Malcome Canmoir who shows himself ‘vnabil to be ane king for sindry vices’. 49 Meroure of Wyssdome, p. 133, lines 37–8. 50 Meroure of Wyssdome, p. 134, lines 6–7.

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The Thre Prestis poet may well have known Ireland’s version of the tale.51 However, it would be incorrect to suggest that this was his source. The tale in The Thre Prestis contains many apparently independent details, and is extended to allow the wounded man to be encountered by two separate individuals, a servant and the king. Most importantly, the part of Fictus in Archibald’s retelling is unprecedented in all the story’s analogues. Furthermore, in Archibald’s narrative Fictus and the court follow the king ‘Vnto ane Cietie … for his sporting’ (500) providing for the tale a context that makes more dramatic the contrast between the king’s youthful frivolity and the serious responsibility of executing justice. The wounded man is discovered by Fictus and some servants, one of whom wishes to ‘skar thay felloun fleis away’ (516). His foolishness is checked when Fictus explains that hungry flies do more damage than satiated ones. However when the king arrives on the scene he repeats the mistake of his servant. In response to the victim’s accusation that his predicament is a direct result of the royal refusal to heed counsel, that ‘The falt is ȝowris, sir King’ (542), the king waves his curiously bauble-like accoutrement, a ‘bob of birks’ (547) to frighten the flies away. His ‘bob’ is also a parody of the sceptre, and the whole action is a comic travesty of the dispensation of justice, completing the reversal of the positions of fool and king observed by the victim: ‘ȝour fule, sir King, hes mair wit than ȝe haue’ (556). As in John’s tale the king’s misery at learning such a pointed lesson is an important sign of his receptiveness to instruction. The accusation of the wounded man results in an acutely felt moment of self-understanding in which the king recognizes his youthful mistakes: Fra this sair man now cummin is the King, Hauand in mynd greit murmure and mouing, And in his hart greit hauines and thocht, Sa wantonly in vane al thing he wrocht; And how the Cuntrie throw him was misfarne Throw ȝong counsel, and wrocht ay as a barne (563–8).

The incident prompts the king to seek guidance from his fool and Fictus glosses the significance of the flies with the ‘courtier’ analogy. Sustaining his metatextual role, his moralitas on the day’s events demands that the king rereads his action to understand its greater implications, namely that he should value those of experience, outlaw greed from court, and protect the poor: ‘Thairfoir now be this exampil wee may se / That ane new seruant is lyke ane hungrie fle’ (633–4). The poet’s emphasis on the king’s receptiveness is optimistic, as is his detail that the whole court, filled with ‘dreid’ (640) at Fictus’s words, also learns a lesson. The second part of Archibald’s tale recounts an exemplum about a king who pardons a murderer in return for financial gain, thus allowing the criminal to kill 51 On connections between Ireland’s work and the poem, and the possibility that Ireland may have written The Thre Prestis, see R.J. Lyall, ‘“Trinall Triplicities”: The Significance of the Structure of The Thre Prestis of Peblis’, in Rhetoric, Royalty, and Reality: Essays on the Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. Alasdair A. MacDonald and Kees Dekker (Leuven, 2005), pp. 17–32.

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again. The granting of remissions in exchange for money caused continued concern in Scotland and generated numerous acts of parliament from the reigns of James II to IV 52 that stated the king’s commitment not to misuse the system.53 Like the previous story, a version of this was also told by Ireland in Book VII of the Meroure.54 This time Ireland’s tale does include a commentary on the king’s actions uttered by a wise fool which subsequently brings the king to the recognition of his faults. Once again it is possible that the poet knew Ireland’s tale, but he may also have been familiar with the version told in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes (3123–64),55 a text known to other Scottish writers such as James I, and the authors of The Spectacle of Luf, and a lyric in the Bannatyne Manuscript.56 Hocceleve’s version includes ‘a foole sage þe king byside’ (3145) who accuses his master of being responsible for the second death and warns him to be ‘avised wel’ in future (3155). It is less terse than Ireland’s version and also contains the detail, crucial to The Thre Prestis, of the murderer’s ‘frendes’ (3130) who can intercede for him at court. And, unlike Ireland’s telling, the king eventually allows the murderer to be punished according to the law, something that Archibald’s king also wishes to do. Nevertheless, the independence, detail and subtlety of the Scottish reworking of the tale are indisputable. In both Ireland’s and Hoccleve’s versions, two murders are committed before the king takes any action, and very little information is given about either. In The Thre Prestis, three murders have taken place by the end of the tale. Further, the poet of The Thre Prestis is constantly concerned with motivation and character in a way that neither Hoccleve nor Ireland is: he specifically draws attention to the criminal’s recklessness, the courtier’s growing uneasiness, and the king’s anger and grief at the third murder. The considerably worsened circumstances of the tale give Fictus’s lesson to the young ruler, that ‘the last twa men ȝe slew’ (752), maximum impact. As in John’s tale, the poet is again concerned to show the king’s corruption being encouraged by and reflected in his courtiers. In order to heighten this emphasis the poet develops the character of a familiar who plays no part in Ireland’s retelling, and only a limited one in Hoccleve’s Regiment, where the criminal negotiates directly with the monarch. In contrast, the Scottish courtier is ‘inward with the King’ (654) and acts as a channel of communication between the criminal, who has promised payment for the favour, and the monarch. The prominence given to this character encapsulates conventional anxieties about royal favourites and kings failing to consort with their natural (aristocratic) advisors, charges made against James III, but also against his European contemporaries.57 The 52 Compare the 1483 act against the king’s ‘gevin of Remissionis or respettis … to thame þt comyttis tresoun slauchteror forthot felony common thift and manifest Refe …’. APS, II, p. 165; cf. pp. 104, 139, 176. 53 A parliament of 1457–58 appealed to James II to curtail his granting of remissions for serious crimes. See APS, II, p. 50; Macdougall, James III, pp. 40–41, 99; Macdougall, James IV, p. 164. 54 Meroure of Wyssdome, p. 133, line 14. 55 See Lyall, ‘Sources’, 257–70 (262–4). On Hoccleve’s source see Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, p. 345. 56 See ‘Introduction’, pp. 6, 10. 57 Macdougall, James III, pp. 126–8, 162–5.

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courtier’s prominence in the tale foregrounds the difference between bad and wise advice, thus keeping central the issue of the importance of judicious counsel in youth beside the larger matter of perverted justice. His means are devious, his manner obsequious, his ‘tail’ (660), or account of events, emotive, and his timing is carefully contrived with the aim of catching the king ‘blyth and glad’ (691). It is the mutual affection (‘lufe’, 661) between king and familiar, and the urgency with which the appeal is made, that brings the case to royal attention, demonstrating that personal feelings impair the king’s judgement. Even when the courtier realizes that the second murder has been committed in ‘racklesnes’ (683), he still attempts, through his own self-interest, to influence the king with promises of gold in exchange for the granting of the remission. From his vantage point, sitting, ‘vpon ane lytil bony stule’ (743), Fictus offers his interpretation of the king’s actions. For the second time in Archibald’s tale the king’s grief at his misdemeanor emphasizes the markedly positive agenda of the Scots poet in showing a monarch who is willing to make amends. Perhaps less hopefully, Fictus’s advice is unsolicited on this occasion, and there is none of the independence of the king of Master John’s more idealistic tale in instituting reform. Indeed, the king’s only independent inclination, to execute the murderer, is, as the fool reveals, fundamentally misguided. However, the king’s self-accusation that he is the ‘fule of fules’ (776), provoked by Fictus’s revelation of his part in the deaths of the murderer’s victims, leads him to articulate some understanding of his situation: ‘I se weil, be this taill this fule can tel, / That I had greitly neid of wyse counsell’ (779–80). He promises before his parliament that he ‘sould neuer gif mercie to nane / That slauchter in his Realme committit than’ (803–4). Strikingly, the language of some of the acts of James III’s reign encodes royal remorse for related abuses of justice, reminiscent of the self-recrimination of John and Archibald’s kings: ‘Our Souerane Lord hes considderit and vnderstandin that his Realme is greitlie brokin in the self his liegis troublit and heryit throw tresoun slauchter reif birning thift and oppin heirschip throw default of scharpe executioun of Justice and ouer commoun granting of grace & remissiounis to trespassouris. His hienes thairfoir … sall … stop and restrein ȝie geuing of remissiounis and respectis for cryminall actiounis’.58 The climactic element of Archibald’s tale has attracted surprisingly little critical attention. Its subject is the desire of the king for a woman of lower status and the queen’s successful attempt, masterminded by Fictus, to win back her husband and preserve the sanctity of the royal marriage. This part of The Thre Prestis also has some important similarities to the narrative of King Hart as we shall see in the next chapter, for while Fictus has helped correct court corruption and injustice, and while the king’s remorse has facilitated a degree of self-reformation, the young monarch as yet remains unable to regulate his sexual desires. Indeed, that the king is said to have left ‘all lichtnes’ (809) but one, draws attention to the persistence of unruled sexual passion when other vices have been corrected. However, the fact that Archibald’s tale does not end with the unequivocal subduing of desire but with the sanctioning of royal sexuality, if properly guided, represents a realistic, and even optimistic, development of the tradition of writing on love in Scotland. Fictus does not teach 58 APS, II, p. 176. Compare APS, II, p. 250.

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the idealistic, even impossible exchange of amor for caritas, but simply what it is to love with restraint. Archibald’s tale now only survives in the Charteris print of The Thre Prestis. If it was once present in the Asloan Manuscript witness, as is likely, and if it was part of the section of the poem in the fragmentary sixteenth-century manuscript NAS, MS RH 13/35, then its amatory emphasis would have been highly appropriate to the concerns of these anthologies. The Thre Prestis immediately follows Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice in the Asloan manuscript and shares with this poem the exploration of royal sexuality in poetic and hermeneutically challenging contexts. In Edinburgh NAS, MS RH 13/35 are found King Orphius and Sir Colling, poems which also address the amorous dilemmas of the powerful.59 The section of King Orphius that survives in this manuscript deals with kingship and self-knowledge and with the integrity of the king’s love for his queen. Orphius’s love for queen Issabell becomes the proof of his worth, and his rescue of her essential for the harmony of the realm. The ‘finding of ye quein’ (147) is met with celebration amongst Orphius’s subjects, and all are ‘restorit … to yair awin estait’ (152). As in Archibald’s tale, royal sexuality is not denied, and moral order is confirmed with the king’s rightful love for his queen. In the other romance in the manuscript, Sir Colling, ‘ane kingis sone’ (8) is bedridden by love sickness for the daughter of a worthy lord: ‘Sir Colling luifit hir best of ane / Scho lay his hairt sa neir / he luifit hir ane yeir and mair’ (19–21). Colling must leave his ‘couardly’ (45) sickbed, and prove the intensity of this love to his beloved with ‘deidis of armis’ before winning her hand in marriage. Like Lancelot of the Laik, the romance shows that love can be a debilitating source of self-pity, but it may also endow the knight with fortitude. The tale told by Archibald has been traditionally seen as relating to the alleged estrangement of James III and his queen, said by John Leslie in his 1578 History of Scotland to have taken place after the capture of the king at Lauder Bridge in 1482. According to Lesley, the king was approached by a number of his lords complaining that ‘he wold nocht suffer the noble men to come to his presence, and to governe the realme be thair counsell, bot keipit him self quietlie, leveing voluptuouslie, and had lychtlyit his awin nobil Quene, and intertanit ane howir callit the Daesie in her place’.60 Whether or not the affair with ‘the daisy’ actually took place, the legend of James’s lechery was well established in the century after the king’s death. Another sixteenth-century historian, George Buchanan, recorded James III’s seduction of 59 See King Orphius and Sir Colling, The Brother’s Lament, Litel Musgray. Poems Transcribed from Scottish Manuscripts of c.1586 and c.1680, ed. Marion Stewart and Helena M. Shire (Cambridge, 1973); M. Stewart, ‘A Recently-Discovered Manuscript: “ane taill of Sir colling ye knyt”’, SS, 16 (1972), 23–40. 60 For Leslie’s text see The History of Scotland from the Death of James I in the year M.CCCC.XXXVI to the Year M.D.LXI, ed. T. Thomson, Bannatyne Club, 38 (Edinburgh, 1830), p. 48. Pitscottie makes no mention of this, but notes that, ‘This may be sen and knawin to all kingis that comes efter to gif thame ane document or ane lessone that they fall not from god wssing thair weckit lywes to thair awin sensuall plesour … as this febill king did’. See The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland from the Slauchter of King James the First … by Robert Lindesay of Pittscottie, ed. Æneas James G. Mackay, 3 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 42, 43 and 60 (Edinburgh and London, 1899–1911), I, pp. 209–10.

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the wife of William, 3rd Lord Crichton, named (inaccurately) Janet Dunbar, which provoked Crichton’s retaliatory affair with James’s younger sister Margaret.61 However, what is striking about Lesley’s account of James III and ‘the daisy’, and interesting from the point of view of the emphasis of Archibald’s tale, is the simultaneous treatment of the king’s sexual adventures alongside issues of counsel and royal governance. This double focus presupposes a dangerous closeness of the public and private spheres and the likelihood that corruption in one will be reflected in the other, perhaps leading to the instability of the realm. Adam Abell underlines this when recording the lascivious tendencies of James III, and of James IV. Abell makes no specific mention of James III’s infidelity, but nevertheless connects the king’s lechery to the more serious abuses that later brought his downfall. His formulation is telling: the king was ‘gretumlie gevin to carnale pleseure by his halie quene and privat consall of sympill men. Be the quilk consall he destroeit his awne bredir maist necessir to him’.62 The parity is also there in Abell’s account of James IV who is said to have been susceptible to ‘prewat consall’, as well as private dalliance, being ‘gretumlie gewin to the plesour of the flesche and lechorie of it’, and also ‘be ewill consall’ opposed his father at Sauchieburn.63 The source for the chain of events told in Archibald’s tale has been suggested as the tale of Giletta of Narbonne from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which is the likely basis of the plot of Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well.64 In this elaborate story, Giletta, the daughter of a physician, falls into unrequited love with a young noble called Beltram, the son of one of her father’s patients. After the death of her father and of Beltram’s father, Giletta secretly follows her beloved to Paris and eventually secures his hand in marriage as a reward for curing the king of France of a mystery ailment. Count Beltram is dismayed at this match with a low-born woman and leaves Giletta, threatening only to return if she performs a series of apparently impossible tasks, including (in his absence) producing a legitimate heir. Undeterred, Giletta plots with the mother of a poor but noble girl who is admired by the Count, to go to his bed disguised as the object of his desire. With this help she consummates her marriage and bears Beltram twin sons. The girl is rewarded with a dowry that will secure her a suitable marriage, and the amazed Count is pressed by his people to accept his countess and heirs. However, Archibald’s narrative bears little resemblance to the intricacies of Boccaccio’s story – the initial relationship and marriage of the protagonists, fiercely 61 See The History of Scotland, ed. and trans. J. Aikman, 2 vols (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1827–29), II, pp. 151–2. 62 Macdougall, James III, p. 314, citing Edinburgh, NLS, MS 1746, folio 110v. On Adam Abell, see A.M. Stewart, ‘The Final Folios of Adam Abell’s “Roit or Quheill of Tyme”: An Observantine Friar’s Reflections on the 1520s and 30s’, in Stewart Style. Essays on the Court of James V, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (East Linton, 1996), pp. 227–53 (227–35). 63 Macdougall, James IV, p. 296, citing Edinburgh, NLS, MS 1746, folio 112r –v. 64 R.S.D. Jack, The Italian Influence on Scottish Literature (Edinburgh, 1972), pp. 16– 17; Jack, ‘Thre Prestis’, 257–70 (258–9). Lyall suggests that the poet’s source was probably Laurent de Premierfait’s French translation of Boccaccio’s text (c.1411). See Lyall, ‘Sources’, 257–70 (264–5). For the Decameron story see The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. and trans. Guido Waldman, World’s Classics (Oxford, 1993), pp. 231–40.

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objected to on one side, the motif of the impossible tasks set by the dissatisfied husband, and the complicated journeys of both parties. Instead the Scottish story is only concerned with the usurpation of the beloved’s place in bed as a cure for the wayward husband’s infidelity. This is a common folk-tale motif65 which incidentally finds an interesting manifestation in prose The Spectacle of Luf in the Asloan manuscript in which an incestuous daughter is helped by her nurse to occupy the ‘bed of þe king hir fader he wenyng þat scho had bene ane vþer ȝing damesell’.66 In The Thre Prestis, the queen does not even know about her husband’s adulterous desires until Fictus communicates his plan to her, and reassures her that the whole affair will bring her ‘nouther sin nor shame’ (864). Furthermore, the revelation of the identity of the king’s bedfellow by Fictus is far removed from the complicated sequence which leads to the uncovering of Giletta’s secret. In the Scottish tale we are told that for some time a ‘strangenes’ (812) has existed between the young king and his ‘fair and gude and ȝong’ (904) queen to the extent that ‘He beddit nocht richt oft nor lay hir by, / Bot throw lichtnes did lig in Lamenry’ (813–14). The object of the king’s youthful desire is a ‘bonie wench’ (820), not a girl of noble birth as in the Decameron, but the daughter of a burgess innkeeper who certainly has no mother to protect her interests. Therefore, the Scottish poet places all his emphasis on the king’s sexuality and the strength of his longing to ‘ly with wemen …of law degrie’ (911).67 He is unable, as he explains to Fictus, to rationalize his desire, ‘I can not tel the ressoun caus nor quhy’ (920). There is no attempt to find a remedy through the complete suppression of the king’s sexuality and therefore no tidy ending such as that of Lyndsay’s Satyre, where Divyne Correctioun banishes Sensualitie from King Humanitas’s court. For it is not the sexual ‘appetyte’ (922) of the king that is censured by the wise fool in The Thre Prestis but the wantonness with which he pursues it. In The Thre Prestis, the king has been cajoled by ‘fals clatterars’ (928), who ‘tel il tailes of the Queene’ (925), into the misdirecting of his lusts, thus demonstrating that the corruption at court outlined in the second part of Archibald’s tale has private as well as public implications. The financial corruption in which the king has been encouraged by his familiars extends to his amorous plans. He will even resort to bribing the girl into collusion. As his ‘lustie ene’ fall on her he fantasizes about how

65 Compare S. Thompson, Motif Index of Folk Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folktales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Medieval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest Books and Local Legends, 6 vols (Copenhapen, 1955–58), IV, pp. 399–400. See types K1317 and K1843. 2. 66 See Asloan Manuscript, I. p. 284, lines 29–30. 67 An interesting analogue to this part of The Thre Prestis is Wyntoun’s account of the Macbeth story. According to Wyntoun’s chronicle, King Duncan, separated from his court during a hunting party whilst preoccupied with his sport, seeks harborage with a miller. He is introduced to the miller’s daughter, who he takes as his ‘luffit lemman’ (1664), and begets on her a son, Malcolm Canmore. All this happens, Wyntoun stresses, during the king’s ‘youthheid’, and before his production of heirs in the ‘lauchfull bed’ (1635–6) of marriage. See The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, ed. F.J. Amours, 6 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 63, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57 (Edinburgh, 1903–14), IV, p. 256 (Bk VI Chapter CXVI).

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he might get her into bed as quickly as possible ‘For gold, for gude, for wage or ȝit for wed’ (829). Fictus’s part in this concluding episode of Archibald’s tale is a deft exploitation of his adopted fool status. Dressed in full parti-coloured costume, the court fool traditionally allies himself with excess and untrammeled desire. Fictus carries the familiar club and ‘bable’ (503), the unquestionably phallic accoutrements of his station. When the young king confides in him about his ‘lust and fantesy’ (827) for the burgess’s daughter, Fictus rises to the occasion, promising ‘Be mee this eirand sall be vndertane’ (834). However, Fictus also becomes the sermonizing fool of tradition, and lectures the maiden on the desirability of taking example from the virginal saints ‘Margaret and Katrine’ (839), convincing her to abandon her liaison. He then fabricates the elaborate fiction that makes the king believe that his concubine of three nights with whom he has had ‘grit gaming … & glie’ (894), supposedly the beautiful burgesses’ daughter, can be made queen. Remaining true to his cunning promise, Fictus also takes a moment to remind his master succinctly that ‘it fallis to na King / To brek his vow’ (953–4). The fool makes the king promise future fidelity to the queen before revealing the truth of the scam. And, in the Scottish tale it is the king in his newly heightened self-awareness who prostrates himself before the queen when he realizes his folly: Than on his kneis he askit forguienes For his licht laytes and his wantones, And scho forgaue him meiklie this ful tyte That he had done throw lichtnes of delyte; For weil scho saw that al was fantasy That he vsit and richt grit foly (983–8).

Master William’s Tale The spirituality of Master William’s tale seems distant from the comedic doings of Archibald’s wanton king. However, without completely detracting from the optimism of Fictus’s lessons, it does provide the reader with an alternative definition of ‘lufe’. The subject of this third tale was probably well known to medieval Scottish readers: its story of a man summoned to undertake a journey to meet his master, without the company of friends, family or possessions, has many analogues.68 A closely related tale gives the substance of the near-contemporary morality play Everyman. This plot also occurs in the widely circulated tale collection Barlaam and Josaphat,69 which was integrated in an abridged form into some versions of the Legenda Aurea by 68 See Lyall, ‘Sources’, 257–70 (265). The theme of preparedness for death would have been familiar from the Ars Moriendi tradition. The Scots Craft of Deying, (Kk.1.5), tells how the dying man ‘thinkis dysess to leif his gret Riches’ and ‘wyf and barnis’ (164–6). See Ratis Raving and Other Early Scots Poems on Morals, ed. Ritchie Girvan, STS, 3rd Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1939), pp. 166–74. 69 See Barlaam and Iosaphat: A Middle English Life of Buddha. Edited from MS Peterhouse 257, ed. John C. Hirsh, EETS, OS, 290 (London, 1986), pp. xiv–xv. For the story of the three friends, see pp. 57–9.

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Jacobus de Voragine, including Caxton’s translation of 1483 (STC 24873).70 Other related retellings of the story appear in Bromyard’s Summa, Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale,71 the Speculum Morale, and in a sermon by Jacques de Vitry. A version with minor differences appears in the Gesta Romanorum.72 In Master William’s exemplum many traditional elements of the story and moralization are preserved. An officer calls the man to his lord without warning on the charge that he must account for his actions. The man is filled with sadness on receiving the summons and decides to seek the comfort of his three friends whom he is said to love respectively ‘better than him self in al degrie’ (1056), as himself, and the third, least of all. The first friend will not hear of undertaking the journey, and the second friend can come only as far as ‘the port’ (1130). Finally, the third friend agrees to accompany the man to his lord. Yet despite its conventionality, William’s tale is more extensive and detailed than even the longest versions of the analogues, and is carefully crafted to sustain the concerns of the collection. William’s tale distinguishes itself from the other narratives in The Thre Prestis by the variation in its opening couplet. Its biblical inflexion extends the temporal and fictional perspective indicated by the openings of the other tales, drawing the reader’s attention to the allegory that is to follow: ‘A King thair is and euer mair will be,/ Thairfoir the KING of Kings him cal we’ (1013–14). In the Asloan Manuscript The Thre Prestis is followed by the Contemplacioun of Synnaris: if the whole tale collection was originally present in this anthology, Master William’s contribution would have provided a natural lead into this devotional work with its advisory emphasis on just and pious kingship and use of illustrative exempla.73 With its spiritual remit William’s tale refocuses elements of the previous tales, especially those that have concerned the king’s accountability for his actions. For example, the king of Master John’s tale had to learn not to corrupt his spiritual lords through his own greed, and to rule his people in the service of God. In Archibald’s tale Fictus quotes the psalms to remind the king that ‘Blist mo thay be that keipis Law and Justice’ (754). The king who fails to act justly, ‘sould not presume / Na to haue count upon the day of Dome’ (755–6). Crucially, the moralization of Master William’s contribution also warns of the swift passage of worldly affections. He reveals them to be mere ‘fleshely lust fulfillit with folly’ (1326), and so offers a rigorous moral gloss on the king’s amorousness in 70 Several printed copies of the Legenda Aurea are recorded in sixteenth-century Scottish ownership. See John Durkan and Anthony Ross, Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow, 1961), pp. 63, 67, 70, 71, 84, 96, 138, 139, 147, 158, 162. 71 Bower drew on a Douai version of the Speculum Historiale in writing his Scotichronicon. J.B. Voorbij, ‘Bower’s Use of Vincent of Beauvais’, in Scotichronicon by Walter Bower in Latin and English, ed. D.E.R. Watts, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98), IX, pp. 260–80. 72 The Early English Versions of the Gesta Romanorum, ed. Sidney J.H. Herrtage, EETS, ES, 33 (London, 1879), pp. 127–31. On the circulation of the Gesta in Scotland see Early Scottish Libraries, pp. 75, 92, 94. 73 This poem is also concerned with justice, royal intervention in church appointments (105–12), and the cultivation of reason in one’s ‘tender age’ (254). See Asloan Manuscript, II, pp. 187–241.

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Archibald’s tale. William’s moralitas also urges the reader to ‘mend’ (1328) while there is still time, again recalling the exemplary reformations of the royal figures in the preceding stories. Finally, the explanation offered in the moralitas for the identity of the king in William’s tale as ‘The Father, Sone and eik the haly Gaist, / In ane Godheid and ȝit in persones thre’ (1242–3), gives a Trinitarian significance to the patterns of three which have dominated the collection. Thus William’s tale encourages, through verbal and imagistic correspondences, a recollection of the tales of his fellow priests. In so doing, it establishes an interpretive paradigm for the other tales in the collection demanding a spiritual and ethical rereading of the whole, a hermeneutic agenda that is similar to Henryson’s in his Morall Fabillis or Orpheus and Eurydice. Thus the first friend refuses to follow the man on his journey because the king is, in his eyes, ‘crabit’ (1068), the same royal fault feared by the corrupt courtier in Master Archibald’s tale (698). The third friend tells the man that he has neglected the good ‘counsal’ (1201) that he has been offered, thus recalling a central concern of the first two tales of The Thre Prestis. Also, that this third companion has such a close relationship to the king (‘The king he lufis me ful weil’, 1199) causes us to reflect on the case of the self-interested familiar and the misplaced ‘lufe’ (661) of the king in Archibald’s tale. Finally, in the lesson delivered by William that ‘all our tyme in fantasy be tint’ (1327) we again recall the king of Archibald’s tale who commits himself to his unregulated ‘lust and fantesy’ (827). The fact that the protagonist of William’s tale is ‘a man’ amongst ‘mony’ (1015), rather than a king, also foregrounds the universality of the exemplum’s meaning. The ‘riche’ (1016, 1225) man of the exemplum seems to encompass members of all the estates of John’s tale, burgess, aristocrat, clergyman, even king, all known for their financial greed. But the poet also reminds us that all men, ‘baith grit and smal’ (1034), are accountable before God. Furthermore, the mention of the king to whom this everyman character must report also necessitates a rereading of the worldly kings of the two preceding tales. They are merely, to borrow the words of Divyne Correctioun in Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ‘Rex Humanitas’ before ‘The Prince of Peace, above all Kingis King’ (1582). The indirect characterization of the king seems to be another innovation of The Thre Prestis poet, for other versions of the story say little of the sovereign during the narrative itself, and certainly do not allow the complaint against his goodness given in the Scottish text by the first friend. The king of William’s tale is said to be ‘sa ful of justice, richt and ressoun’ (1069) and ‘stark in his conscience’ (1076). There are no flaws in his governance, and as the first friend recounts, he ‘lufis not na riches’ nor ‘hilynes in hairt nor euil won gude’ (1071–2) and all worldly ‘joy and gloir’ are as ‘fantasys’ before him (1081–2). Strikingly, the interview with the third friend in William’s tale is more searching than its equivalent in the exemplum’s different analogues, and the poet of The Thre Prestis seems more concerned than his predecessors to exploit the didactic potential of the episode. The extensiveness of the protagonist’s angry complaint against the perceived unfaithfulness of his ‘twa best freinds’ (1137) reintroduces the theme of self-understanding that featured in the tales of John and Archibald. Yet his misery also moves him towards a gradual understanding of the quality of worldly fortune, and he sees that he has only had ‘feinȝeit freind[s]’ (1148), and that ‘al is not gold that glitters’ (1150). Furthermore, like the king figures of the poem’s first two tales,

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he is able to articulate his fault, that he has been ‘oft vnkynde’ (1161) to his other acquaintance. In versions of Barlaam and Josaphat, this final friend meets the man’s request accommodatingly, cheerfully promising support despite the abuse he has received.74 However, in The Thre Prestis, the rich man’s self-pity leads the third friend to force him to scrutinize his past behaviour. Even though this friend tells comforting news of the king’s love for his people, and promises to ‘speik and plie’ (1196) for the man, to be his ‘tender freind’ (1214), his speech is also admonitory. He warns the summoned man of the possible wrath he faces from such an exacting lord if ‘he to me wit thou maid ony falt’ (1207). The narrating voice then re-emerges to moralize the exemplum, and to consider death’s role as the great social leveller in the tradition of the ‘Dance of Death’ or Timor Mortis poems: there is ‘na wisdome, riches, na ȝit science, /Aganis his officer may mak defence’ (1251–2).75 In contrast to the situations related by the other priests, in this case there can be no appeal against Death and the King, and no sum of money that will make them divert their course. This rich man, the recipient of Death’s summons is, Master William notes, ‘baith thow and he’ (1261) who loves ‘penny and pelfe’ (1265) more than himself, and feels strong attachment to ‘wyfe and bairnes and freinds’ (1296). The moralitas is stark, demonstrating the spiritual consequences of avarice and worldly love, the social and political implications of which have been outlined in the previous tales: ‘quhan to me or the cumis our deid, / Our riches than will stand us in na steid’ (1267–8). In thematic and interpretive terms this is a dramatic note upon which to end, but the explicit inclusion of the audience in the terms of the moralitas is suggestive of the possible readership of The Thre Prestis. For all its interest in how a king should rule justly, and govern himself, The Thre Prestis is not addressed specifically to a royal audience. MacQueen has suggested that The Thre Prestis was written for the new ‘non-courtly’ reading public of the fifteenth century.76 This group included the prospering middle classes formed of important craftsmen and members of the merchant community, who were increasingly also becoming public servants and rural landowners, and thus were politically influential. In many respects The Thre Prestis would have had much appeal to such a group, as well as to lesser landowners and those in royal service. As an entertaining tale collection, The Thre Prestis deliberately makes its didacticism palatable. However it is also articulate about social and economic, as well as political, problems. Thus in John’s tale, the king’s complaint against the burgesses’ wasteful extravagance, and their self-analysis in response, offers a moral lesson on the acceptability of wealth to the community if it is accrued and distributed honestly. Furthermore, the cooperation of the king and his estates in the maintenance of law and order, as examined in the poem’s first two tales, was as important to urban livelihoods as to the old ruling classes. The thematic focus of Master William’s tale, ‘Almos deid and cheritie’ (1310) is further suggestive of the poem’s intended and perhaps original audience. This part of 74 See Barlaam and Iosaphat, p. 59. 75 See Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), pp. 154–5. 76 John MacQueen, ‘The Literature of Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, in Scottish Society in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Jennifer M. Brown (1977), pp. 184–208 (198–9).

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The Thre Prestis foregrounds the importance of almsgiving as a devotional practice, but also as an economic system that contrasts with the self-interest condemned earlier in the poem.77 In political terms mercantile benevolence, in the forms of spiritual and corporeal charity, was an ideal to be encouraged.78 In post-Reformation Scotland the responsibility for the care of the needy resided with the burgh authorities. However, in the earlier period the charitable deeds of the wealthy merchant burgesses were fundamental to the administration and the identity of the urban community.79 Performing good works, such as supporting neighbours through difficult times, establishing almshouses, or even sponsoring religious drama for the edification of other townspeople,80 was an essential part of the guilds’ function.81 In practical terms donations towards the maintenance of bridges and water supplies benefited merchant lifestyles as well as their corporate image. There are few records (wills or guild documents) of town life in late fifteenthand early sixteenth-century Scotland that might give an insight into the scale of merchant charity. However, contemporary wills of English merchants suggest that it was customary to give up to a third of moveable goods in alms.82 The last section of 77 The priests make oaths to St Martin. The veneration and cult of St Martin, to whom Christ appeared in a dream to tell him that He was the pauper Martin had clothed, reinforced the importance of charity. See P.H. Cullum and P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Charitable Provision in Late Medieval York: “To the Praise of God and the Use of the Poor”’, Northern History, 29 (1993), 24–39 (26, 28). 78 Jennifer Kermode, Medieval Merchants: York, Beverley and Hull in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought (Cambridge, 1998), p. 146. De Ayala recorded that James IV ‘gives alms liberally’. See Early Travellers in Scotland, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1891), p. 40. 79 E.I. Ewan, ‘The Community of the Burgh in the Fourteenth Century’, in The Scottish Medieval Town, ed. Michael Lynch, Michael Spearman and Geoffrey Stell (Edinburgh, 1988), 228–44 (235–6). 80 The Dutch version of Everyman, which is close in plot to William’s tale, has been connected with urban drama festivals in the Low Countries, and the Devotio Moderna, a northern European religious movement which emphasized lay piety and charity. Pamela M. King, ‘Morality Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 240–64 (255–8). 81 On a guild’s charitable duties, Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 15–16; Elizabeth Ewan, Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 62. On urban drama in Scotland see Sarah Carpenter, ‘Early Scottish Drama’, in The History of Scottish Literature. Volume 1. Origins to 1660, Medieval and Renaissance, ed. R.S.D. Jack (Aberdeen, 1988), pp. 199–212 (200–3). 82 Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300–1500, (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962), pp. 177–80; J.A.F. Thomson, ‘Piety and Charity in Late Medieval London’, Journal of Economic History, 16 (1965), 178–95. Acts of spiritual and corporeal mercy are evident in the earliest extant Scots wills. The testament of Alexander Suthyrland of Dunbeath (1456), reveals its testator’s wish to leave provision for ‘a prest to sing perpetualy for my saul in the said College kyrk’ and money for the ‘reparatioun of the said College kirk’. The testament of Sir David Synclar of Swynbrocht, Kyncht, at Tyngwell, 1506, makes bequests for ‘the puir folk that come out of Orknay with me’, ‘to the Halye Cross in Stanebruch’, and ‘to Sanct Georgeis alter in Rosskyill’. See The Bannatyne Miscellany ed. D. Laing, 3 vols, Bannatyne Club (1827–

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The Thre Prestis thus encourages an ethic of charity and reminds the audience of the meaningfulness of this social and devotional activity throughout their lives: a love of ‘good deeds’ must be cultivated over time. William’s tale demands that the reader identify with the self-examination of the kings in John and Archibald’s tale in order to understand that moral self-scrutiny is a socially responsible activity. Recent research suggests that by the end of the fifteenth century, with educational provision improving in the major towns, guild members other than graduates and clerics, and their kinswomen, were able to read and write.83 Although very few Scottish manuscripts can be proved to have been owned by merchants in the late medieval period, the odd book that can be shown to have such links combines devotional and professional material, religious pictures and prayers, as well as practical information relating to costs, measures and market conditions.84 Ratis Raving, and possibly its companion texts in Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.1.5 (6), may also have been intended for an audience which included those involved in trade, and its blend of the ethical and practical may offer further insight into the literary tastes of such a group.85 With their growing wealth, the urban and merchant classes were also an important audience for the printed book.86 This is attested by the figure of Walter Chepman, a wealthy textile merchant and burgess of Edinburgh, a property owner, Dean of the Guild of Edinburgh (1514–15) and notary public. As a writer of the king’s letters, he travelled to England on royal business and it seems likely that he knew writers such as Ireland, Stobo and Douglas.87 His prosperity and social standing clearly facilitated the establishment of his press and the employment of the experienced bookseller and printer, Andro Myllar. During the sixteenth century, The Thre Prestis of Peblis certainly found favour in educated urban circles. John Asloan, who included the poem in his anthology of verse and prose, was a burgess of Edinburgh. It is likely that he compiled his book for personal use, not as a commission.88 The inclusion of the poem in his manuscript may 55), III, pp. 93–102 (96–7, 100), and pp. 107–10 (109). There are no surviving pre-Reformation merchant wills, but for later examples see M.H.B. Sanderson, ‘Edinburgh Merchants in Society, 1570–1603’, in The Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland: Essays in Honour of Gordon Donaldson, ed. Ian B. Cowan and Duncan Shaw (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 183–99. 83 John Durkan, ‘Education: The Laying of Fresh Foundations’, in Humanism in Renaissance Scotland, ed. John MacQueen (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 123–160 (124–5); I.D. Whyte, Scotland Before the Industrial Revolution: An Economic and Social History c.1050– 1750, Longman Economic and Social History of Britain (Harlow, 1995), p. 240. 84 See A. Hanham, ‘A Medieval Scots Merchant’s Handbook’, SHR, 50 (1971), 107–20. 85 Compare Ratis Raving, lines 991–1008. 86 Nicola Royan, ‘The Relationship Between the Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece and John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland’, in Rose and the Thistle, pp. 136–57 (154, n. 12). 87 R. Dickson and J.P. Edmond, Annals of Scottish Printing (Cambridge, 1890), pp. 13–22; Sally Mapstone, ‘Introduction: William Dunbar and the Book Culture of SixteenthCentury Scotland’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’. Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton, 2001), pp. 1–23 (9–11). Chepman’s son David also combined mercantile and literary activities, working as a bookbinder in Edinburgh. 88 Unlike Bodleian Library, MS Douce 148 (containing the Scottish Troy Book fragments and Lydgate’s Troy Book) which Asloan worked on for the Edinburgh Chaplain, Thomas Ewen.

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suggest that it was easily available in early sixteenth century Edinburgh. Asloan has been called a ‘man of orthodox tastes’, and his collection of predominantly devotional, historical and didactic texts may be assumed to be representative of popular literature at the beginning of the sixteenth century, even though some of his texts are unique survivals.89 Several texts that he copied had been printed in 1508 by Chepman and Myllar,90 and he almost certainly had access to their prints.91 Other texts, including some of the works of Henryson and Dunbar, and some anonymous pieces appear half a century later in the Bannatyne or Maitland Folio Manuscripts, or both, and William of Touris’s Contemplacioun of Synnaris circulated south of the Border.92 Further indication of the circulation of The Thre Prestis of Peblis in the immediate decades after Asloan made his anthology is given by a reference in The Complaynt of Scotland (c. 1550), a political allegory partly based on Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif (c.1422). Predating the other two witnesses of The Thre Prestis, the reading offered in the Complaynt engages closely with the generic affiliations and themes of the late fifteenth-century text: ‘the preist of peblis speris ane questione in ane beuk that he conpilit quhy that burges ayris thryuis nocht to the thrid ayr, bot he mycht hef sperit as veil, quhy that the successours of the vniuersal comont pepil baytht to burght & land, thryuis nocht to the thrid ayr’.93 Estates satire is central to the Complaynt, and the allusion to The Thre Prestis is intertextually deft. Extending the criticism of the burgess class in The Thre Prestis, to the common people, the Complaynt mourns the lack of personal virtue in all members of society, identifying the mutual responsibility of all classes for the welfare of a realm. In particular, the burgesses’ admission of their slackening morals clearly rang true for the Complaynt’s author. He notes that John’s tale ‘requiris nocht ane allogoric expositione nor ȝit ane glose’ because ‘ane person that hed neuyr aduersite & hes veltht that procedit neuyr of his auen industrie … and hes neueir kauen education eruditione nor ciuilite, it is onpossibil that he can be verteous and he that heytis vertu, sal neuyr thryue’.94

89 Catherine van Buuren, ‘John Asloan and his Manuscript: An Edinburgh Notary and Scribe in the Days of James III, IV and V (c.1470–1530)’, in Stewart Style, pp. 15–51 (51). 90 The Porteous of Noblenes, Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, Holland’s The Buke of the Howlat and Lydgate’s Complaint of a Lover’s Life. The Chepman and Myllar prints of these works are respectively STC 5060.5, 1316, 13594, 17014.3. The lost items, the ‘goldin targe’, ‘þe flyting betuix Kennyde & dunbar’, and ‘The buke of schir gologruss & schir gawane’, items xxvi, xli and lxv in Asloan’s contents list, were also printed by Chepman and Myllar. 91 Denton Fox, ‘Manuscripts and Prints of Scots Poetry in the Sixteenth Century’, in Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature: Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Adam J. Aitken, Matthew P. McDiarmid and Derick S. Thomson (Glasgow, 1977), pp. 156–71 (157–63). 92 It is found in BL MSS Arundel 285 and Harley 6919 and was printed in by Wynkyn de Worde in 1499 (STC 5643), and in a protestantized form by Hugh Singleton of London in 1578 entitled A dyall of dayly Contemplacion (STC 5644). 93 The Complaynt of Scotland by Robert Wedderburn, ed. A.M. Stewart, STS, 4th Ser., 11 (Edinburgh and London, 1979), p. 112. This suggests that author of the Complaynt (?Robert Wedderburn) thought that the poem had been written by a priest of Peebles. 94 Complaynt of Scotland, pp. 112–13.

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The presence of 115 lines from John’s tale in Edinburgh, NAS, MS RH 13/35 (c.1582–86), is an indication of the poem’s continued attraction to mercantile readers in the late sixteenth century.95 The miscellany has links to the protestant Cockburn family of Ormiston and their associates in and around Longniddry and the royal burgh of Haddington in East Lothian, and was possibly copied by a local priest and notary, Thomas White.96 The lines from John’s tale which survive are the merchants’ answer to why children of burgesses do not thrive, the king’s question to his clergy and part of their answer. As Mapstone has demonstrated, clerical corruption and the system of Episcopal appointments were subjects still troubling the reformist factions of 1580s. Further, the conduct of the merchant classes may also have been of concern to such a family. The towns of Ormiston, Longniddry and Haddington are close to the Firth of Forth in what was, in the early modern period, the commercially active Edinburgh hinterland. Haddington in particular had been a prominent market and pottery town since the fourteenth century, and a meeting place for the Four Burghs.97 Situated on the river Tyne, its prosperity increased, and in the seventeenth century it became a manufacturing town specializing in cloth.98 The choice of The Thre Prestis for production in 1603 by Robert Charteris (also a wealthy burgess of Edinburgh and member of the Town Council)99 is noteworthy. The Charteris copy is a ‘black-letter’ print, perhaps suggesting the printer’s awareness of the poem’s early date and antiquarian value.100 Robert’s father Henry Charteris issued editions of Lyndsay’s works from 1568 to 1597 (STC 15658–64.3), as well as other earlier vernacular poetry including Douglas’s Palice of Honour, The Wallace and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid (STC 13165). Robert Charteris had an interest in printing similar material.101 It is very possible that, with its estates satire section, concern with kingship and royal desire, and the presence of Fictus as a wise fool, The Thre Prestis of Peblis seemed to Charteris long overdue for a wider circulation, a publication that could be as profitable as the work of Lyndsay that it resembled in many ways. Intriguingly, two years after publishing The Thre Prestis, Robert 95 The lines were identified by Sally Mapstone. They correspond to lines 173–233 of Asloan, lines 177–237 of Charteris; and lines 351–408 of Asloan, lines 359–408 of Charteris. See Mapstone, ‘Thre Prestis’, pp. 124–42. The fragmentary nature of the miscellany makes it impossible to judge how much of the poem was originally copied. 96 King Orphius and Sir Colling, p. 20. The family’s connection with the Maitlands of Lethington is noteworthy. See Mapstone, ‘Thre Prestis’, pp. 124–42 (136). 97 Ewan, Townlife, pp. 35, 67, 146–7. Also see John McGavin,‘Drama in SixteenthCentury Haddington’, in European Medieval Drama 1, ed. S. Higgins (Brepols, 1997), pp. 147–59 (147–8). 98 W. Makey, ‘Edinburgh in the Mid-Seventeenth Century’, in The Early Modern Town in Scotland, ed. Michael Lynch (London and Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, 1987), pp. 192–218 (197). 99 See Dickson and Edmond, Annals, pp. 348–76. 100 Lotte Hellinga, ‘Printing’, in The Cambridge History of the Book, volume III, 1400– 1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J.B. Trapp (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 65–108 (75–7). ‘Black-letter type’ was adopted from France by de Worde and Pynson. It was used in London and Edinburgh as the main typeface for vernacular printing, even when other typefaces had become popular. 101 Dickson and Edmond, Annals, pp. 490–508.

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Charteris issued two religious poems, Gabriels Salutation to Marie and Iudas Kisse to the Sonne of Marie (STC 5460.4, 5460.7), written by James Cockburne, and it is not impossible that a copy of the earlier tale collection had come to Charteris’s attention through his connection to this literary family.102 What is certain is that The Thre Prestis of Peblis, now often forgotten in favour of the works of Henryson and Lyndsay, appealed to readers for many decades, skilfully treading the path between earnest and game in its discussion of social problems, just kingship, and personal morality.

102 Mapstone, ‘Thre Prestis’, pp. 124–42 (135–6).

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Chapter 6

King Hart The energetic allegorical poem King Hart (c.1500?),1 recounts the passage of a royal protagonist from youthful frivolity in a castle full of pleasure-seeking attendants to his deathbed testament, via his capture by Dame Plesance, his aging, mental decline, and failed attempts at self-reformation under the auspices of Conscience, Wisdom and Reason. In the formulation of this plot the King Hart poet revisits two central preoccupations of the literature covered in this book: the particular problems of self-government and royal rule faced by the amorous monarch, and the (in)ability of conventional forms of advisory discourse to guide a wayward ruler to reform. The poem depicts the process of self-reform as painful, protracted and often unsuccessful, and considers how the affliction of elderly amorousness may supplant the expected consolations of old age – wisdom and virtue. Furthermore, King Hart exploits the political dimensions of its central ‘household’ metaphor: its discussion of the problems of minority rule, such as court factionalism and the education of the prince for his future personal governance, is more historically and culturally engaged than has previously been recognized. The poem therefore looks forward to early sixteenth-century Scottish works, such as those by William Stewart, David Lyndsay and John Bellenden, which are explicitly concerned with minority rule and court corruption, and which use allegory to convey these political anxieties.2 King Hart survives in the Maitland Folio, now Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys MS 2553, a composite manuscript which was copied in a variety of hands and over a period of some years between about 1570 and 1586.3 It was not, as far as we know, printed until 1786 when John Pinkerton placed it at the opening of his selective two-volume edition of the manuscript.4 In the Folio the poem is twice

1 References to King Hart and to The Palice of Honour, are to The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, STS, fifth ser., 2 (Edinburgh and London, 2nd ed., 2003), pp. 141–70. On the poem’s literary heritage see pp. lvii–lxv. 2 These works are discussed in the Epilogue. 3 See The Maitland Folio Manuscript, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 7, 20 (Edinburgh and London, 1919–27), II, pp. 2–3. Craigie’s item numbers are provided when referring to texts in the Folio. Also see Julia Boffey, ‘The Maitland Folio Manuscript as a Verse Anthology’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’. Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton, 2001), pp. 40–50 (45). 4 See Ancient Scotish Poems Never Before in Print But Now Published from the MS Collections of Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington, ed. John Pinkerton, 2 vols (London, 1786), I, pp. 1–43. It is not impossible that King Hart was copied into the Maitland Folio from an earlier, now missing, print. On the likelihood that other texts in the Folio were copied from printed editions see Maitland Folio, II, p. 70; Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (44).

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attributed to Gavin Douglas ‘Bishop of dunkeld’ (c.1474–1522).5 However, these authorial ascriptions were not made by the scribe responsible for copying the poem, and are in two distinct hands. It is possible that Douglas’s authorship was suggested to an early reader of King Hart by the marginal glosses that appear at the beginning of the allegory. The earliest manuscript of Douglas’s Eneados (copied by the poet’s secretary Matthew Geddes) contains a similar, though more extensive, set of vernacular glosses, which are almost certainly authorial.6 In addition, Douglas’s The Palice of Honour contains a short allegorical passage based on the hierarchies of a royal household (lines 792–1827), which has some generic similarities to King Hart, and this too may have been in the mind of the reader responsible for the attribution. However, there is no firm external evidence, either in Douglas’s own references to his works, or in the testimony of early bibliographers, to confirm his connection with the allegory.7 The improbability that King Hart is part of Douglas’s output complicates the matter of its date of composition. Linguistic and internal evidence is unsatisfactory.8 Its many literary affiliations also only offer limited evidence of its date of composition. King Hart shows similarities of allegorical structure, subject matter and imagery to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century morality plays such as Henry Medwall’s Nature (c.1490–1500), or the Interlude of Youth (c.1513–14).9 It also has various Scottish analogues that provide some indication of its original cultural context. King Hart’s allegorical narrative has similarities to a figurative section on the kingship of self in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c.1499). There are analogous uses of its conventional allegorical motifs in Dunbar’s ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’ and The Goldyn Targe, also found in the Maitland Folio,10 and his advisory allegorical dream vision, ‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay’ (preserved in the Reidpeth

5 The second attribution is a copy of the first, perhaps a pen trial. The first attribution is also in a different script to that used for the copying of the text. See Shorter Poems, pp. lxxii–lxxiii. 6 With thanks to Sally Mapstone for this suggestion. A set of marginal notes accompany the prologue and first seven chapters of Book I of the Eneados in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS O. 3. 12. The Longleat Manuscript also has some of the marginalia. See Shorter Poems, pp. 107–10; Daniel J. Pinti, ‘The Vernacular Gloss(ed) in Gavin Douglas’s Eneados’, Exemplaria, 7 (1995), 443–64. 7 King Hart cannot be conclusively identified with any of the Latin titles given by John Bale. See Shorter Poems, p. lxxiv, and Bale’s Index Britanniae Scriptorum in Index Britanniae Scriptorum: John Bale’s Index of British and Other Writers, ed. R.L. Poole and M. Bateson (Cambridge, 1990), p. 83. Neither does it seem to be the work mentioned by Douglas in The Eneados, Book IV, ‘Lundeis Lufe the Remeid’. See F.H. Ridley, ‘Did Gavin Douglas Write King Hart?’, Speculum, 34 (1959), 402–12. 8 Shorter Poems, pp. lxxviii–lxxix. 9 Records indicate that miracle and morality plays were widely performed in Scotland, but texts are rare. We can only guess as to the subject of the ‘Moralite’ performed by ‘John Inglish and hys Companyons’ before the king and queen in ‘hyr grett Chamber’ in 1503. See Anna Jean Mill, Medieval Plays in Scotland, St Andrews University Publications, 24 (Edinburgh and London, 1927), pp. 320, n. 1, cf. 15, 62. 10 It is poem XXXVII in the Folio.

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Manuscript), and it is possible that the King Hart poet knew these works.11 In the first of these poems a speaker is taken prisoner for gazing at his beloved.12 He is wounded by ‘fresche bewte’ (9), a character who is also in the vanguard of the attack against King Hart, and confined to a ‘deip dungeoun’ (12) in the ‘castell of pennance’ (25). Here, like Hart, he is at the mercy of the porter Strangeness, but is then aided by ‘Petie’ (49). As in King Hart, a violent siege ensues. The attackers in Dunbar’s poem, like the two hostile armies who besiege Hart, are armed with a ‘benner’ and ‘gyn’, making the castle’s ‘foir tour’ (59–60) collapse, just as it does in King Hart.13 Dunbar’s poem also features other characters who appear in King Hart – Langour, Bissiness, Lust, Chastity (in both poems found in the office of ‘chalmarere’), Gud fame and Invy.14 Another similarity between the two poems lies in the use of the first person narrating voice. Dunbar’s poem begins by being spoken by an ‘I’ voice, who gradually disappears as the narrative progresses.15 In King Hart, the narrator makes two brief appearances but then also becomes invisible. In The Goldyn Targe, Dunbar’s speaker is again taken prisoner for looking, and the personification of beauty is once more at the forefront of the attack. Venus’s army is made up of characters found in King Hart such as Plesance, Youth, Will and Wantonnes, all of whom oppose the dreamer’s Reason. After being taken captive, the dreamer is delivered into the care of Hevynesse, who is also the keeper of Hart’s castle. The Goldyn Targe must have been completed before c.1508 when it was printed by Chepman and Myllar (STC 7349). Bawcutt dates it to sometime in the 1490s because Douglas’s Palice of Honour (c.1501) appears to show its influence.16 ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’, which is perhaps closer to King Hart in tone, plot and imagery, is harder to date, and need not belong to the same period as the more sophisticated Goldyn Targe. However, King Hart’s concerns with court life and corruption also converge with the subjects of Dunbar’s more topical works, most of which must belong to the period from c.1500 to c.1513 when he was engaged at James IV’s court.17 Of course, it is not impossible that literary influence is at work in the opposite direction. Dunbar was well aware (as ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’ shows) of the literary traditions of England and Scotland. But he is not a sufficiently bookish poet, given to close imitation of other works and flaunting his sources, to make this suggestion entirely 11 References are to The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 27–8 (Glasgow, 1998), I, pp. 184–92, 229–32. 12 For a recent analysis see Sarah Couper, ‘Allegory and Parody in Dunbar’s “Sen that I am a presoneir”’, SSR, 6 (2005), 9–20. 13 See King Hart, lines 133, 858, 875. 14 Poems of William Dunbar, II, pp. 456–7. 15 Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), p. 308. ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’ is not in the Maitland Folio, but its presence in the Reidpeth Manuscript suggests that it may have been part of the gathering which is now lost from the Folio. 16 William Dunbar. Selected Poems, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, Longman Annotated Texts (London and New York, 1996), pp. 231–2. For the suggestion that Dunbar may have been influenced by Douglas see R.J. Lyall, ‘The Stylistic Relationship Between Dunbar and Douglas’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’, pp. 69–84. 17 Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 6–7.

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satisfying. The best compromise then is to tentatively date King Hart to c.1500, or to some time in the first decade of the sixteenth century. Past critics have read King Hart as a skilful example of allegory’s ability to express the abstract for didactic purposes. C.S. Lewis described the poem as the ‘fusion of erotic and homiletic allegory to perfection’, a ‘fable’ of the soul, while Bawcutt calls it ‘a radical allegory’ representing a ‘study of man in general’.18 Yet, with its detailed and symmetrical structure,19 King Hart’s allegorical form is hermeneutically exacting, its metaphorical levels of narrative shifting, and its final teaching ambiguous. Unlike many near-contemporary allegories, the poem, as it survives, lacks any narrative frame which would help to contextualize its action. There is no poet-narrator, who, in the chanson d’aventure tradition presents the allegorical events related as a dream vision as, for example, in Dunbar’s Goldyn Targe or Douglas’s Palice of Honour. Neither is the poem presented as an exemplum with an appended moralization. And, in addition to being divorced from a framing fiction or didactic structure, King Hart’s narrator stays detached throughout much of the poem, negating a stable source of moral guidance for the reader. The first person pronoun is used only twice (lines 28 and 273), and on both occasions voyeuristically. The second occasion that we are aware of a narrating voice (‘Thar saw I Lust ly law vnder lok’) problematically coincides with the observations of Jealousy as he arrives in Plesance’s dungeon, thus closing the distance between the reader and Hart’s youthful followers, and foregrounding our own susceptibility to the follies of passion and therefore our need for careful self-analysis. The scribal notes that accompany King Hart in the Maitland Folio Manuscript seek to remove any contention from the interpretation of the poem resulting from the absence of these conventional structuring devices, and are thus themselves a response to the interpretive demands of the text. Beside the first stanza is the marginal note, written in the hand which copied the poem, ‘Cor in [corpore] homini[s] hart in the [body] of a ma[n]’, beside the fourth, ‘Iuuentus et quot nomina habet ȝouthheid and quhat names he [hes]’, and beside the sixth, ‘Desideria cordis Iuuentute The desyris of hart in ȝouth’.20 Yet, as we shall see, the poem is more complicated than these descriptions suggest: Hart and his castle are difficult to interpret consistently along the lines of more conventional allegories of the body and soul.21 18 Shorter Poems, pp. lxvi–lxvii; Lewis (1936), p. 287. On common approaches to allegory see C. van Dyke, ‘The Intangible and Its Image: Allegorical Discourse and the Cast of Everyman’, in Acts of Interpretation: The Text and its Context, 700–1600: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature in Honour of E. Talbot Donaldson, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Oklahoma, 1982), pp. 311–24 (311). 19 The action takes place between two castles. The display of banners in the first battle is later mirrored by the approach of Decrepitus with his ‘baner’. The wounding of Hart by Plesance is echoed in the assault of Decrepitus. The queen is woken after the escape of Pity, yielding to Hart’s will, as he previously had to hers. Later it is she who steals away while the king is asleep. 20 These marginal notes have been damaged during repairs to the manuscript, and more may have been lost as a result of early restoration or rebinding. 21 On the metaphor of the castle as the human body, see G.R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, 1961), pp. 77–87.

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The poem’s eighteenth-century editor, John Pinkerton, also desired to elucidate the poem for his readers. Stating that ‘In the original copy [the Maitland scribe’s exemplar], the allegory seems to have been always pointed out in the margin’ he divided the poem into two cantos to foreground its depiction of the passage from youth to age. He also constructed a tidy ‘argument’ in an elaborate imitation of Older Scots prose to preface the poem. This addition to King Hart is an obvious attempt to fix its meaning: ‘This poeme is ane alegorycale representatioun of human lyfe. The hart of man, beand his maist nobil pairt … is heir put for Man in generale; and holdis the chief plaice in the poem … This mysticale king is first representit in the blume of youtheid, with his lustie attendaunts, the atributis or qualiteis of youth.’22 His emphasis on the universality of the poem takes from King Hart’s allegorical narrative all traces of historicity, reinforcing what Priscilla Bawcutt has called the poem’s ‘strangely timeless’ qualities.23 Thus readers of King Hart have been accustomed to interpret the poem on the non-literal level, foreclosing and masking certain subtle dimensions of this complex text, particularly its socio-cultural resonance. Van Dyke sees this as a typical approach to allegory: ‘Because the prior text or story carries its own pre-allegorical meaning, allegory appears as the alternative (usually the superior alternative) to a more obvious way of reading …’.24 As Delany further suggests, ‘most writing on allegory seems to minimize or omit’ the ‘dialectics of history’.25 Yet late medieval audiences were accustomed to reading allegory in political contexts and for commentary on contemporary events, as well as for perennial moral lessons. Allegory was popular as a device in visual art and in civic displays produced for royal audiences, and often carried didactic comments about good rule.26 It also occupied a prominent role in festivities produced by courts and aristocratic households with more explicitly propagandist agendas. Furthermore, the assumption that allegory affords access to universal truths is also problematic in relation to the Scottish text.27 The conclusions 22 Pinkerton, Ancient Scotish Poems, I, pp. 1–2. In Pinkerton’s edition the first canto ends at line 424 after the union of Plesance and Hart. 23 Shorter Poems, p. lxxix. 24 C. van Dyke, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (1985), p. 16. 25 Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology, Cultural Politics (Manchester, 1990), p. 43. Also note Astell: fourteenth-century allegories ‘address the pressing issues of the day: issues of royal succession, of social justice, of the balance of powers between king and parliament …’. Ann W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca and London, 1999), p. 43. 26 For example, see Lydgate’s Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry into London (1432) which records an allegorical pageant intended both to flatter the young king and instruct him in good rule using figures such as ‘Sapience’ and ‘Goode Counsaylle’. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ed. Henry Noble MacCracken, 2 vols, EETS, ES, 107 and OS, 192 (London, 1911–34), II, pp. 624–48. Also see Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford, 1998), pp. 147–53. 27 Compare Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Preface’, in Allegory and Representation: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1979–80, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore and London, 1981), pp. vii–xiii (vii).

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of the poem, which refuse to offer an authoritative (perhaps Christian) moralitas for the figurative narrative, question the utility of conventional didactic and sermonizing discourses, and express uncertainty about the ability of individuals to achieve lasting order in the self. The poem’s allegorical structure is shaped by the popular metaphor of the body politic,28 using the idea of the royal household and its officers as illustrative of man’s mortal body and moral nature. Strikingly, it places the heart, rather than the reason (or the head), in the role of ruler in its allegorical household, thus emphasizing the imperfection of human nature, and the fact that the lordship of reason over the self is an ideal only, while susceptibility to desire is a fact of man’s existence. However, the poem also rigorously pursues the literal and political dimensions of its governing image in order to comment on the very real dangers of young counsel and unregulated households, thus challenging the boundaries between the conventional and topical. So, while Hart derives some of his identity from the common medieval trope of the personified heart as the figuration of erotic desire,29 and also from popular ‘Mankind’ characters, the way in which he is presented is highly ideological and historicized.30 Like Rex Humanitas in Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, Hart’s presentation as a ruler with a household and country to govern is far from casual. Thus its allegorical implication that each man must learn to govern his inner kingdom, to rule his heart with reason in preparation for maturity, is inseparable from the narrative of the ‘prior text’, the tale of a young king, dwelling in pleasure amongst unsuitable courtiers, his rule contested, and end ignoble.31 Critics who have overplayed the conventionality of King Hart’s protagonist, lose sight of the fact that the king is, as J.E. Peterson writes of Infans in Mundus et Infans, ‘placed in our minds culturally, socially and historically’.32 King Hart’s literal story of a young king subjected to bad influence has particular relevance to the political situation of late medieval and early modern Scotland, in which the repeated minorities of the Stewart dynasty resulted in long periods of regency government and faction fighting. During these minorities stable provisions for the custody of the child king were rarely honoured, and the governance of the royal person, and his education for future rule, usually swung between several opposing factions each with their own interests in keeping power.33 Some of these minors, 28 David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague, 1971), pp. 32–47. 29 Compare Sheila Delany, ‘King Hart: Rhetoric and Meaning in a Middle-Scots Allegory’, Neophilologus, 55 (1971), 328–41 (328). 30 Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods and Theatricality in Late Medieval England, Medieval Cultures 9 (Minneapolis and London, 1997), pp. 89–90. 31 Contrast Delany, ‘King Hart’, 328–41 (328). I differ from her view of the secondary importance of desire in the poem. 32 J.E. Peterson, ‘The Paradox of Disintegrating Form in Mundus et Infans’, ELR, 7 (1977), 3–16 (8). 33 In James II’s minority the families competing for power were the Livingstons, Crichtons and Douglases; in James III’s, the Kennedys and Boyds, and in James V’s, the Angus Douglases. See Sarah Carpenter, ‘David Lindsay and James V: Court Literature as Current Event’, in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century:

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James III and James V in particular, were little more than royal prisoners during periods of their tutelage. When they asserted their personal rule, their purges of the minority regimes were harsh, and regents were charged with abuses such as keeping the king against his will, exposing him to danger during his tender age, and the poor governance of the realm.34 Having a child or adolescent king on the throne, subject to the influence of self-interested subjects and politicians, also generated accentuated concerns about royal susceptibility to personal misgovernance, and King Hart should be seen as a response to these anxieties. The poem’s interest in how the difficult circumstances of royal minority may lead to the king’s sexual and moral corruption may reflect more explicit statements to this effect made by near contemporary chroniclers and observers. For example, James IV’s notorious affairs with Marion Boyd and Margaret Drummond during the 1490s,35 and later with Janet Kennedy, were witnessed at closer quarters by the Spanish Ambassador to Scotland, Don Pedro De Ayala. De Ayala notes that when James ‘came of age and understood his duties’ he gave up his amorous ‘intrigues’, but had been ‘keeping a lady in great state in a castle. He visited her from time to time … He did the same with another lady, by whom he had a son …’.36 Like his father and grandfather, James V also gained a reputation as indulged, misguided and even debauched during his fifteen-year minority, as a ‘king of love’, as he is styled by one modern commentator.37 By the time of King Hart’s inclusion in the Maitland Folio in the late sixteenth-century the presentation of these Stewart kings as lustful and destroyed by their ‘awin wylfull mysgovernance’38 was widespread in poetry and chronicles from Lyndsay to Abell and Pitscottie. It was James V’s English uncle, Henry VIII, who actually styled himself as a ‘king heart’ figure when he jousted in the disguise of the ‘Coeur Loyal’ in allegorical pageants held at Westminster and Richmond.39 But the notion of the heart as a France, England and Scotland, ed. Jennifer and Richard Britnell, Studies in European Cultural Transition, 6 (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 135–52 (137). 34 Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–42, ed. N.A.T. Macdougall, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1998), pp. 9–28. 35 The ALHTS contain entries for gifts and clothing for the king’s mistresses. See ALHTS, I, pp. 307, 392. 36 See Early Travellers in Scotland, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh, 1891), pp. 39–49 (40–41). 37 Helena M. Shire, Song, Dance and Poetry of the Court of Scotland Under King James VI: Musical Illustrations of Court Song (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 3–4. In 1579 the young James VI of Scotland was presented with the keys of the burgh of Edinburgh by Cupid. See Michael Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual During the Personal Reign of James VI’, in The Reign of James VI, ed. Julian Goodare and Michael Lynch (East Linton, 2000), pp. 71–92 (75). 38 Lyndsay on James IV in The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (513). See Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 30 (Glasgow, 2000), pp. 58–97. This is echoed in Pitscottie’s Historie. See The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland from the Slauchter of King James the First … by Robert Lindesay of Pittscottie, ed. Æneas James G. Mackay, 3 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 42, 43 and 60 (Edinburgh and London,1899–1911), II, pp. 277–8. 39 As recorded by Edward Hall. See Henry VIII by Edward Hall, The Lives of the Kings, ed. Charles Whibley, 2 vols (London, 1904), I, pp. 22, 26. Hall recorded that in a joust at Westminster (1511), ‘his grace’ was ‘called Cure loial’ and his lords played parts including

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sovereign in the self, who must cultivate reason, enjoyed considerable currency in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Scottish writing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the most distinctive and developed Scottish illustration of this idea is found in Aristotle’s allegory of the heart, desire or will as a king, who is influenced by his youthful servants and censored by his counselors Conscience, Reason and Discretion, in the Regiment section of The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. Another version of this potentially troubling notion appears in an anonymous poem on free will in the Maitland Folio (CLXXII) which exhorts the heart to uphold truthfulness and virtue as a defence against fortune’s blows:40 Vp hart thow art the pairt of man most souerane Lat seruell menbris smert and bound allane remaine for gif thow do nocht stane Thy trewthe and honestie How cane thow be in pane No suirlie þow art frie.

Focusing on the heart as an unregulated monarch is a poetic debate between the ‘foly Hairt fetterit in fantesye’ and the body in the Bannatyne Manuscript (folio 212r-v). The body acknowledges the natural pull of sexuality but also reminds the heart of its moral responsibilities as ruler of the self: To luve I wet it is bot naturall Till all mankind in ȝoutheid specialie Bot sen þat þow art cheif and principall Grantit be god to gowirne thy bodie Thow suld be set to serwe him Idently And luf him best þat bocht þe wt his blud.

The acquisition of reason by the monarch-heart and the regulation of his house and realm anticipated in these poems prove difficult for King Hart. In the flower of his ‘ȝouthheid’ Hart is a sort of ‘summer king’, ‘so blyth as bird in symmer schene’ (8), presiding at the head of a festive and disordered household over which he has little control.41 Dame Nature has appointed servants, allegorically representing unwelcome aspects of the youthful self, ‘to governe and to gy’ (20) the innocent king. those of Bon voloire, Bonespoir, Valiaunt desire salvigne. Hall also recalls a 1511 pageant depicting a ‘garden of pleasure’ in which the king and his five companions were ‘appareyled in garmentes of purpul satyn’, playing parts such as ‘Cuer loyall’, ‘Bone voloyre’, ‘Bone espoier’, ‘Valyaunt desire’, and ‘Amoure loyall’. According to Wyatt, Scottish ambassadors watched the Christmas celebrations of 1523–24 which featured a castle of loyalty, allegorical personages, and a ‘battail of pleasure’. See The Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. K. Muir (Liverpool, 1963), pp. 4–5. 40 One of Sir Richard Maitland’s poems in the MS (‘Ces hart and trubill me no moir’, CLXXIX) also addresses the personified heart. 41 On the derisive label of ‘summer king’ for bad leaders see Sandra Billington, Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford, 1991), pp. 12–13.

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He is ‘vnder warde’ (17), that is, in feudal vocabulary, a minor in the guardianship of another.42 His position is certainly an interesting literary equivalent of that of the young James IV, as outlined by the Spanish Ambassador to Scotland in 1497, who wrote that when the king ‘was a minor, he was instigated by those who held the government to do some dishonourable things. They favoured his love intrigues … in order to keep him under their subjection’.43 The young Hart dwells ‘vnder the wyng of Wantownnes’ (16) blissfully unaware of ‘payne’ (12), and attended by such personifications as Grien Lust, Glutony, Wilfulness, Waistgude, Vanegloir and Prodigalitie, figures familiar from the French allegorical tradition. The hierarchies at his court are therefore in disarray. His attendants are said to be his diligent ‘seruitouris’ but in fact act as his ‘gouernouris’ (33–4), urging him on to physical indulgence and vice. They keep him ‘inclynit to þair curis’ (35), secure in the knowledge of their imminent ‘rewarde’ (38). Hart’s other servitors, the five wits, ‘teichit war ay tressoun to espy’ (50), but from the beginning ‘þair king betrasit oft’ (64), further eroding his power. His retainers parody the courtesy-book advice set out, for example, in Ratis Raving, which instructs those who wish to ‘serue a lorde’ at court, to be ‘lel [loyal], lufand, and debonare’ (1009–11). A fragmentary poem, ‘My frend gif though were a servitour’, in Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (fol. 229), advocates similar ideals of service and order in the household: ‘Serviture[s]’ of all degrees must be ‘traist and obedient’, ‘kepe comandament’, and be restrained and industrious at all times.44 With such standards abandoned for self-interest, the few well-meaning royal servants stand no chance of exerting any positive influence on King Hart: ‘Discretioun wes as than bot ȝoung of age. / He sleipit with Lust, quhair ever he micht him find’ (281–2). Most worryingly, Hart’s ‘femell’ (41) or familia of wayward and self-interested attendants comprises a vast retinue ‘Quhilk nummerit ane milȝon and weill mo’ (42). These sorry characters with ‘falt of gude’ (512) throng Hart’s court like the greedy mobs described in sixteenth-century satires on court life such as Dunbar’s ‘Schir ȝe haue mony seruitouris’ (Maitland Folio LXVIII), William Stewart’s ‘Rolling In my Remeberance’ (CXXXV), or The Complaynt of Schir David Lindesay. Hart’s disreputable servants also anticipate the company that serves the innocent young Rex Humanitas, in Lyndsay’s Satyre, making a persuasive case for the wider circulation of the allegory in the sixteenth century than its single exemplar suggests. Rex Humanitas’s servants Wantonness, Placebo and Solace claim to be the loyal secretary and page to their ‘royall young king’, but also his ‘sportour and playfeir’ (176–7) deviously confusing roles of service with those of self-interested recreation as they introduce him to the ways of Dame Sensuality and the Vices.45 Despite their allegorical guise, the presentation of Hart’s attendants as disreputable courtiers is highly convincing. Indeed, in the course of its festivities, the late medieval 42 MED, n. ‘ward(e)’. 43 Early Travellers, p. 41. 44 IMEV 2242. 45 See Sir David Lindsay: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, ed. R.J. Lyall, Canongate Classics, 18, (Edinburgh, 1989). ‘Dame Sensuall’ (873) and other allegorized courtly vices also make a brief appearance in The Testament of the Papyngo.

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Scottish court often seemed to light-heartedly, but self-consciously, acknowledge such unsettling presences in its own midst with recourse to the sort of allegorical vocabulary that we find in King Hart. For example, the Treasurer’s Accounts record numerous payments made to a certain ‘Wantounes’ and her ‘marrow[s]’ for singing before the king between 1507 and 1511.46 References to one Janet Bair Ars, who was presumably the real-life counterpart of Dame Sensuality’s side-kick Fund-Jonet in Ane Satyre, remind us of the currency of amorous game in court settings, and so of the focused public discourse of King Hart.47 Unsurprisingly, the inverted bonds of service in Hart’s castle leave it vulnerable to attack from without, the young king and his servants easy prey for Dame Plesance’s hunting party, which is variously described as a ‘sute’ (187), ‘muster’ (156), or ‘lynnage’ (221), a militaristically ordered company ‘arrayit weill’ (225).48 Typical of his weakened leadership is Hart’s decision to send out servants ill equipped to meet this threat – ȝouthheid and Fresche Delyte, followed, when this pair is captured, by Newgate, Wantownnes, Grene Luif, Disport, Waistgude and Fulehardynes. Because ‘Wisdome is away’ (190) it is only a matter of time before Hart and the rest of his ‘cumlie ost’ (218) are taken as well. Indeed, the king is, as Conscience will later tell him, his own worst enemy, ‘thy propir fa’ (572). Hart is overcome first with ‘yre and tein’ (211), and then desire: his ‘buirelie bainer’ (219), with all its phallic suggestiveness, is said to be ‘brathit vp on hicht’ (219). Despite the lack of guidance with which the poem is narrated, a degree of moral censure is evident in the description of the madness of this encounter: Dame Plesance is riding ‘as scho war woude’ (175), and more damningly, Hart and his men are seen to ‘preik’ and ‘prance, as princis þat war woude’ (224). In a series of comic incidents dominated by siege and battle imagery familiar from the Roman de la Rose tradition, Hart’s folk are dazzled by the company of Dame Plesance and the king wounded and imprisoned.49 In its comic portrayal of the young king’s household, internally weakened by disorder, and subjugated to Dame Plesance and her numerous followers (‘Ane legioun liell war at hir leding’, 123), the poem gestures towards contemporary fears about maintaining large households, and about factionalism at court, practices which, in the politically sensitive time of royal minority in particular, presented considerable difficulties for the keeping of the peace and upholding of the monarch’s dignity. Fifteenth-century statutory legislation passed by the Scottish parliament during or following periods of royal minorities repeatedly sought to curb the troublesome practice of maintenance and the power of over-prominent families. In various acts 46 ALHTS, III, pp. 369, 372, 377, 379. See the reference to clothes made for one ‘Lady Maistres’, III, p. 300 (1506), and of payments ‘To ane woman callit Justice’, IV, 315 (1511). There are also numerous references to payments made to women for singing to the king or in his chamber, III, pp. 162, 196 etc; IV, p. 127. 47 ALHTS, IV, pp. 62, 108, 295, 358. 48 DOST, n. ‘muster’, n. ‘linage’, MED, n. ‘sute’. 49 For Scottish examples of images of the imprisonment of the heart, see the Bannatyne Manuscript lyrics, ‘My Hairt is thrall begone me fro’ (fols 222v–3r), ‘No wondir is althocht my hairt be thrall’ (fol. 234r –v), and ‘Consider hairt my trew intent’ (fols 235v–6r). See The Bannatyne Manuscript Writtin in Tyme of Pest 1568, ed. William Tod Ritchie, 4 vols, STS, 3rd Ser., 5, 2nd Ser., 22, 23, 26 (Edinburgh and London, 1928–34).

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passed between 1425 and 1503, subjects were enjoined not to come to court or attend justice ayres ‘wt him ma personis þan ar in his daily houshalde and familiaris’, ‘multitude of folkis’ or ‘with armys’, but ‘in a ‘sobre and quiet manner’.50 It was both prohibited that any subject ‘rebell agaynis the kingis persone’ and for nobles to retain disreputable individuals, or assist any rebel ‘in rede, confort, … consal or mayntenance’.51 Captured and trussed up in Venus’s bands, King Hart is presented to the queen and yields to her ‘estait’ (243). Without any real power of his own, Hart’s amorousness makes him akin to the popular mock kings of Scottish folk and institutional festivities such as the kings of Bean and May, and Rex Stultorum;52 to the French ‘Prince of Pleasure’; and to the ‘Prince of Love’53 who took on the role of Lord of Misrule in festivities at the Middle Temple during the sixteenth century.54 As Dame Plesance’s ‘prince of love’ Hart also recalls the literary figure of the King of Love who makes several appearances in late medieval Scottish contexts. The two fifteenth-century Alexander romances, The Buik of Alexander (c.1438), and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, devote considerable space to the narration of an episode based on Les Voeux du Paon in which Alexander’s lifting of the Siege of Effesoun is celebrated with the election of a King of Love to partake in a playful love debate. In the first of these romances it is made clear that the King of Love is a ‘counterfittit king’ (2189),55 and in the second he is ‘crovnit with ane rois chaplet’ (8004), invested with appropriate kingly attributes such as truthfulness and righteous judgement, and given an opportunity to offer moral advice on ‘the thewis of ane gud women’ (8478).56 A third reference to a fashion for the courtly King of Love figure in Scottish circles is of a more historical character. In his Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis, John Shirley records how, just before his assassination and amidst multiple prophecies of his murder, James I was feasting and playing ‘at þe chesse’ when he humorously elected a ‘ful amerowse’ knight as ‘King of Love’ claiming to be ‘vndur [his] knighthode as in þe service of love’.57

50 APS, II, pp. 177, 16, 51. Compare 7 no ‘ligis or bandis should be maid amangst his lieges in þe Realme’. 51 APS, II, p. 35. Compare p. 243 (act of 1503). 52 Mill, Medieval Plays, pp. 16–23. 53 See Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Le Prince d’Amour or The Prince of Love with a Collection of Several Ingenious Poems and Songs by Wits of the Age (1660). 54 See T. Cain, ‘Donne and the Prince D’Amour’, John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne, 14 (1995), 83–111. 55 See The Buik of Alexander or the Buke of the Most Noble and Valiant Conquerour Alexander the Grit, ed. R.L. Ritchie, 4 vols., STS, New Ser., 17, 12, 21, 25 (Edinburgh and London, 1921–29), II. 56 This episode is discussed further in Chapter 3. 57 Death and Dissent. Two Fifteenth-Century Chronicles. The Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis and Warkworth’s Chronicle, ed. Lister M. Matheson (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 23–56 (34). Discussed in Sally Mapstone, ‘Kingship and The Kingis Quair’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 1997), pp. 51–69 (51–2).

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Although these mock kings signal an inversion of the normal hierarchical order in a ludic context, they also have serious advisory or admonitory functions. In The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, the appointment of a king of love coincides with an advisory episode, and Shirley’s reference to the King of Love in his de casibus homily highlights the tension between public and private concerns for those in high office, and becomes the occasion for a meditation on the transience of royal power. Explicit comparison to the mock kings of revelry is used in near contemporary texts to criticize those monarchs who fail to live up to their exalted status. Thus in a fourteenth-century English ballad Robert Bruce is scathingly labelled a ‘kyng of Somere’.58 In Scotland, both Dunbar and Lyndsay use Lord of Misrule imagery for critical and instructional purposes. Dunbar’s complaint about the ‘ffantastik fulis bayth fals and greedy’ (57) that cluster around James IV in his ‘Schir ȝe haue mony seruitouris’,59 his playful account of Sir Thomas Norny’s position as ‘lord of evere full’, and his references to other figures of folly who stand emblematic in the midst of rife courtly corruption, implicitly suggest that the king presides over all manner of disorder, not all of which is harmless.60 Lyndsay later employs mock king imagery to warn James V of the misgoverned ruler’s vulnerability to Fortune in The Testament of the Papyngo. Alluding to the notorious sensuality and frivolity of this young king, the Parrot warns that if James fails to govern himself in his ‘adolescent yeris’ (305) and ‘lerne to be ane kyng’ (287), he will be ‘bot Kyng of Bone [Bean]’ (337) – of no more value than the temporary New Year monarch elected on Uphaliday for obtaining the portion of the Twelfth Day cake containing a bean. As a prisoner, King Hart becomes confined to the marginal spaces of Dame Plesance’s castle,61 his followers threatened with violence. He moves into ever more domestic and un-kingly spaces where he becomes merely a voyeur of the mirth at Plesance’s court: ‘King Hart in till ane previe closet crappe’ (313). Like the protagonist of Dunbar’s ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’ he is firmly in the ‘bandoun’ of his lady.62 But although Dame Plesance’s household at first seems as organized as her hunting party, with ‘chalmarere’ and ‘portare’, ‘garitour’ and ‘merschale’ (l1. 303–7) at their posts, it too is weakened by disloyal retainers, enabling the king, with Lust and ‘New Desyr’ (379) to conquer the queen in a dramatic sortie into her bedchamber. Grene Lust triumphantly announces to Dame Plesance that ‘fairlie sall we governe ȝow and ȝouris, / Our lord king Hartis will most now be done’ (386–7). The king delights to have ‘dame Plesance at his will!’ (402). Here, Hart’s emergence from tutelage is comically redolent of the assertiveness with which many of the fifteenth-century Stewart monarchs assumed their personal rule, a moment articulated in poems such 58 Billington, Mock Kings, pp. 12–13, 19, 87. 59 Poems of William Dunbar, I, pp. 222–4. 60 See Dunbar’s ‘Now lythis off ane gentill knycht’, line 50. Also see his ‘Sir Ihon Sinclair begowthe to dance’ (20), and ‘Schir I complane of injuris’ (18–27). See Poems of William Dunbar, I, pp. 133–4, 233–4, 199, 89–92. 61 The castle of pleasance is a common literary motif. It appears, for example, in Le Livre de Cuer d’Amour by René of Anjou, c.1457. See Shorter Poems, pp. lviii–lix. Also related is Neville’s ‘castell of pleasure’ in his poem of the same name (1518?). See The Castell of Pleasure by William Neville, ed. R.D. Cornelius, EETS, OS, 179, (1930). 62 See ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’, line 4.

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as the Kingis Quair and Dunbar’s Thistle and the Rose, in terms of a transition into amorousness. In reiterating this, King Hart also reminds the reader that majority does not necessarily bring mature self-rule. Indeed, despite this superficial sense of hierarchy restored, Hart will spend the next ‘Sewin ȝeir and moir’ in the ‘cure and gouernance’ of those he should govern, ‘schir Lyking and Schir Loue’ (429–30), characters familiar from morality plays such as Mundus et Infans. The more desirable guardianship of Dunbar’s ‘nobill king’ Matremony is completely lacking.63 King Hart’s continued subjection to his youthful passions and his resulting status as an amorous king of misrule is further signalled by the exchange of clothing and references to his attire in the poem. This motif is another of the poem’s links to its morality play analogues,64 where protagonists dress or are dressed as an indication of their moral state or the progress of their journey through life, but its use in King Hart is more politically charged, expressive of the shifting and unstable power relations in the court depicted. Medieval advice writing often stressed the importance of the king being ‘ever stately cled … and in faire maner grathit’ as Hay puts it in his Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (ch. 6, lines 1–16).65 In addition, the splendour of the royal household bespoke the dignity of its sovereign, the exchange and display of clothing visually buttressing the court’s order, ratifying obligations between the king and his servants, and performing crucial political and diplomatic functions.66 As historians have long observed, James IV was the Stewart monarch most famous for his love of finery and display, his retainers of all degrees ‘clad almost entirely at [his] expense’.67 Furthermore, James IV and V were as conscious as their English and French counterparts of fostering a sense of optimism and ebullience through the exploitation of the symbolism of youthfulness in the visual presentation of the royal household.68 Although there is no evidence that there were fixed livery colours at this time, the wardrobe accounts show the popularity of expensive fabrics, and bright, highly symbolic dyes.69 Green and black were chosen for James III’s henchmen in 1474, who on another occasion wore coats exotically embroidered with gold and darnel leaves.70 James IV’s attendants for the Whitsunday celebrations of 1489 and 63 See ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’, line 97. 64 For example, in the Castle of Perseverance, the youthful Humanum Genus is ‘cloþyd clere’, and then dressed in ‘ryche aray’ (626). In old age he wears a sober ‘sloppe’ (gown) (2488). See The Macro Plays: The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind, ed. Mark Eccles, EETS, OS, 262 (London and New York, 1969). 65 See The Prose works of Sir Gilbert Hay, ed. Jonathan A. Glenn, 2 vols, STS, 4th Series, 21 and 5th Series, 4 (Edinburgh, 1993–2005), Volume III: The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, p. 70. 66 A.F. Sutton, ‘Order and Fashion in Clothes: The King, His Household, and the City of London at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, Textile History, 22 (1991), 253–76 (253, 259). 67 ALHTS, II, pp. lxii–lxiii; III, p. xc. 68 On James IV’s extravagance see Ranald Nicholson, Scotland in the Later Middle Ages, The Edinburgh History of Scotland, 2 (Edinburgh, 1974), pp. 574–6 (cf. p. 483 on James III); and on James V, see Cameron, James V, pp. 263–5. Also ALHTS, I, pp. clxviii–clxxxvii. 69 ALHTS, I, p. clxxvi. 70 ALHTS, I, p. 58. Compare the Bannatyne MS lyric, ‘Quhen he was ȝung and cled in grene’ (fol. 107r-v).

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1491 were clad in green and yellow,71 and the king himself sported a coat of ‘kendal grene’ at the Raid of Norham in 1497.72 Yet, while it was usual for a prince to dress in a way befitting his majesty, and to supply his retainers with a livery, typically at Whitsuntide and Yule, the process is reversed at Hart’s court. Indeed, Hart’s main gesture of giving in recognition of service comes at the end of the poem during his deathbed testament, the final confirmation of his degeneracy. In acknowledgment of his past lack of princely liberality, he gives to Fredome a ‘threidbair cloik, sumtyme … thik of wow’ (938). To ‘Vant and Voky’ (boastfulness and vanity) he bequeaths a ‘rown slef’ (947), an extravagantly cut sleeve of the sort that was frequently the object of the moralist’s satire.73 Elsewhere, however, the king dons new garments at the injunction of others, indicating the extent of his powerlessness. Thus, when ȝouthheid provides him with a newfangled livery to replace the dull ‘pallioun’ [cloak] (326) rotten with tears with which Danger has dressed him, Hart emerges reflecting the attire, and misconduct, of his own retainers. ȝouthheid makes him ‘ane courtlie cote, / Als grene as gers, with goldin stremis bricht / Broudin about’ (329–31). This ‘wourthy weid’ (333) is a copy of ȝouthheid’s own highly symbolic and opulent ‘cloik, / … browdin all with lustie levis grene’ (154), which, later in the poem, is appropriated by Fresche Delyte, before fading into a ‘Thriftles, threidbair’ (503) rag, in imitation of youth’s transience. In addition, ȝouthheid gives Hart a vibrant ‘wysar’ or mask ‘payntit … ruby reid and pairt of quhyt amang’ (333–4). This mask is said to be ‘fassonit … all wrang’ (336) by Heaviness, and so perhaps gives the king a fortune-like face, one side smiling, the other crying. In this carnival camouflage the young king becomes an epitome of folly. Hart’s costume perhaps recalls the colourful attire recorded in the Treasurer’s Accounts for the court entertainers and fools of the period such as ‘Sande Fwle’ and Curry, suggesting just how un-kingly Hart’s behaviour is.74 Indeed, Conscience later refers to the conduct of Hart’s servants as ‘buirding’ (559) or jesting, and Reason condemns his ‘ȝoung folk seruandis’ as ‘bot fulis’ (654), confirming that the king has indeed become a Rex Stultorum figure. This moment is perhaps echoed in Lyndsay’s Satyre, where Chastity and Verity help Rex Humanitas to understand that his courtiers have beguiled him and played him ‘the glaiks’ (1879) – that is, taken him for a fool. In preparation for the consummation of his love, Hart dresses himself in an ‘amouris clok’ (412). But far from marking the resurgence of his supremacy, the episode merely shows the completeness of Hart’s subjection to Will. Indeed the whole incident is said to be ‘devysit’ by his attendants, ‘Loue, Desyre and Lust’ (409). With his colourful mask, clothing, and folly-like appearance, and the collusion of his errant companions, the verb used to describe the king’s dressing of himself for the occasion, ‘disgysit’ (411), is highly appropriate. As well as carrying the negative 71 ALHTS, I, p. 165. 72 ALHTS, I, p. 340. 73 G.R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, (Cambridge, 1926), p. 123. 74 The ALHTS show the purchase of colourful clothes for the fools Norne, ‘Sande Fwle’, and Curry. ALHTS, I, p. 174; III, pp. 93, 100, 109, 307 etc.

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sense of ‘altered for the worst’, the word is also suggestive of ostentation and masquerading,75 a sense that again refocuses the poem’s mock king imagery, fits the celebratory context of the banquet with the queen and calls to mind to the popularity of disguisings at the Stewart courts, in which the king himself often participated, having mumming robes made for his use.76 The irreverent dressing of a young king as a comic Lord of Misrule figure or mummer also occurs in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. Alexander’s enemy, King Darius of Persia sends ‘certane barnis playokis scornandly’ (4287) to the young conqueror, with an insulting letter in which he accuses him of ‘vaneglore … folie’ and ‘wantones’ (4312–13) and verbally dresses him as a comic counter king or boy bishop, replacing the symbols of high office, variously the mitre and staff of a bishop, or the crown, orb and royal robes of a king, with frivolous playthings and mumming costume. He sends Alexander a gold ‘chaiplet’ ‘Like till ane myter, þat foly sould pretend, / In barnis plais or into desgysing’ (4334–6). He also sends a ‘ball’ or orb which ‘betakynnys play’ (4338), and a golf-staff because ‘The scourge betakynnys chastiment’ to one who must be chastised ‘as ane barne’ (4340–41). Darius finally suggests that Alexander go home to play, ‘Cled as ane fule in-till ane purpure cote’ (4516) who can only ‘conterfete a kingis maiestie’ (4518). Darius’s accusations of Alexander’s wantonness are, of course, unjustified. The young king receives these insults ‘all in gude patience, / For he was sobyr in wisdome and prudence’ (4354–5). In King Hart however, there can be no doubt about our royal protagonist’s persistent folly as he attempts to remain virile. With the arrival of Age, King Hart does adopt ‘Blak and gray’, the colours of his new attendants, much disapproved of by the queen who complains that ‘thir carlis ar nocht courtlie clede’ (739). But rather than signalling the king’s dawning self-awareness and sobriety, the fresh attire is chosen in mourning for his more esteemed companions who faithlessly flee the new regime. Fondly thanking ȝouthheid for ‘gude seruice’ (466), Hart promises For saik of the I will no colour reid Nor lusty quhyt vpone my bodie beir, Bot blak and gray alway quhill I be deid. I will none vther wantoun wedis weir (473–6).

Therefore the first part of King Hart with its narrative of the king’s unsavoury associates, and his adventures in love, depicts youth as a time detrimental to wisdom and self-rule, leaving the individual poorly equipped to face the moral challenges that accompany sexual maturity. ‘ȝouthheid’ is indeed unstable, ‘lous and ay about 75 DOST records the sense of ‘transform, alter for the worst’ for the verb ‘disgyse’. The noun ‘disgisyng’ commonly meant ‘masquerade’ in fifteenth-century Scotland. See DOST, v. ‘disgyse’, 1b); n. ‘disguisyng’; and cf. MED, v. ‘disgisen’, n. ‘disguise’, ger. ‘disgising’. Sponsler also discusses ‘dysgysynges of atyre’ and sumptuary legislation. See Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, pp. 9–14. For references to ‘gysaris’ (mummers) performing before the Scottish king, see ALHTS, I, p. 184. 76 See Louise Olga Fradenburg, City, Marriage, Tournament: Arts of Rule in Late Medieval Scotland (Madison, Wisconsin, 1991), p. 175; ALHTS, III, p. 249.

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waverand’ (277) and the Strength and Beauty associated with it regard Conscience as a ‘fo’ (719) with whom they cannot cohabit.77 However, the poem problematically presents this course of events as largely unavoidable, for Nature herself is the main obstacle to the king’s youthful self-governance. King Hart’s narrative reveals the disturbing extent to which personal morality is governed by forces essentially beyond the individual’s control. In political terms therefore, foresight, wisdom, conscience and reason, are inevitably exiles from the households of young kings. Even more pessimistically, however, the poem goes on to represent self-governance in maturity as similarly elusive. Indeed, Nature is also seen to dictate a predetermination to disorder in the grown man: youthful misrule and geriatric decline are both unavoidable, leaving little room in between for sagacity and abstemiousness. Conscience is ‘of kyn and blude’ (610) to Hart, but so is the less desirable Decrepitus (a personification of physical decline and senility), who ‘socht king Hart, for he full weill him kend’ (883). To stress this naturalness, Hart’s life is imagined poignantly both in terms of the seasons and the passage of a single day. It is only ‘morrowingtyde’ (433) when Age arrives with his ‘branchis braid out bayr’ (514) but by the time that Reason and Wit arrive at the king’s gate the day has drawn ‘neir the nicht’ (579). At last the urgency of Hart’s need to reform is expressed by Reason: ‘Schir king, I reid ȝe ryse. / Thair is ane grit pairt of this fayr day run’ (761–2). Age creeps up on the wanton king unannounced, much to Hart’s annoyance: ‘It dois me noy, be God, in bone and blude, / That he suld cum sa sone. Quhat haist had he!’ (453–4). Conscience laments Hart’s faded appearance: ‘Quhair is thy garment grene and gudlie hew? / And thy fresche face þat ȝouthheid to the maid?’ (565–6). Heaviness also has ‘meikill mervale’ of the king’s face ‘That changeit is lyk ane winter blast’ (787–8).78 The reports of these characters are conventional in their depiction of the physical blight of age, but they also have a specular function, Conscience urging that his monarch hold up a mirror to his condition: ‘Richt fayne wald I with mirrour it war mesit’ (631).79 The uncovering of Hart’s face from beneath the ‘visar’ of youth therefore seems to promise a revelation of his true identity, hitherto ‘disgysit’ (411) with fleshy pleasures: his unmasking is in stark contrast to Dame Plesance’s appearance in the latter stages of the poem, ‘hir face hid with ane silk’ (684).80

77 In Ratis Raving, the same incompatibility of youthful attributes and reasoned faculties is acknowledged: ‘bewte’ is ‘fyrst in place and fyrst away’ before ‘scho met with full resone’ (1278–81). 78 Plesance’s distaste at Hart’s grey hair (‘Hir face scho wryit about for propir teyne’, 520) is reminiscent of May’s dismay at January’s advances in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, Canterbury Tales IV, lines 1845–6, and Florent’s response to his loathly bride in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, I, lines 1781–4. 79 For analogues see Shorter Poems, p. 234; and Joanna Martin, ‘Readings of John Gower’s Confessio Amantis in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University (2002), p. 307. 80 Dame Plesance’s veil is perhaps worn in mourning. However, ostentatious headgear of all sorts provoked the disapprobation of preachers and legislators. See Owst, Literature and Pulpit, p. 401. A sumptuary law passed by the Edinburgh Parliament in 1457 stipulates that

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As soon as Age arrives at Hart’s court, Conscience comes ‘cryand our the wall’ (522). Problematically therefore it is not Hart’s own choice to invite Conscience’s return and nor is it he who admits his advisor into the castle. Rather, we learn that it is the king who has ‘hald … in exile’ (523) Conscience, keeping Wantwyt in his stead.81 The poet makes the political as well as personal implications of Conscience’s return explicit. Blaming the king for wasting time, Conscience passes the resonant judgement that Hart’s problems are due to the ‘ȝong Counsale’ that was in him ‘sa lang … seasit’ (629), and the ‘wickit counsalouris’ (557) that, as a result, ran his household. A similar judgement is passed on Lyndsay’s Rex Humanitas, who is said to be ‘effeminate’, ‘gydit be Dame Sensualitie’, and ‘with young counsall intoxicate’ (1121–3). However Hart objects to Conscience’s analysis and points out that it was Nature who ‘gaif to me ȝouthheid, first seruitour’ (602) and Wantonness, in whose ‘warde, … tutourschip and cure’ (604) he was nurtured. Other members of Hart’s youthful retinue also fiercely defend the naturalness of their behaviour: as ‘Delyuernes’ (Agility) protests, ‘Trow ȝe þat I sall ly heir in to hyde / This wourthy craft þat Nature to me gaif?’ (485–6). It is thus Nature not he, who ‘did mis’ (600). He complains that he ‘followit counsale alway for the best’ (598) and accuses Conscience of being a ‘counsalour sle’ (615) for staying away so long: Off my harme and drerie indigence, Gif þair be oucht amys, me think, parde, That ȝe ar caus verray of my offence (617–19).

To settle his dispute with Conscience, King Hart invites Reason to arbitrate between them. But somewhat surprisingly, this sage counsellor legislates that experiences such as the king’s are essential for the formation of man’s moral maturity, also agreeing that like the governorship of the rival faction of youth, Conscience’s self-defence (‘My terme was set by ordour naturall’, 637) is valid. Reason asks, ‘Quha gustis sweit and feld nevir of the sowre, / Quhat can he say? How may he seasoun iuge?’ (657–8). Indeed, Reason’s lesson that ‘barnis ȝoung suld lerne at auld mennis sculis’ (656) is also founded on the assumption that experience, rather than scholarly instruction, generates the fullness of wisdom and self-knowledge. Conscience confidently promises the king that ‘With help of Wisdome … / I sall reforme ȝow’ (644–5). However, Hart’s confrontation with his trio of advisors also suggests that even conventional ‘advice to princes’ texts may not be enough to facilitate change after such a dissolute start. Indeed, that Conscience’s sermonizing to Hart is described as ‘chydand’ (577), either reproaching, scolding or quarrelling, invites us from the start to be doubtful about its efficacy. This verb has rather negative connotations in near contemporary texts, being used, for example, of the self-absorbed and self-ignorant complaints of Henryson’s Orpheus and Cresseid. The rest of the advice-giving episode in King Hart is highly metatextual. Reason’s lesson on the importance of royal ‘mesour and treuth’ (652), subjects central to speculum principis ‘na woman’ should ‘cum to þe kirk nor mercat wt hir face musalyt or couerit þt scho may not be kende …’, APS, II, p. 49. 81 This is another precursor of Lyndsay’s Satyre where the vices keep Good Counsel exiled from court.

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literature, is derived from the official ‘rollis’ he brings with him ‘raithlie to … reid’ (648).82 When he has delivered his ‘sentence’ (650), Wisdom then issues a ‘wourthy document’ (670) that will ideally help the king to ‘forbeyr / The work of vice’ (671–2). It urges Hart to allow ‘Foirsicht’ a place at court, and, if his ‘cuntre’ is to be ‘all weill ȝemit’ (676), to know his friends and foes amongst his servants. That Wisdom’s text is described as a ‘document’ foregrounds its formal, instructional character, giving it the legalistic connotations that are particular to Older Scots.83 For example, Kk.1.5’s version of The Thewis of Gud Women also describes itself as a ‘document’ which is of crucial importance in filling the void of wisdom left by youth: ‘ȝouthed ay inclynis to wyce’ (209), and so ‘ȝonge lordis ar put to cur [tutorship] / quhill wysdome cum thaim be natur, / Or ellis throw documentis ore age / To gouerne weill thare heritage’ (213–16). The advisory texts of Reason and Wisdom in King Hart, produced specially for the king’s reformation, thus explicitly place themselves in the category of the conduct book or speculum principis text. Indeed, Reason’s statement that ‘That is my scule to all þat list to leyr’ (666) is not far removed from the introductory admonitions standard in courtesy manuals.84 It is telling that in King Hart, even after the onset of age, such instruction remains essential in lieu of true moral maturity. Wisdom thus urges Hart to Schape for sum governance, Sen fayr dame Plesance on hir wayis ar went. In ȝour last dayis ȝe may ȝour self avance (769–71).

However, despite this sound advice, Hart’s moral reformation is never completed, and his three advisors fail to become authoritative figures within the poem. Prescribed moral texts are of no use to those who have no wish to learn. The pull of the elderly Hart’s passion remains strong, and the concupiscent and irascible aspects of his character unyielding. Factionalism is still rife at court, Dame Plesance acknowledging ‘Eis’, rather than Conscience, as ‘ane gouernour of ouris’ (685). Hart is seen to have ‘turnit abak’ (721) on Conscience in an attempt to outwit his advisors and sustain his liaison with the queen. He promises his beloved that, Thocht Conscience and Wisdome me to keip Be cunning both, I sall thame weill begyle. For trewlie, quhen thai ar gone to sleip, 82 On the association of the roll primarily with official records and documents, see OED, n. ‘roll’. Æsop carries ‘Ane roll of paper’ in Henryson’s ‘Lion and the Mouse’ (Morall Fabillis, 1356). All references to Henryson’s works are to Robert Henryson: The Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1981), pp. 3–110. 83 DOST, n. ‘document’, senses 1) –2) and 3b). Cf. Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scots Buke of Phisnomy and Sir Gilbert Hay’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 54 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 1–44. (21–2, fn. 71). In his dedication to the Meroure of Wyssdome, Ireland thus addresses James IV to suggest that ‘þi hienes suld tak tent to this document’, see Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, ed. Charles J. MacPherson, STS, 2nd Ser., 19, (Edinburgh and London, 1926), p. 13, lines 16–17. 84 Compare IMEV 1920 or IMEV 4152.

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I salbe heir within ane bony quhyle My solace sall I sleylies thus our-syle. Richt sall nocht rest me alway with his rewle (729–34).

Only when Dame Plesance finally deserts Hart, does the king heed the advice of Conscience, Wisdom and Reason and return to his own castle: ‘The king hes harde thair counsale at the last / And halelie assentit to thair saw’ (777–8). Yet it soon becomes apparent that this homecoming does not mark a significant moral progression or signal a period of sagacious and contemplative old age. Hart’s castle never becomes what Henryson calls a ‘strang castell / Of gud deidis’ (Morall Fabillis, 2966–7) in preparation for death. Rather Hart sinks into idleness, and is attended once again by the treacherous servants of his youth. Most disturbingly, ‘Desyre wes dalie at the chalmer dure, / And Ielousie wes never of his presence’ (809–10) and Schir Eis is ‘Best lovit with the king’ (816). As the poet of Ratis Raving observes, ‘eild’ is ‘wmquhill led with lichory’ (1446, 1449), the lordship of the self eluding one in maturity as well as youth: … ay the eldar that þow bee, The mar the vyce encouerys the, and makis the bot a kepar knawin quhat þow suld lord be of thin awin (1376–9).

Even though Conscience was briefly Hart’s porter, the task of doorman soon falls to a less desirable watchman, Ire,85 and the rolls and documents of Wisdom and Reason are replaced by a new, less arduous courtly pastime, the ‘taill’ (808) telling of Sin.86 The regrets that Hart expresses now are not at his poor behaviour in the past, but at his losses, that he has ‘fresche ȝouthheid and his fallowis tynt’ (792). As Sir Richard Maitland observes, with a pun worthy of King Hart, ‘Ageit men sould Iois in morall telis / And nocht in talis’ (8–9),87 but Hart shows little inclination to act with the sagacity befitting his years.88 Finally, Hart’s reformers relinquish all efforts to order or defend the king’s ‘hous’ (863). Initially, Conscience felled Sin with one ‘dunt’ (537), but in the tumultuous activity of the later stages of the poem the struggle becomes progressively difficult, and the king’s sagacious counsellors slide into impotence and senility. Wisdom is too busy chatting to Wirschip to notice the threatening approach of ‘Decrepitus’ and his ‘hiddous ost’ (850–51). After the fierce attack on the king, ‘Ressoun forfochtin wes and ewill drest, / And Wisdome wes ay wanderand to the dure’ (889) while ‘Conscience lay doun ane quhyle to rest’ (890–91). The castle begins to fall down in

85 Ratis Raving records the tendency for ‘malice’ to be ‘portar’ (1485) during old age. 86 The emergence of Sin as tale teller to the king implies that advice has been put aside for more popular entertainments: the ALHTS record numerous payments made to ‘tail tellaris’, for example in 1506, or in 1490 to ‘Wallass that tellis the geistis to the king’, ALHTS, III, p. 192; I, p. 176. 87 DOST, ‘tail’, n. sense 5. 88 See A.A. MacDonald, ‘“Sir Richard Maitland and William Dunbar”: Textual Symbiosis and Poetic Individuality’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’, pp. 134–49 (145–6).

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representation of the king’s worn body, and of the likely disintegration of the country of a king who cannot rule himself, let alone others. The outright failure of Hart’s good counsellors is particularly disturbing when compared to the outcome of Dunbar’s allegorical dream vision ‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay’. In this poem the narrator witnesses the arrival of the company of king ‘Nobilnes’ (an allegorical representation of James IV), and is soon attended by the ladies Distres, Hevines and Langour, personifications which seem to represent his anxiety about the state of the court. Nobilnes is concerned at the narrator’s gloom and sends Confort and Pleasance to give him solace, as in King Hart, participating in the pursuit of pleasure amongst his followers. Yet Nobilnes, unlike Hart, is then aided by Persaveing (perceptiveness) and heeds the advice of Discretioun, Witt, Considerance (consideration), Ressoun and Temperance. They explain to Nobilnes that the ‘lecheing’ (50) of the narrator, who ‘lange hes bene ane servand’ (67) and has never used flattery to gain royal favour, lies with him alone. Their progress is somewhat interrupted by the undesirable courtly presences of Blind Effectioun, Inoportunitie, and the collector of plural benefices, ‘Schir Johne Kirkpakar’ (86) who all assert their influence over the king. However, the poem ends with Patience urging the narrator to have ‘guid cheir’ (106) and faith in his prince’s ‘nobill intent’ (108). Although Dunbar does not show us the court reformed, he does leave us with the sense that even if Nobilnes has been susceptible to bad influences in the past, his court is able to accommodate the virtues of reason and good judgement. King Hart ends with the making of the protagonist’s testament. In the writing of this deed Hart expresses bitter regret for his body ruined by levity and indulgence, but also some enduring fondness for his faithless servants and the pleasures of his ‘barneheid’ (907). Its tone is ambiguous and it was perhaps for this reason that John Pinkerton thought these stanzas full of ‘absurdity and trash’, observing that ‘the Testament disgraces the poem, and it would have been as proper perhaps to omit’.89 However, the literary testament was a popular genre in the late medieval period, and Hart’s will is one of many near-contemporary Scottish examples that exploit the conventions and idiom of legal wills for poetic, moral and philosophical reasons.90 Surviving legal testaments are documents of devotional as well as material importance, allowing for the itemization and disposal of goods, often for charitable purposes, and for the confirmation of the testator’s spiritual health. Literary testaments both imitate the technical format of these texts and exploit the opportunity they afford for complaint, self-assessment, and moral exempla.91 89 Pinkerton, Ancient Scotish Poems, II, p. 378. 90 Julia Boffey, ‘Lydgate, Henryson and the Literary Testament’, MLQ, 53.1 (1992), pp. 41–56; Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 195–8; Janet Hadley Williams, ‘“We had the Ky and thai gat bot the glaikis”: Catching the echoes in Duncan Laideus’ Testament’, in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh, 2005), pp. 346–69. 91 For near-contemporary examples, see the testament of Sir David Sinclair of Swynbrocht, Tyngwell (1506), and the testament of Alexander Suthyrland of Dunbeath (1456), both in The Bannatyne Miscellany ed. D. Laing, 3 vols, Bannatyne Club (1827–55), III, pp. 107–10, and pp. 89–97. Also see the testament of George Ker in Selkirk Protocol Books 1511–1547, ed. T. Maley and W. Elliot, Stair Society, 40 (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 9–10. Other Scottish literary testaments attend to the speaker’s dignified exit from the world. Lyndsay’s

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Hart’s testament loosely adopts some of the idioms of real wills, but is as notable for what it neglects as for what it includes. While using the conventional testator’s formulae of itemization and bequest (‘To … I leif’, ‘beir to’ etc), the old king’s testament strikingly omits all mention of his spiritual state and the afterlife, and all requests for mercy, defiantly focusing instead on the corporeal. Indeed, the King Hart poet deploys his protagonist’s last will as a demonstration of the king’s reluctant attitude to moral self-scrutiny. The self-absorption of Hart’s concluding words is far removed, for example, from the repentance of Henryson’s Cresseid whose testament is prefaced by her self-accusation of ‘fleschelie foull affectioun’ (558) and ‘vnstabilnes’ (568). In Lyndsay’s Testament of the Papyngo, the bird’s complaint to false fortune, her sorrow that ‘Vaine hope … my resoun haith exilit’ (194), and shame that she has rejected ‘Prudent counsell’ (199) for ambition, appetite and fantasy, has a social efficacy similar to that of Cresseid’s speech, grounding her address to the king and court in a sense of her personal exemplariness. Even the fictional Duncan Laideus, in Duncan Laideus alias Makgregouris’ Testament (c.1552), so proud of his wickedness elsewhere in the poem, finally tells his readers to take ‘exampill’ of his sorry end, and ‘Traist not in fortune with her fickill quheill’ but ‘dreid youre God’ and obey ‘Youre prince and reularis’.92 Such conscious selfpresentation as exemplum is not Hart’s concern. The closest Scottish analogue to the black comedy and pessimism of the testament in King Hart is Dunbar’s macaronic poem ‘I maister Andro Kennedy’, a text also found in the Maitland Folio (XLIV). The degenerate speaker of this testament, possibly intended as a fictional embodiment of one of James IV’s physicians,93 leaves his soul to remain in his ‘lordis wyne cellar’ (20), and his fickle heart to his lady, ‘Consorti meo Jacobe’ (44). He is as spiritually unconcerned as the dying Hart. With a more gentle satire, Lyndsay’s The Testament of Squyer Meldrum shows its testator recalling his lusty youth by bequeathing his heart ‘To fresche Venus’ (85), and bidding farewell to his ‘Sweit hart’ (238) and to the ladies that he served in his ‘youth, with ardent besines’ (227).94 But intractable sexuality is even more of a theme in Hart’s testament. In his will, the old king revels in sensuality, remembering ‘fayr dame Plesance’ with his ‘prowde palfray, Vnsteidfastnes’, saddled with ‘Fikkilnes’ (897–9), a gift in memory of a passionate love affair.95 King Hart also reconstitutes the order of his youthful castle by leaving Grein Appetyte as a servant for Bewtie, ȝouthheid as a companion for Wantounness and a casket (‘fostell’, 906) of fantasy for Grein Lust. His decaying body is distributed with fondness to Gluttony, to Rere Supper who has made his ‘stomak with hait lustis leip’ (920), and Deliuerance who the king admits has ‘oft Squyer Meldrum foregrounds his innate nobility and piety (29–32) and Henryson’s Cresseid makes provision for her soul (587–8). 92 The Black Book of Taymouth: With Other Papers from the Breadalbane Charter Room, ed. Cosmo N. Innes (Edinburgh, 1855), p. 164. 93 Though see Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 51–3; Poems of William Dunbar, II, p. 328. 94 In Sir David Lyndsay, pp. 174–82. 95 The association of riding and sexual intercourse was well established, and here colours Hart’s bequest. Cf. MED, v. ‘riden’.

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tymes done me gude / Quhen I wes ȝoung’ (921–2).96 His broken bones, (‘the bewteis of the fute bale’ as another poem in the Folio observes),97 provide wistful verification of his past sporting pleasures at ‘ball and boul’ (924). The king’s remembrance of ‘Covatice’ (946) in the will recalls the traditional persistence of this sin in morality plays such as Everyman. Most revealing is Hart’s final and defiant toast to his past bawdiness in which he offers his unmistakably phallic ‘brokin speir’ (959) to Danger. His only remorse comes in his bequest of his Conscience to Chaistite’s cleansing tears, for she alone remains ‘clene of Lustis curst experince’ (936). King Hart’s narrative of a minor who never really grows into a good ruler thus lacks the optimistic belief in royal and personal reformation found, for example, in Lyndsay’s Satyre, where Rex Humanitas is reconciled to the purposes of Correctioun, Gude Counsell, Verite and Chastite by the end of the play. It is possible that, like much late fifteenth-century Scottish literature, King Hart does not emanate directly from court circles but from a magnate, laird or burgess household.98 Such an environment may have given the poet a context in which the conduct of rulers, as well as individual morality, was of concern, but where there was the freedom to explore difficult moral questions rather than the pressure of having to confidently predict the emergence of good kingship from the most unpromising of circumstances for a court or royal audience. However, whatever the shadowy facts of its authorship, original audience, and circulation, King Hart still held significance for the Maitland family in the late sixteenth century, whose members were prominent royal servants during the reigns of James V, Mary Queen of Scots and James VI, and it is surely in recognition of its complex discussion of morality, love and kingship that it was chosen for the family’s anthology. The Folio has attracted scholarly attention primarily as a collection of Dunbar’s works, forming ‘the single most important repository’ of his poems.99 The Folio also contains works by Henryson, Kennedy, Arbuthnot, William Stewart, and Scott, as well as a number of anonymous fifteenth-century Scottish poems and two English works which were well circulated north of the Border.100 Most importantly, however, the Folio serves as a collection of forty poems by Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586), a lord of session, privy counsellor and keeper of the Great Seal.101 Many of Sir Richard’s poems are highly topical, concerned with contemporary political events or his family’s fortunes.102 The folio also contains some poems addressed to Sir Richard (including two epitaphs for him), and notes relating to important family 96 The disposal of body parts is a popular element of the literary testament. Compare Lyndsay’s Testament of the Papyngo, lines 1088–1136. 97 ‘Brissit brawnis and brokin banis’ (LXXVII). Pinkerton prints this as poem as a footnote to stanza lxiii of his edition of King Hart. Anceint Scotish Poems, II, p. 379. 98 Hart is referred to as a ‘lairde’ (a prince or overlord, and, from the fourteenth century, also a lesser landowner) at line 40. See DOST, n. ‘Lard, Laird’, senses 1–3. 99 Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, p. 12. 100 Chaucer’s Lak of Steadfastnes (CLVI), which is also in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fol. 67r), and Lydgate’s ‘Thingis in kind desyris thingis lyk’ (LV), which is in the Bannatyne Manuscript (folio 79r-v), and was printed by Chepman and Myllar. 101 MacDonald, ‘Sir Richard Maitland’, pp. 134–49. 102 Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (41).

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events.103 The book seems to have originated in ‘family piety’ towards Sir Richard: its continued importance to the family is suggested by the fact that it remained in their hands until the end of the seventeenth century and was apparently being added to for some of this time.104 The Maitland Folio offers a valuable interpretive context for King Hart. The poem was copied by the scribe responsible for penning the largest section of the manuscript, and indeed, is the longest text in the codex – hardly a casual addition to this family book.105 Unlike the Bannatyne Manuscript with which it shares many texts, the Folio is not divided into clearly defined sections in which poems are grouped by theme.106 Yet many of the works included in the Folio, are, like King Hart, concerned with enduring philosophical and moral themes, while also offering more topical perspectives on kingship, royal minority, and surviving the dangerous temptations of court life. For example, King Hart’s perennial themes of the power of sexual desire, the passage of time and personal loss, find many echoes in the Folio. Poems such as Henryson’s debate between youth and age: ‘Quhen fair flora goddes of the flouris’ (LVII) or the anonymous complaint on the loss of youth (‘Quhen phebus in the ranie clude’, LIX) both address the miseries of age and loss of sexual desire. Conversely, Maitland’s poem ‘Pas tyme with godlie cwmpanye’ (CXIII) or Kennedy’s ‘At matine hour in middis of the nicht’ (LXXI), discuss the virtues of wise old age that Hart never cultivates. Maitland’s ‘Amang folyis ane grit folye I find’ (XXXI), mocks the senex amans like king Hart: ‘Efter mid age, the Luifar Lyis full lang / Quhone þat his hair is turnit Lyart gray’ (17–18).107 Many poems in the codex, like Scott’s ‘ȝe blindit luiffaris luke’, also discourse on the unhappiness and folly attendant upon physical love, and some (including Kennedy’s ‘Leiff luif my luif nor langir I it lyk’, CXVII) expound the sinfulness of sensual living. The large number of poems by Dunbar in the Folio helps to define the collection as being concerned with public life and how this is shaped by private morality.108 The theme of court corruption that King Hart shares with several of Dunbar’s works is pervasive in the manuscript. Maitland’s ‘My sone in court gif thow pleisis remane’ 103 Such notes are written on p. 256 of the manuscript. 104 Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘The Earliest Texts of Dunbar’, in Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy, York Manuscript Conferences, 2 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 183–98 (191); Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (40–41, 45). Sir Richard’s daughter, Helen Maitland, whose name appears after King Hart (p. 256), seems to have owned the book for a time. Both the Maitland Folio and Quarto manuscripts were in the hands of Sir Richard’s great-grandson, John, Duke of Lauderdale at the time of their purchase by Pepys. 105 The poem was copied as part of the scribe’s second campaign. Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (42). 106 Sally Mapstone, ‘Introduction: William Dunbar and the Book Culture of SixteenthCentury Scotland’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’, pp. 1–23 (12–13). On the Maitland exemplars see Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (43 –4). 107 Maitland’s poem is discussed in Evelyn S. Newlyn, ‘Images of Women in SixteenthCentury Literary Manuscripts’, in Women in Scotland, c.1100–c.1750, ed. Elizabeth Ewan, and Maureen M. Meikle (East Linton, 1999), pp. 56–66 (60–62). 108 Boffey, ‘Maitland Folio’, pp. 40–50 (43).

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(XIV), a reworking of Dunbar’s ‘To dwell in court, my freind, gif that thow list’, stresses the need for self-governance for those in royal service.109 It warns its young reader against succumbing to the evils of court life, the like of which are enumerated in Dunbar’s ‘Schir ȝe haue mony seruitouris’ (LXVIII), ‘Be dyuers wayis and operatiounis’ (CXL), Stewart’s ‘Rolling In my Remeberance’ (CXXXV), or the anonymous verse on sexual promiscuity, ‘The vse of court so weill I knaw’ (LIII). Like this last poem Maitland’s ‘Quhair is the blythnes þat hes bein’ (XXI) also pauses to condemn the ‘wantoun vane arrayis’ favoured by so many who ‘in the court wald gang so gay’ (50–3). Sir Richard’s warnings are repeated in the anonymous courtesy poem, ‘My sone gif thow to the court will ga’ (XLVII) which presents its teachings as essential for the edification of the young who are to be exposed to such corruption. Many other poems in the Folio are directly concerned with princely governance. The fifteenth-century poem, De Regimine Principum (XXXIX) one of the longest texts in the Folio, offers extensive advice on how a king should rule, rewarding the worthy, punishing the wicked, ordering the royal household, and cultivating personal virtue. Many of Maitland’s poems on social disorder, amorality, and legal corruption, allude directly to the national insecurity brought by regency governments and young rulers. In his ‘O Lord our syn hes done the tene’ (CI) Maitland repeatedly laments that ‘oure court is neuer stable’ (80), warning Scotland’s lords to put aside personal differences because no one knows ‘how lang þat þai sall stand / To haue þe reule of quene or king / And specialie quhone þai ar ȝing’ (83–5). His poem, ‘O hie eternale god of micht’ (XV), expresses similar anxiety about having a young head of state. The poem asks for divine guidance for the young Mary Queen of Scots, ‘This realme to gyde and to defend / In iustice’ (7–8). It also prays for the ‘quein regent’ (11) Mary of Guise and ‘all staitis and degre’ (91). It depicts Scotland as threatened by its own sinful churchmen, treacherous lords, avaricious lawyers, prodigal merchants, lascivious ladies and oppressed innocents.110 Maitland’s last work in the manuscript (and indeed the final poem in the collection, preceding the closing epitaphs) addresses another young monarch, this time James VI, ‘Our Souerane lord in to thy tendir aige’ (CLXXX). It advises James to heed ‘guid iust men and seige’ (3) who will ‘gif ane faythfull counsell till ane king’ (5). Above all the poem emphasizes how the king must ‘do na thing in [his] minoritie / be persuasioun of ewill teillis’ (61–2) that he will regret in his ‘maioritie’ (63), advice that the wilfully misgoverned protagonist of King Hart never heeds.

109 Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 141–2; MacDonald, ‘Sir Richard Maitland’, pp. 134–49 (139–40). 110 A.A. MacDonald, ‘Scottish Poetry of the Reign of Mary Stewart’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham D. Caie, R.J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone and Kenneth Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 44–61.

Epilogue

Poetry and the Minority of James V I This book has been concerned with a body of poetry from the fifteenth century for which (with only a few exceptions) names of authors and immediate contexts of composition are largely unrecoverable. However, it concludes with a group of closely related writers whose identities, lives and connections with the royal court are more clearly verifiable. These writers both draw on the earlier Scottish tradition of writing on royal amorousness, and generate new directions in the poetic explorations of this subject. The Scottish poets of the 1520s and 1530s, David Lyndsay, John Bellenden and William Stewart, were themselves court servants and administrators with direct experience of the difficult and variable politics of minority rule. However, before their writings on kingship and love are explored, it is necessary to pause over the poet who bridges the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – William Dunbar. Much has been said in the foregoing chapters of James IV’s reputation for amorousness, and the possible literary responses to it, and it was Dunbar, in receipt of payments as a court ‘servitour’ in the first decade of the sixteenth century, who was best placed to observe the king’s conduct. He addresses the issue of his king’s amorousness, and, more generally, the subject of sexual misconduct at court, with a mixture of banter and admonition, and often with a great deal of obliqueness.1 The most striking of the poems that deal with this subject are a group of texts which relate to James’s marriage. However, the puzzling ‘This hinder nicht in Dunfermling’ also deserves some attention here. ‘This hinder nycht in Dunfermeling’, introduced by George Bannatyne as the ‘wowing of the king quhen he wes in Dunfermeling’, takes the form of a beast fable in which a tod (or fox) makes ‘gud game’ (4) with a lamb and, interrupted by a wolf, takes refuge inside the skin of his ‘silly’ (59) – both innocent and foolishly complicit – companion. The encounter is described with plentiful word play and its sexual suggestiveness is unmistakable: the tod embraces the lamb’s ‘bony body sweit’ (8), grips ‘hir abowt the west’ (29) and ‘wald haif riddin hir lyk ane rame’ (6).2 This ‘lang-taild beist’ (17) is a ‘lusty’ wooer, familiar with the rhetoric of the persistent but disingenuous lover: he ‘askit grace’ (12), and ‘spak full fair, thocht he was fals’ (37), decorously promising not to touch her ‘prenecod’ or pincushion,

1 On the near ‘impertinence’ of Dunbar’s intimacy with the king see Priscilla Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar (Oxford, 1992), p. 81. 2 The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols, ASLS (Glasgow, 1998), II, pp. 470–71, on the sexual meanings of ‘todlit’ (11), ‘tribbill … bace’ (19), ‘Strikkin’ (66).

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a well attested euphemism for the female genitalia.3 She is a ‘morsall of delyte’ – literally ‘yung and tender’ meat for a fox, who has no appetite for the flesh of old ewes, and figuratively in this ambiguous fable world, an object of sexual fulfilment.4 The poem’s final image of the fox creeping into the lamb’s skin, is a disturbing representation of (sexual) consumption. The poem’s narrator repeatedly distances himself from the events he relates. The whole episode is presented as hearsay (‘To me wes tawld …’, 2) and almost too extraordinary – ‘ane ferly cace’ (refrain) – to be believable. Yet, towards the end of the poem he tells us that he will ‘no lesingis’ put in verse (43) and distinguishes himself from other ‘jangleris’ (44). The poem derives a highly ambiguous status from such narratorial ambivalence. It is paradoxically presented as a truthful reporting of something beyond the bounds of veracity, yet deliberately refuses topicality in its appropriation of the language and stereotypes of fable. As such the poem invites the reader to resolve its riddle and to ponder such a remarkable event, which has apparently occurred in such proximity to them both in time (‘this hinder nycht’), and geographical location (the royal burgh of Dunfermline). Bannatyne’s copy of the poem probably post-dates the composition of the work by at least half a century, and the poem is not connected in the Maitland or Reidpeth manuscripts with the sexual adventures of a king. His presentation of the poem as relating to the sexual exploits of James IV, who was well known for entertaining mistresses, had some longevity amongst later readers.5 However, recent critics such as Lyall and Bawcutt have sought to disengage the poem from its manuscript rubric. They suggest that the poem more likely refers to some gossip of court scandal or clerical misconduct, the details of which may never be fully recovered.6 But, although the attributions found in the Bannatyne Manuscript are often inaccurate, its scribe clearly enjoyed writing descriptive and at times creative titles for the poems he anthologized, exhibiting his attentive reading habits or sensitivity to poetic form. Indeed Bannatyne’s rubric to Dunbar’s poem is not without interpretive subtlety, picking up upon the disparity of size, power and nature, between the fable lovers it describes. These inequalities of power and agency between the protagonists is explicitly stated in the text, as well as being reinforced by the language of attack used of the fox’s advances and lamb’s demurring (‘girnand’, ‘race’, ‘defend hir’), and underscored by the disturbing lack of protection offered to the lamb by the bystanding yews. Furthermore, Bannatyne’s entitling of the poem thus may also suggest his awareness of Dunbar’s other depictions, sometimes playful, sometimes disturbing, and often highly ambiguous, of amorous misconduct and private corruption in Edinburgh and at the court of James IV. A poem similar to ‘This hinder nycht’ in its disquieting sexual content and deliberately oblique suggestions of contemporaneity is ‘Madam, ȝour men said thai wald ryd’ (found in the Maitland Folio and Reidpeth 3 DOST, n. sense 3b. 4 DOST, n. sense 1b. 5 See Ian S. Ross, William Dunbar (Leiden, 1981), pp. 166–8. 6 R.J. Lyall, ‘Dunbar’s Beast Fable’, SLJ, 1 (1974), 17–28 (24); Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 307–7.

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Manuscripts), which is thought to be an address to Margaret Tudor, the queen of James IV.7 Although the poem’s connection with the queen cannot be verified, the formal term of address with which it opens is appropriate only to be used to women of high rank.8 Dunbar uses it to address the queen in, for example, the refrain of ‘The wardraipper of Venus boure’. The poem seems to concern the activities of the male ‘servitours’, possibly of the queen’s household, on ‘this Fasterennis Ewin’ (2) or Shrove Tuesday, thus on the eve of Lenten sobriety and abstinence. They determine to ‘ryd’, a verb which (as in ‘This hinder nycht’ and King Hart) can suggest copulation as well as travelling on horseback,9 but are kept at home by their wives in order to ‘lib tham of the pockis’ (5). This phrase (which forms the refrain to the poem) is highly ambiguous but seems to have the sense of ‘cure themselves of the pox’ (syphilis)10 or (as in line 15) ‘be sexually active’, the latter perhaps being thought to be a remedy for the disease. Like ‘This hinder nycht’ the poem is dominated by beast fable imagery, and unmistakable double entendre. The men go off to get their fill of ‘Wenus feest’ (7). Indeed, ‘Dam Venus fyre’ has made some ‘sa hard’ (12), and others rampage violently like riotous rams, tearing up the town until they find a ‘pamphelet’ (14) – or loose woman – with whom to satisfy their desires. Yet the ‘pockis’ gradually tame them to impotence so they become like meek lambs or old ewes (‘sarye crockis’, 18). Their fighting cocks are distinctly lacking in vigour (‘in the fedle preiff thai na cockis’, 8). Those who thought themselves giants are reduced to ‘willing wandis’ (22), an allusion to the wasting effects of the disease. In the last two stanzas of the poem, the narrator’s tone changes from one of mockery to one of admonition, although with discernable resignation, to warn young men from frequenting brothels. Thairfoir, all young men, I you pray, Keip you fra harlottis nycht and day – Thai sall repent quhai with tham yockis – And be war with that perrellous play That men callis libbin of the pockis (31–5)

Dunbar’s other comic addresses to the queen, such as ‘The wardraipper of Venus boure’, and those poems which refer more explicitly to members of her household, such as ‘Sir Jhon Sinclair begowthe to dance’, deploy irony and satire lightly. In the latter, for example, Dunbar caricatures himself amongst a host of flatulent dancers which includes ‘the quenis knycht’ Sinclair, and her wardrobe official James Doig, the ‘quenis Dog’. And in the former poem, the identification of the queen’s chamber with Venus’s bower, and the designation of James Doig as her over-sized lapdog, is highly playful, if also suggestive. Yet, if ‘Madam, ȝour men said thai wald ryd’ is to be interpreted as an account of court wantonness in the company of James IV’s

7 Poems of William Dunbar, II, pp. 354–5. 8 DOST, ‘Madam’, n. sense 1. 9 DOST, ‘Ride’, v., sense 11. 10 Dunbar uses the term ‘Spanyie pockis’ in line 30 which more explicitly refers to a sexually transmitted disease. See DOST, ‘Pok’, n., sense 2.

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‘dame Venus’ then it comes closer to depicting a darker and more decadent court environment. It is striking that Dunbar is most articulate on the subject of James IV’s amorousness when he is writing about the royal marriage or addressing the queen. Most well known of the poems on this subject is ‘Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past’ which is associated with the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, in August 1503. The poem is an adept synthesis of a celebration of the royal union, praise for the new English queen, ‘the ros of most plesance’ (39), and admonition and advice-giving for the king. Before a parliament of animals, birds and flowers, Nature, who occupies the role of true ‘sovereign’ in the poem, calming even Neptune and Eolus, and thus a reminder to James of the temporal limits to his own power, anoints and instructs three heraldic representations of the monarch.11 She first addresses the Lion ‘king of beistis’ (103) reminding him to ‘Exerce justice with mercy and conscience’ (106) and to protect small creatures from those who would oppress them. She then crowns the Eagle ‘king of fowlis’ (120) and again reminds him of the need to treat all justly and to protect the vulnerable. Finally, and in terms quite different from the addresses to the Lion and Eagle, the warlike Thistle is given instruction. Nature advises it to, ‘hald non udir flour in sic denty / As the fresche Ros … / For gife thow dois, hurt is thy honesty (141–3). By ‘honesty’, Nature encompasses courtesy, liberality, truth or fidelity, and also chastity, thus alluding to the ideals of monarchical virtue in the ‘advice to princes’ tradition. In exploiting the polysemy of ‘honesty’ Dunbar thus powerfully reminds his royal reader of the synonymy of the monarch’s public and personal (sexual) virtue. Significantly, Nature’s lesson in fidelity to the rose is also accompanied by a reminder of the importance of royal virtue, wisdom and prudence. Nature tells the Thistle that ‘sen thow art a king, thow be discreit. / Herb without vertew hald nocht of sic pryce, / As herb of vertew and of ordor sweit’ (134–6). Here James is reminded of the importance of discretion – that is prudence, reason and good judgement, the ability to tell the virtuous from those ‘vyle and full of vyce’. Her words also have implications for the Thistle’s own conduct as a king. He too must be a ‘herb of vertew’ rather than one full of ‘churlichenes’ (139). This conclusion to the poem’s instruction articulates the king’s transition to full personal rule and emphasizes the onerous moral as well as governmental responsibilities of the adult ruler. At the end of the poem, Nature calls the rose to be crowned. She ‘of all flouris quene and soverane’ (170) is celebrated for her beauty, her ‘perle’-like (180) purity, royal blood and burgeoning freshness. With rhetoric heavily reminiscent of Marian and Eucharistic lyrics, she is hailed by the ‘commoun voce’12 as their ‘paramour’ (180).13 This ending confirms the poem’s sophisticated configuration of royal love 11 For discussion see Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 94–103. 12 Compare ‘“Welcum, our quein!” the commones gaif ane schout’ (55) in Dunbar’s ‘Blyth Aberdeane, thow beriall of all tounis’. 13 Dunbar’s poem is recalled in Richard Maitland’s celebration of the festivities that greeted the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, ‘The grit blythnes and Ioy inestimabill’ (poem XVI in the Maitland Folio). Maitland figures the queen as the people’s

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in its reproductive and erotic but also political forms. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator was counted amongst the ‘luvaris’ (13) that Aurora greets, his role as loyal subject thus subtlety underscored. Yet his initial distance (he is a ‘Slugird’ (22) reluctant to rise in the ‘busteous’ (34) spring air) also permits him the role of observer and moral commentator on the duties of the monarch, rather than that of sycophant. Eroticism is carefully tempered: before the convening of the parliament, the birds, in a reversal of the aubade, sing to drive away the ‘dully nycht’ that is ‘luvaris fo’ (60) and welcome the comfort of day, hailing Nature and Venus in one breadth. And Margaret as paramour of her people represents their ‘peax’ and ‘plane felicite’ (181), promising concord with Scotland’s old enemy and stability in the form of a future heir, thus reconfiguring royal love as political policy. The near contemporary poems of praise addressed to the queen afford Dunbar other opportunities to raise, albeit subtly, the question of royal amorousness. In ‘Gladethe, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun’, dated by Bawcutt to the early years of the marriage (1503–1507), Dunbar celebrates Margaret as the burgeoning rose who will produce Scotland’s long wished for heir. The praise of the queen’s virtue and the eager anticipation of her fertility (‘plaunt to spring of thi successioun’, 30) serve implicitly as a reminder of James’s long delay in finding a queen and securing the future of the Stewart dynasty, and his keeping of mistresses, such as Marion Boyd, with whom he produced two illegitimate children in the 1490s.14 The witty, petitionary work, ‘Schir, for ȝour grace, bayth nicht and day’, contained uniquely in the Maitland Folio, also combines praise of the queen’s ‘vertew’ (15) and goodness with a commentary on James’s conduct. Although highly playful, the poem imagines how James’s role as a husband and relationship with his queen might influence his role as king and relationship with his subjects. Dunbar suggests that the king, as warlike ‘Thirsill’, should be made ‘soft’ by the ‘mersy of that sweit meik Rose’ (21–2) Queen Margaret and, following her example, recognize and reward virtue. This idea is central to advice to princes writing: a king should only surround himself with the wise and good, and eschew the wicked and greedy. In the refrain to each stanza the supplicant narrator admits that he prays devoutly that the king ‘war Iohne Thomsounis man’, because if he was, and if he could be influenced by his wife’s compassion for down-trodden poets, then Dunbar would receive some advancement, bringing an end to his hard fortune (7). The refrain, as Bawcutt explains, appears to signify ‘a man dominated by his wife’ which later in the sixteenth century became ‘a taunt for a hen-pecked husband’, deriving from a lost ‘Scottish tale or anecdote’ about one John Thomson and his jealous wife.15 But Dunbar also interweaves more flattering chivalric motifs to figure Margaret as queenly intercessor (‘advocat’, 25) who can divert the ruthless ferocity of the king, and James as dedicated to the service of his lady. He imagines Margaret, through her superlative qualities, as winning the ‘wirschip’ (15) or honour of having her king in her service. He then imagines James beloved, anticipates the ‘gude successioun’ that the marriage will produce, and addresses advisory comments to the ‘michtie prince and spous to our maistress’ (55). 14 See Norman MacDougall, James IV, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1997), p. 98. 15 See Poems of William Dunbar, II, pp. 244–5.

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as having ‘vowit to the Swan’ (a reference to the practice of knights making solemn oaths on a swan or peacock)16 to be in her dominion for one year. II Dunbar’s poems on the union of James and Margaret, his addresses to the queen, and accounts of court gossip, find several echoes (and some direct verbal borrowings) in the compositions of Lyndsay, Bellenden and Stewart, who continue to broach the subject of royal amorousness in the context of the minority and early personal rule of James V. James had acceded to the throne as an infant after his father’s death at the disastrous Battle of Flodden in 1513. The ensuing minority government was from the outset characterized by extensive political infighting. Queen Margaret, the king’s mother, had been appointed by James IV’s will as the sole regent but was widely regarded as unsuitable for this role. Until 1516 she was the heir to the English throne, and a year after Flodden she married Archibald Douglas, two factors which lost her the support of the political community in Scotland and consequently any power over her son until 1524.17 In 1515, John Stewart, Duke of Albany, the king’s cousin and heir presumptive, returned from France, on the invitation of the lords, to begin the first of two long periods of regency (1515–17, 1521–24).18 When Albany returned to France in 1524, the Queen Mother, supported by James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, took control of the government once again. By 1525 it was decided by Parliament that the guardianship of the young king should be entrusted to four aristocratic factions, which would each take charge of the government of the realm for a period of three months at a time. However, Archibald Douglas, sixth earl of Angus, failed to relinquish control of James at the end of his allotted quarter in 1526, claiming that at fourteen years of age the king had in fact reached his majority and was therefore responsible for his own decisions. Angus appointed his supporters to key positions in the royal household and remained effectively in control of the government, and James a prisoner for two years, with only unsuccessful challenges to his authority by Arran and Lennox. James escaped from Douglas’s control in 1528, and at the age of sixteen declared that he had reached his majority. The early poems of Lyndsay, and those of Bellenden and Stewart, combine personal reminiscence of this political ‘variance’, as they describe it, with advice to the young king on his political and bodily governance, and counsel to the estates to honour their duties. The youth of the monarch, the quality of his education, the nature of the influences on him, and the direction of his own natural impulses are at 16 On the Scottish circulation of the Voeux du Paon, in which Alexander the Great oversees the union of noble men and women according to their vows on the peacock, see Chapter 3. This work is incorporated (in a much edited form) into The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c.1499) and is translated as The Buik of Alexander (1438). 17 See Louise O. Fradenburg, ‘Troubled Times: Margaret Tudor and the Historians’, in The Rose and the Thistle: Essays on the Culture of Late Medieval and Renaissance Scotland, ed. Sally Mapstone and Juliette Wood (East Linton, 1998), pp. 38–58. 18 See Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, Massachusetts Studies in Modern Culture (Amherst, 1994), p. 20.

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the core of their works. Lyndsay’s Satire of the Thre Estaitis (c.1552) is best known for its examination of how ungoverned youthful royal sensuality can lead to a host of other political abuses. Yet a quarter of a century before the first performance of the play, the themes of royal desire and the dangers of sensuality amongst the political and ecclesiastical elite, are already prominent in Lyndsay’s early writing.19 Lyndsay’s contemporary, John Bellenden, best known for his Scots prose translations of Livy and of Boece’s Chronicles, explores the political consequences of unbridled passion in his poem, The Proheme apon Cosmographe, which is discussed later in this epilogue. Also examined here are some of the works of William Stewart which are concerned with the various dangers of minority rule. In addition to the shared subject matter addressed by these poets, sufficient correspondences of genre and allusion exist between their poems to suggest that they were self-conscious participators in a shared literary culture. III Sir David Lyndsay’s The Answer to the Kingis Flyting is one of the most explicit accounts of amorous kingship to be examined in this book.20 Like many of Lyndsay’s early poems it is addressed directly to the ‘Redoutit roy’ (1), James V, and the title given to the poem in its earliest extant print, that of Henry Charteris, further confirms that its intended readership is royal.21 Also like the earlier poems it advertises its author’s closeness to power, in terms of his position at court, his affection for the king, and his concern for James’s future self- and political rule. Lyndsay had been employed at court since c.1507, and between 1517 and 1523 occupied various offices including that of Usher and Gentleman of the King’s Bedchamber, which brought him into close contact with the royal family.22 As Sarah Carpenter has observed, even before his rise to the important ceremonial court roles of Snowdon Herald (1530) and Lyon King of Arms (1538–42),23 Lyndsay uses his ‘privileged private involvement in the king’s affairs’ in his poetry to offer some perspective on the public business of government.24 The Answer is conventionally dated to c.1535–36, before James’s 19 See R. James Goldstein, ‘Normative Heterosexuality in History and Theory: The Case of Sir David Lindsay of the Mount’, in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohene and Bonnie Wheeler (New York and London, 2000), pp. 349–65 (p. 349). 20 References are to Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 30 (Glasgow, 2000). 21 STC 15658, ‘The Answer quhilk Schir David Lindesay maid to the Kingis Flyting’. 22 On Lyndsay’s role at court see Janet Hadley Williams, ‘David Lyndsay and the Making of King James V’, in Stewart Style. Essays on the Court of James V, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (East Linton, 1996), pp. 201–26. 23 Hadley Williams explains that this role involved ‘high judicial, administrative and executive duties’. The Lyon King ‘granted, recorded and corrected abuses of arms, preserved and certified the royal genealogy, received the king’s pronouncements and proclaimed them to the people, carried out diplomatic missions on the king’s behalf, and was deviser and recorder of State, royal and public ceremonial’. See ‘David Lyndsay’, p. 207. 24 Sarah Carpenter, ‘David Lindsay and James V: Court Literature as Current Event’, in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century: France, England

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marriage to Madeleine of Valois, and as Hadley Williams points out, it seems to allude to the dissolute conduct of James’s bachelor years, during which he fathered several illegitimate children. Consequently, the poem registers the imminence of James’s French marriage proposal, but also refers to ‘the lady that luffit yow best’ (57), probably Margaret Erskine, who was James’s preferred choice as a future wife. Lyndsay does not call his own poem a flyting, but nevertheless places it partly within, and at the same time at distance from, this popular oral and literary tradition. Bawcutt notes that literary flytings fell in to two categories,25 divided between works with a serious polemical purpose – moral, political, theological – and those of a less serious bent, without such fervour or rancor. The latter is often part of a ritualized, literary game, in which competitors vie for metrical and verbal supremacy. Although Lyndsay’s work belongs most clearly to the second group it also owes something to the spirit of the first. The poem also tends towards the tonal ambiguity, rich and punning diction and alliterative style characteristic of the Scottish tradition of flyting in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Lyndsay adopts some of the conventional phrasing of the genre. For example, like other literary flyters he invokes the penitential Psalm 51:10, although to admit defeat, rather than to goad his opponent. As Bawcutt notes, the references to penitential language here, as in the Flytings of Dunbar and Kennedy and Polwart and Montgomerie, invoke the public penitence sometimes required of those charged with slander, thus alluding to the oral, ‘reallife’, rather than literary, instance of flyting.26 Lyndsay also makes clear that his poem is a response to James’s ‘ragment’ or ‘flyting’ (1, 3), and that he has actually been commanded by the king ‘To mak answer’ (24). But he wishes to be freed from this battle of wits because the king’s pen is so sharp, in contrast with his own poetic dullness, and because of his social inferiority. It is not his job to ‘pley’ (22) (argue or contend) with a king. Wer I ane poeit, I suld preis with my pen To wreik me on your vennemous wryting, Bot I man do as dog dois in his den, Fald baith my feit or fle fast frome your flyting (15–18)

Humour, deference and self-deprecation mark the opening of the poem. James’s poetic skills are praised,27 as is his physical strength and his valiance in ‘Venus werkis’ (30), perhaps promising praise of this prince’s chivalrousness in arms and in love. However, the poem’s partial allegiance with flyting also gives it a licence to be exaggerated, comic and even abusive in the images it conjures up to depict the young king, which soon disabuses us of any notion that he will be celebrated as the flower of knighthood. Like Dunbar’s ‘Madam, ȝour men said thai wald ryd’, the imagery is drawn from comically conflicting registers of the farmyard and chivalric and Scotland, ed. Jennifer and Richard Britnell, Studies in European Cultural Transition, 6 (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 135–52 (140). 25 Priscilla Bawcutt, ‘The Art of Flyting’, SLJ, 10.2 (1983), 5–24 (10). 26 See Bawcutt, Dunbar the Makar, pp. 222–4. 27 None of James’s compositions survive. However, Bellenden’s ‘Proloug apoun þe Traductioun’ which prefaces his translation of Livy mentions his poetic skill (17–18).

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tournament. The king is compared to various mating animals – ‘ane restles ram’ (36) and ‘ane boisteous bull’ (47), and a coupling ‘swyne’ (58) and the adverbs, such as ‘rudelie’ (36) or ‘Royatouslie’ (48), which describe his conduct, suggest the wildness of beasts and the roughness of churls. James is more like a rogue, or ‘rude rubeatour’ (48),28 than a king. His undignified amorous encounters are with wenches (‘ladronis’, 50), prostitutes (‘druddroun’, 59)29 and even with the monstrously ugly (‘caribaldis’, 51), and take place in the palace brewery beside the mashing vat: ‘Ye caist ane quene overthort ane stinking troch’ (53). In this particular liaison, the pair have been so involved in their love making that they squeal and whimper like farmyard animals, with the swill of the trough flowing around their ears. The tonal complexity of this poem recalls that which characterizes other Scottish works of literary flyting. Playfulness is never entirely abandoned, and neither is Lyndsay’s deferent affection in his praise of James’s poetic skills. The poet’s positioning of his persona in the tradition of the old and failed lover, who is so detestable that he is banished by the beautiful ladies in James’s court to keep the cooks company in the kitchen, also provides a witty recollection of earlier Scottish narrators in, for example, Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid or the Asloan Manuscript’s The Spectacle of Luf. Like Henryson’s narrator, Lyndsay’s professed interest in the profligate sexuality of another has a certain prurience to it that threatens to compromise his moral authority. However, the ironic playfulness of the narrator’s voyeurism cannot ultimately counter our growing sense of a sharp moral criticism emerging in the work. It is significant that to distance his work from other genuinely ludic flytings, Lyndsay has made the more conservative stanzaic choice of rhyme royal for the work, which diffidently contrasts it with what he describes as the ‘ornate meter’ (66) of James’s ‘endyting’, but which also helps to align it with his earlier advice-giving poems.30 In addition, the voice of Lyndsay’s persona becomes more like that of the preacher, his eschatological warnings confronting James with the passage of time, and reminding him that his conduct is hastening his ‘awin saule knellis’ (40). James is destroying his physical gifts (‘Waistand your corps, lettand the tyme overslyde’, 46), which will leave him ‘dry’ (41) or impotent (and possibly syphilitic) and unable to produce a legitimate heir for Scotland. The consonance of these observations with Dunbar’s addresses to James IV and Margaret is strongly apparent here. The application of the language of chivalric warfare to James’s amorous exploits is also conventional, recalling the siege imagery familiar from the Roman de la Rose tradition, and skilfully deployed in texts such as Dunbar’s ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’. Yet it also reinforces the criticism of his unkingly conduct, and is a powerful reminder of the negation of the monarch’s obligation to defend the realm. James’s promiscuity is described with the lexis of archery (‘Schutand your bolt at mony sindrie schellis’, 37), and of artillery (‘your fine powder spair’, 34), metaphors which, while describing how 28 DOST, ‘rubeatour’, n. 29 This word is almost certainly a borrowing from Dunbar. See Janet Hadley Williams, ‘Dunbar and his Immediate Heirs’, in William Dunbar, ‘The Nobill Poyet’. Essays in Honour of Priscilla Bawcutt, ed. Sally Mapstone (East Linton, 2001), pp. 85–107 (p. 105). 30 Sir David Lyndsay, p. 257.

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he wastes his seed on illegitimate children rather than an heir, also define the king literally as a careless and wasteful soldier, a knight not committed to his chivalric duty. The poem ends with a jousting metaphor: Bot yit be war with lawbouring of your lance: Sum sayis thare cummis ane bukler furth of France Quhilk wyll indure your dintis, thocht thay be dour (67–9)

The image is both erotic and ambiguous. It is anticipated that the ‘bukler’ (68), James’s future French bride, will be a match for him. But whether she will be an equal in the strength of her desire for James’s sexual advances, or in her ability to regulate and restrain his passions is not clear. Its erotic suggestiveness – that she will receive the hard ‘dintis’ (69) of James’s lance – is also troubling, suggesting that his consort will have to ‘indure’ (69), that is either suffer, or tolerate, James’s lustfulness. A contrasting perspective on James’s amorousness is found in Lyndsay’s formal lament for this French ‘bukler’, the young Madeleine of Valois, daughter of Francis I, and first wife of James V, The Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalene (1537).31 James left Scotland for France in September 1536, accompanied by a large retinue, with the intention of marrying the daughter of the Duke of Vêndome, Mary of Bourbon. Instead, he and Francis I drew up a treaty for his marriage to Madeleine, and the union was solemnized in Paris on January 1st 1537. On the journey back to Scotland, Madeleine fell ill, and she died less than two months after arriving in Edinburgh. She was seventeen years old.32 The Deploratioun is an extended apostrophe to death, chastizing it for taking from Scotland its young queen before her body could yield ‘fruct’ (28).33 It presents James as a ‘leill’ (true) lover ‘without dissimulance’ (39), a portrait that was at first expected but which never materialized in The Answer. James is also referred to as Madeleine’s ‘prince and paramour’ (19) and her ‘lustie lufe and knicht’ (64), and in turn she ‘Ful constantlie’ puts ‘his plesour’ (52) above the demands of her family and country. The pair are also compared to other legendary lovers such as Hero and Leander, and James is imagined having ‘left his realme’ (48) and journeyed at great personal danger ‘throw bulryng stremis wode’ (45) to ‘seik his lufe’ (49).34 With such a hastily contracted marriage it is unlikely that this account of their love is anything more than a conventional deployment of the register of fin’ amor. However, it nevertheless serves to celebrate the virtue and lineage of both young royals and by the end of the poem, their union is also 31 For an excellent analysis of this poem see Carpenter, ‘David Lyndsay and James V’, pp. 135–52 (146–8). 32 See Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–42, ed. N.A.T. Macdougall, The Stewart Dynasty in Scotland (East Linton, 1998), pp. 132–3. 33 Dunbar’s ‘Gladethe, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun’ likewise celebrates the fruitfulness of Margaret Tudor, James V’s mother (29–30). For a later example of an address to a queen, see Sir Richard Maitland’s poem on the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots to the Daupin in 1558, ‘To the grit god mak intercessioun’ (poem XVI in the Maitland Folio). 34 See Sir David Lyndsay, pp. 101–8. Also see A. Thomas, ‘“Dragonis baith and dowis ay in double forme”: Women at the Court of James V’, in Women in Scotland, c.1100–c.1750, ed. Elizabeth Ewan, and Maureen M. Meikle (East Linton, 1999), pp. 83–94 (84).

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regarded as the source of more lasting political gains. The final stanza of the lament imagines the royal couple in terms of the heraldic symbols for France and Scotland, as ‘hevinly flour’ (197) and ‘thrissill kene’ (198), and refers to the ‘lyoun’ (200) of the realm rejoicing, despite the brevity of the union, at the sweet smell of peace between Scotland and France that it established.35 The imagery here recalls the presence of the Lion, ‘awfull Thrissill’ (129) and Rose, as depictions of the Scottish king and his English queen, in Dunbar’s ‘Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past’, a poem connected to the marriage of James’s parents. And in some respects Lyndsay’s poem reads like a partial inversion of Dunbar’s commemorative and advisory allegory. The Deploratioun announces and honours a royal marriage, but it is also an account of how the celebrations of that marriage became so unexpectedly curtailed. At its centre there is loss and absence – James’s problematic self-imposed exile in the name of love, the untimely death of a queen and the loss of hope for an heir, all of which make the narrator fret about the transience of human achievement and worldly rulers. During his wooing of French brides, James was absent from Scotland for almost nine months. The memories of forced royal absenteeism, that of James I a little over a century before, cannot have completely faded. Although historians now believe that James’s extended sojourn in France was evidence of Scotland’s stability and good crown-magnate relations,36 it is little wonder that Lyndsay observes that this state of affairs left the realm in a state of ‘greit disesperance’ (48). And while the Parisian marriage celebrations can be recalled, Edinburgh’s ‘greit preparativis’ (99) never came to fruition.37 The poem is unable to become properly ‘occasional’ in the manner of Dunbar’s ‘Blyth Aberdeane, thow beriall of all tounis’, which celebrated the entry of Queen Margaret into the city in 1511. The dedication of almost half of the poem (a full thirteen stanzas out of twenty-nine) to the pageantry of the royal entry into the city, which could never actually take place, most powerfully inscribes the political loss. But although the mournful complaint persists almost until the penultimate stanza of the poem, it yet manages, as suggested above, to find some brief consolation and reparation in the form of renewed allegiance with Scotland’s old ally. And although the narrator is denied the opportunity to counsel the king and queen for their future reign as Dunbar did in ‘Quhen Merche …’, a degree of resolution is permitted in his assertion of the permanence of personal virtue even in the face of death. Although Lyndsay’s earlier poems are less direct in their treatment of royal amorousness than The Answer to the Kingis Flyting and The Deploratioun, they nonetheless engage in extensive discussion of the problems of minority, and in so doing display anxiety about the proper education for a prince and the regulation of his will and desires. In particular, Lyndsay’s earlier works regard the church as the 35 See Janet Hadley Williams, ‘Lyndsay and Europe: Politics, Patronage, Printing’, in The European Sun: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature, ed. Graham D. Caie, R.J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone and Kenneth Simpson (East Linton, 2001), pp. 333–46 (340). 36 Cameron, James V, p. 133. 37 See Douglas Gray, ‘The Royal Entry in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Rose and the Thistle, pp. 10–37 (23–4).

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cradle of a pernicious sensuality and wantonness that then spreads to infect other estates, including the head of the realm. The earliest of these major works, The Dreme of Sir David Lyndsay (c.1526), was composed a decade earlier than The Answer and before James reached his majority. It is a structurally elaborate poem, divided into several sections. Its opening epistle is addressed to the king, and expresses the poetnarrator’s affection for his young charge, recording the tender service he performed at court. A prologue then records how Lyndsay’s persona restlessly walks along a wintry beach and, taking refuge in a cave, falls asleep and begins to dream. In the dream, the narrator meets Dame Remembrance, who represents the important intellectual power of memory and of learning from the past. She takes him on a celestial journey, through hell, purgatory, limbo, the planetary spheres and heavens, during which he learns about the earth, and discusses with his guide the current state of the Scottish realm. He then meets a ragged figure, Jhone the Comoun Weill, who complains that misrule and degeneracy are driving him from Scotland. The narrator is woken from his dream by a cannon firing on a passing ship, and goes home to write his ‘visioun’ (1033), to which he appends an ‘Exhortatioun’ to James, urging the young king to rule with prudence, faith, courage, justice and temperance. In the first part of his journey, the dreamer-narrator is lead by his guide to Hell, which he finds populated with popes, emperors and kings. The scene is deliberately echoic of the moment in Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice when the harpist comes across an underworld similarly populated with wicked rulers and greedy churchmen. Dame Remembrance first singles out the conduct of the prelates and explains to the dreamer that they have been condemned for avarice, lust and ambition. They have failed in their duty to ‘instruct the ignorent’ (190), choosing to serve worldly princes above their needy flocks, and have indulged in gambling, ‘harllotrie and huris’ (207). However, Dame Remembrance goes on to note that ‘blude royall’ (245) is no defence against eternal damnation. The ‘catyve kingis’ (246) seen by the dreamer have been condemned for a multitude of sins committed against their people, but their sexual wrongs, which include ‘publict adultrye, and incest’ (249) and ‘Delyting so in plesour sensuall’ (251) are singled out for comment, just as they are in Henryson’s poem. Their queens and noblewomen too have indulged in adultery and in ‘tyisting men to lechorye’ (273). When the dreamer requests a glimpse of Scotland at the climax of his celestial voyage he is afforded more insight into the worldly sin which has condemned society’s spiritual and temporal rulers to hell. In answer to his question of why such a beautiful and fertile country should be so poor, Dame Remembrance tells the dreamer that the fault lies not with the land or its inhabitants but with ‘the pepyllis governyng’ (847), and particularly with the conduct of the ‘heid’ (878) of the realm. Without just government there can be no prosperity and peace. However, her lessons remain deliberately indirect. She proceeds to discuss the problem in the circumlocutory language of the beast fable, some of which is strongly reminiscent of Henryson’s Morall Fabillis.38 The ‘raggit, revin, and rent’ (921) figure that approaches them as they are talking is also dependent on allegorical discourse as he laments the disappearance of his friends, Polecey, Justice, Laute, and Reassoun, from Scotland, and the tyranny 38 Compare lines 890–903 in The Dreme with Morall Fabillis lines 2707–6.

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of their enemies such as Plane Wrang and Oppin Treassoun. He particularly blames the ‘Lordis of religioun’ (984), and the aristocracy for the resurgence of pride and avarice, for banishing ‘Chaistitie’ and taking ‘Sensuale Plesour’ (983) in her place. In their refusal of specificity and their emphasis on the failings of the church and nobility, Dame Remembrance and Jhone the Comoun Weill draw attention to the absence of mature royal authority within the realm. Indeed, Jhone’s complaint concludes quoting Ecclesiastes 10:16 with its lament for the country with a young king. Jhone observes that there will be no end to Scotland’s problems until it is guided by the ‘wysedome of ane gude auld prudent kyng’ (1005). In the ‘Exhortatioun to the Kyngis Grace’ which concludes the poem, Lyndsay’s narrator adopts a more direct stance than his allegorical characters. This section summarizes the concerns of the rest of the poem, but also firmly establishes the authority of the young king, without placing any other estate in a position of moral or political responsibility. The teenage James is encouraged to reflect on the immensity of his ‘vocatioun’ (1055) and to be just and virtuous in office. The most dangerous faults, avarice and lechery, to which he might succumb are pithily illuminated with the help of exempla from classical literature. Significantly, lechery is illustrated with the story of Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece which, the narrator observes, led to the prince losing his crown, and being ‘depryvit’ (1099) of Rome. Tarquin’s sexual aggression even leads to the destruction of the institution of monarchy until the Romans are able to elect one of ‘verteous governyng’ (1103) as their emperor: ‘And in dispyit of his lycherous levying, / The Romanis wald be subject to no kyng’ (1100–1101). The injunction that James marries soon, and abstains from ‘that unhappy sensuall syn’ (1094) of ‘lychorie’ (1092) therefore becomes politically rather than just morally desirable. Composed between c.1529 and 1530, The Complaynt of Schir David Lindesay brings together a witty petition for reward with a satire on contemporary court life. In the petitionary opening of the poem he recalls his intimacy with his young master, and the music, dancing, games and disguisings with which he once amused the child king, contrasting it with his current misfortune, ‘defamit’ (18) by his rivals and poorly recompensed for his long service. This opening is also infused with Lyndsay’s characteristic comedy and ironic self-deprecation as he admits that his own sloth has cured his greed and hitherto prevented him from petitioning the king like everyone else at court. However, the reminiscences unfold into a serious account of the political troubles of James’s minority. Lyndsay’s description of this period does not aim for historical veracity, but instead draws from his own perception of events some important lessons on government, especially on the dangers of ‘proffeit singulair’ (130) as opposed to the protection of the ‘commoun weill’ (129). He laments the wilful disruption of James’s education following Albany’s departure, and how the ‘chylde of tender aige’ (140) was thrust in to the position of ruler by the new administration headed by the Queen Mother, before he could master his duties or understand the perils of his position. A substantial part of the work is occupied with an account of how James was subject to the corrupting influences of his self-interested courtiers who are no longer allegorical personages, but real, if anonymous, foolish and flattering wastrels. These unnamed companions, sinisterly referred to with the indefinite pronoun ‘sum’, soon begin to debate, with colourful colloquial directness, as to which of them can supply the ‘fair young tender kyng’

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(228) with the best sexual partner.39 A maid in Fife, ‘Ane of the lusteast wantoun lassis’ (239), a ‘lusty las’ (244) from Linlithgow, a ‘dayis derlyng’ (248) in Stirling, or alternatively the brothel where they can ‘lope at lybertie’ (251), are all proposed for the king’s delectation. Caught up in their machinations, James is merely a passive and unknowing plaything corrupted by those who should be preparing him for the onerous duties of government. However, the narrator’s satire then shifts to those who bear the ultimate moral responsibility for correcting the wantonness of court, ‘prelatis of the kirk’ (309) who have neglected their duty to be of exemplary virtue and who are blinded ‘With wardly lustis sensuall’ (315). The final section of the poem gives thanks that James has at last reached his majority and is subject to none of these bad influences. This contemporizes his poem in a way which serves to emphasize that the court corruption just delineated is truly a thing of the past and absent from the king’s personal rule. At the court of the mature James V, the ‘lady Chaistitie / Hes baneist Sensualitie’ (391–2), and the king is guided by a powerful alliance of Dame Prudence, Temperance and Force. The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (1530) is generically the most ingenious of Lyndsay’s early poems, combining bird fable, chanson d’aventure, literary testament, and complaint. It also exploits the form of the de casibus exemplum which focuses on the fall of an individual, in this case the king’s parrot, from good fortune. Like the Dreme and Complaynt, the poem also includes a critique of clerical abuses and direct advice to the king, and then to his nobles, on good government. Yet, in a subtle change to the mode of address found in these two works, The Testament is at first addressed to ‘rurall folke’ (66) ostensibly because of its paucity of rhetorical attributes, and only within its fable section does the bird, rather than the poet’s persona, speak to the monarch – her ‘Prepotent prince, peirles of pulchritude’ (228). This initial distancing of the poet-petitioner and royal reader suggests a growing lack of confidence in James’s ability to heed counsel and live morally that is borne out by the rest of the work. Like the earlier poems, the Papyngo is concerned with the education of the king in his ‘adolescent yeris yeing’ (305): James was indeed only eighteen at the time of composition. The Papyngo herself is proud and sensual, her literal fall from a high branch, and therefore figuratively her fall from felicity, is precipitated by her greed (the narrator tactlessly warns her that she is ‘rycht fat’, 159), vanity (we are told that she ‘displayit’ her wings and ‘sat full wantounlie’, 165) and refusal to listen to ‘Prudent counsell’ (199). She is also aligned with counterfeiting and duplicity, for she is said to be learned in ‘language artificiall’ (87) and gossip, qualities which inevitably leave attentive readers wary about the worth of her subsequent advice. After her fall, the bird repents her wicked ways, admitting that she has used her ‘appetyte’ against her ‘reassoun’ (200). Furthermore, her relationship with the royal reader (and her one-time owner) is playfully configured as frivolous and, as Hadley Williams has suggested, even intimate and sexual – ‘his grace one lang tyme had delyte’ (82) of her. Indeed, in the testament section of the poem she bequeaths her heart to the king imagining that he will ‘it clois in to one ring’ (1120) in the manner 39 Janet Hadley Williams, ‘Althocht I beir nocht lyke ane baird’: David Lyndsay’s ‘Complaynt’, SLJ, 9 (1982), 5–19 (14).

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of a love token.40 The narrator too finds her beauty alluring: ‘This blyssit bird wes to me so plesande’ (99). Her initial moral ambiguity (not unlike that of the narrator of The Answer) and her own experience of folly and ensuing self-analysis lend some credibility to her advice on self-government. Central to her advice is that James must ‘lerne to be ane kyng’ (287) not through the tutelage of others, but through learning to put his ‘bodye tyll … ordinance’ (293) and by cultivating virtue with the help of chronicles and regiments of ‘princelie governyng’ (307). In her address to the court, the parrot produces her own miniature chronicle of the late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Stewart kings, from Robert III to James V, in an attempt to offer ‘boith gude and evyll reporte / Of everilk prince’ (313–14) for its edification. In this account, the Scots kings are presented as victims of their changeable courts which ‘few or none may makyng resistance, / And sparis nocht the prince more than the paige’ (410–11). Interestingly, with the exception that Lyndsay now refers to courtly intrigue rather than to the whims of Fortune, this diagnosis seems to echo The Kingis Quair,41 whose author the Papyngo later describes as a ‘flude of eloquence’ (432) as well as the ‘patroun of prudence’ (430), justice and virtue. While the Stewart kings receive some criticism, they are spared extensive reprimand in her account, and instead the abuses of their aristocracy and advisors are catalogued. James I, the Papyngo states, was destroyed by ‘fals exhorbitant conspiratioun’ (435). Though lacking prudence and strength, James III is sacrificed by the poor counsel of Cochrane and ‘his catyve companye’ (465). James IV receives the highest praise for his subduing of the ‘savage Iles’ (494) of Scotland, and for the illustriousness of his chivalrous court, although he is also rebuked for his ‘ardent lufe’ (505) of France, which played a significant part in his disastrous opposition of the English at the Battle of Flodden – a sign of ‘his awin wylfull mysgovernance’ (513). The Papyngo brings her chronicle up to date with an account of the ‘gret mysreule’ that prevailed when ‘our yong prince [James V] could noder spek nor gang’ (526–7), caused by the ‘variance’ (531) of regime change between Margaret, Albany, Angus, and Arran. As the parrot grows closer to death she is attended by a magpie, a raven and a kite, in the roles of canon regular, monk and friar. However, it soon becomes evident that they are more concerned about her worldly possessions than they are with the fate of her soul, and in her exchange with them she embarks upon a satire of ecclesiastical abuses, reprimanding this estate for its subjection to wealth and to ‘dame Sensuall’ (858), and their neglect of learning and prayer. This corruption, she laments, has spread from the church to the royal government: Dame Chaistitie, unable to find audience in the European or English courts, has appealed to ‘the kyng and courte of Scotlande’ (876), but has been denied refuge there too. In response to her complaint, the false birds merely contend that the religious are degenerate because their ‘spirituall fatheris’ (1000) bequeathed this manner of living to them and because worldly princes perpetuate such abuses by appointing unsuitable candidates to benefices. The 40 Janet Hadley Williams, ‘Women Fictional and Historic in Sir David Lyndsay’s Poetry’, in Woman and the Feminine In Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, ed. Sarah M Dunnigan, C. Marie Harker and Evelyn S. Newlyn (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 47–60 (52). 41 See especially lines 60–61 of the poem. See Chapter 1 for discussion.

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Papyngo, they protest will be unable to cure them and, rather like Henryson’s swallow in the Morall Fabillis, she ‘prechis all in vane’ (1060). In their acquiescence to the Papyngo’s charges, and denial of any moral responsibility, they offer no promise of their future reform upon which, the poem suggests, depends the reformation and wellbeing of the other estates. Overall, The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo is the bleakest of Lyndsay’s early poems. Unlike The Complaynt it shows little confidence in the renewal of good government under the mature James V. Even the comic and conventional modesty topos with which the work concludes sounds a note of pessimism. The poet-narrator’s self-deprecating instruction to his ‘rude’ (1179) and clumsy ‘quair’ (1177) to creep into a nook and never be ‘sene besyde none uther buke / With kyng nor quene, with lord, nor man of gude’ (1180–81) carries with it the suggestion that, like the Papyngo’s advice to the other birds, Lyndsay’s counsel to the king, provided through the fable’s protagonist, will never be heard. IV In contrast to his own professed ineptitude in versifying, Lyndsay names poets ‘Quhose sweit sentence’ (14) resounds throughout Britain in the opening of The Testament. Amongst them is ‘Ballentyne’ (51) or John Bellenden. It is highly possible that, as well as being familiar with his writing, Lyndsay knew Bellenden personally through court connections. Bellenden, a graduate of St Andrews, seems to have been employed in royal service by 1515, and went on to become Archdeacon of Moray. Furthermore, it has been suggested that his parents were Patrick Bellenden, Steward to Queen Margaret between 1509 and 1514, and Marion Douglas, ‘Kepar’ of the infant James V.42 Katharine, daughter of Patrick and Marion, succeeded to the position of royal seamstress after Lyndsay’s wife Janet Douglas.43 Bellenden’s prose translation of Hector Boece’s Latin Scotorum Historiae44 (which had been published in Paris in 1527), was completed in c.1531.45 The translation was apparently made at the request of James V to whom the Latin text had been directed, and the Treasurer’s Accounts for 1531 record the payment he received for this work. The production of a new vernacular chronicle, so closely associated with the king’s

42 Theo van Heijnsbergen, ‘The Interaction Between Literature and History in Queen Mary’s Edinburgh: The Bannatyne Manuscript and its Prosopographical Context’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture offered to John Durkan, ed. A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan, Brill Studies in Intellectual History, 54 (Leiden, 1994), pp. 183–225 (191); ALHTS, IV, pp. 414, 446. 43 van Heijnsbergen, ‘Interaction’, pp. 183–225 (192). 44 On Bellenden’s ‘translation’ see Nicola Royan, ‘The Relationship Between the Scotorum Historia of Hector Boece and John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland’, in Rose and the Thistle, pp. 136–57. 45 See The Mar Lodge Translation of the History of Scotland by Hector Boece, ed. George Watson, STS, 3rd Ser., 17 (Edinburgh and London, 1943). For the full text of Bellenden’s translation see The Chronicles of Scotland Complied by Hector Boece, Translated into Scots by John Bellenden, ed. R.W. Chambers, Edith C. Batho, and Walter W. Seton, 2 vols, STS, 3rd Ser., 10 and 15 (Edinburgh and London, 1938–41).

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name, and available in print, was as Roger Mason has demonstrated a major cultural event intricately connected with James’s desire to promote the importance of Scotland on the European stage.46 The work survives in nine manuscripts and was printed, in revised form, in Edinburgh by Thomas Davidson by c.1540, although unusually the precise date of the edition is not known.47 Bellenden also had a reputation amongst his contemporaries for his poetry: Lyndsay’s reference to his ‘ornate’ works in The Testament (52) follows praise of him as a ‘plant of poetis’ (51). However, only four of his verse compositions now survive – The Proheme apon the Cosmographe, The Proheme to the History,48 both of which are included in versions of the translation of Boece, the Ballat vpone the Translatione, which accompanies the translation of Livy, and the free-standing devotional work, The Baner of Peetie, which survives in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fols 1–3, and item 1 in Bannatyne’s Draft Manuscript). The Proheme apon the Cosmographe is also contained in the Bannatyne Manuscript and the presence of these two works by Bellenden at the opening and close of the collection is, as Theo van Heijnsbergen has demonstrated, explained by professional connections and the special regard in which the Bannatynes held this distinguished family. George Bannatyne’s ‘memoriall buik’ which records the godparents of his father and siblings, and spouses of his brothers and sisters, contains several Bellenden names including that of Thomas Bellenden of Auchnoull who has been identified as the brother of John Bellenden.49 The Proheme apon the Cosmographe (c.1531)50 is a poem rich in allusions to earlier Scottish and English writing and takes the form of an allegorical dream vision, composed in nine-line stanzas, with inset debate. It begins with the narrator being summoned by the personification Labour to translate the ‘þe story of our progenitouris’ (presumably the following Chronicles) in order to form a mirror of wisdom, honour and courage, and to celebrate the end of tyranny. Yet despite her confident request, the narrator experiences lethargy and ‘upleasand hevines’ just as Lyndsay’s narrator had done at the start of The Dreme: he takes a walk and settles down to rest in a bare garden which is symbolic of his unease. The narrator’s weariness at the commission, and his exit into an inhospitable landscape, also recalls the response of Dunbar’s persona to May in ‘Quhen Merche …’, who is reluctant to rise on such a windy spring day to ‘discryve the ros of most plesance’ (39). Bellenden’s persona remembers his faithful service to ‘his grace in yeiris tenderest’, and how he was cast from the court by a rival faction in the minority government – ‘Be thaym that had þe court in governing’ – suggesting that Labour’s celebrations at the end of a period of misrule may have been premature. Bellenden, as clerk of the king’s expenses (‘Clerk 46 Roger Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998), p. 124. 47 On the relationship of manuscript and print versions of the Chronicles see Sally Mapstone, ‘Shakespeare and Scottish Kingship: A Case History’, in Rose and the Thistle, pp. 158–89 (163–8). 48 On the poem’s circulation see A.S.G. Edwards, ‘Bellenden’s Proheme of the history and chroniklis of Scotland: a note’, The Bibliotheck, 6 (1971–73), 89–90. 49 See van Heijnsbergen ‘Interaction’, pp. 183–225 (191–8). 50 Printed in Mar Lodge Translation, pp. 3–13; and Chronicles of Scotland, I, pp. v–xv. No line numbers are given in either edition.

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of his comptis’ as he tells us in the Proheme) between 1515 and 1522, would have witnessed the factionalism of James’s minority at first hand. Furthermore, a ‘maister Johne ballentyne’, probably the poet, was employed as Archibald, earl of Angus’s ‘servitour and secretar’,51 and was to answer charges of treason brought against the Douglases for endangering the king in the parliament of September 1528. The metaphorical density of the early stanzas of the Proheme reveals allusions to, amongst other texts, Holland’s Buke of the Howlat, a poem which deals with the political fortunes of the Douglas family, and to Gavin Douglas’s Palice of Honour.52 As we have seen, family and professional connections existed between the Bellendens and Douglases.53 The fact that Bellenden stresses his literary connections to the Douglases through his allusions to these texts, as well as through his praise of the family in the chronicle itself,54 may signal his political allegiances. Furthermore, the narrator’s initially ambivalent response to Boethian philosophies and use of nautical imagery in the poem’s opening also seem to recall the beginning of The Kingis Quair where James’s narrator imagined his youthful self tossed in the variable winds of fortune. Gavin Douglas was related to Henry Sinclair, the owner of the sole surviving manuscript witness of the poem, and it is possible that this connection could have given Bellenden access to a copy of James I’s work. Bellenden’s narrator figures himself tossed in a deep sea of fortune, paralyzed by the fatalistic notion that the individual has no power over his destiny, which is instead directed by ‘hevinly creaturis’. As the Proheme unfolds, there is little clear division between the narrator’s waking and sleeping state, further emphasizing his distress and confusion. In the dream itself the narrator finds himself in a sun-filled field, in which a company of ‘courtly gallantis’ gather before a fresh-faced monarch, ‘With tender dounis riseing on his beird’. The courtiers are singing and playing, ‘According to this princis appetite’, when in their midst arrive two ladies who the narrator recognizes as ‘Virtew’ and ‘Delite’. Both are apparently in the king’s pay, despite their contrasting identities, for both are opulently dressed and bejewelled: their ‘costlie clethin schew þair michty rentis’. Both also wish to please the king, and to be chosen as his ‘high empryis’. Delite speaks first and praises the young king’s ‘dedis amorous’. She offers him a lecture on physiognomy, stressing the naturalness of youthful sexual desire. She urges him to abandon military conquest and the heavy affairs of state, and to enjoy her ‘tender body’. He should seek the lover’s pleasure, she says, which is greater than any other earthly delight, before ‘The rose, þe lillyis and þe violet … are with þe wynd ovirset’. When Delite has finished speaking, the narrator moralistically observes that she has spoken ‘as rage of youthheid thocht maist relevant’. 51 APS, II, p. 322. 52 See Priscilla Bawcutt, Gavin Douglas: A Critical Study, (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 194–6. 53 Thomas Bellenden of Auchnoull participated in the copying of a manuscript of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. On the Douglas-Bellenden links, and on the possible connections between Bellenden’s family and David Lyndsay, who was usher to James V in the period in which Marion Douglas was employed in royal service, see A.A. MacDonald, ‘William Stewart and the Court Poetry of the Reign of James V’, in Stewart Style, pp. 179–200 (185). 54 Thomas Rutledge (private communication). See for example Book XIV, ch. 8 (v. II, p. 269) of the Chronicles of Scotland.

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Virtew’s speech is almost twice as long as that of her rival, one of several indications that she advances the more credible case in the debate. She begins with a pious excursus on the value of ‘honest laubour’ and the ability of virtue to raise a man above his peers and closer to God. Her discussion broadly recalls the lesson on the differences between worldly and spiritual honour (or virtue) at the end of Douglas’s Palice of Honour.55 Douglas’s dreamer is told that ‘vertew is a thing sa precious’ (1999) because it ‘makis folk perfite’ (2002), and provides the only sure way to honour. Bellenden’s Virtew also claims to overcome age, death and fortune, and that her ‘werk perfytis evry wycht’. She is governed by ‘wit, reason, [and] manheid’ and her ship, unlike the narrator’s, is ‘so strang that [she] may nevir de’. However, although Virtew describes Delite disparagingly as a ‘wench’, and condemns the ‘sensuall appetite’ she espouses, she also teaches the prince to view inescapable experiences such as the ‘rage of youtheid’ as treasure – ‘the finest gold or silver that we se’ – part of the process of moral refinement. She notes epigrammatically that ‘the more distress, þe more intelligence’. Some experience of physical delight, and the struggle to overcome temptation, is necessary for the acquisition of virtue. Unlike Delite, Virtew illustrates her argument thoroughly, using exemplary stories. Just as Lyndsay does in his Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo, Bellenden’s speaker reminds the royal reader that indulgence of his sexual appetite may lead to grave political problems. The great conqueror of the Romans, Hannibal, was made ‘so soft and deligait’ through sensual pleasure that he was quickly overthrown. Achilles was slain by ‘lust’; Sardanapall was an ‘effeminat’ prince, who neglected his knightly deeds for the sating of his lusts, and was overthrown by his enemies. The use of ‘effeminat’ here (and in several of the works connected with James’s minority) may suggest some concern about homosexual desire, as well as about the enfeebling or distracting effects of excessive passion. As these exemplary stories multiply Virtew also generalizes her case to suggest that the indulgence of sensuality is just one symptom of a fully wicked life. She sums up by asking the king to make his choice between a moment of voluptuousness which ends in eternal misery, and the challenging struggle with the rage of youth, which will lead to triumph, a long rule and eternal felicity. The debate remains unresolved because a sudden downpour wakes the narrator before he can hear the king’s decision. However, he is still able to comfort himself with the thought that as Hercules chose virtue and labour above pleasure this young king might just do the same.56 Yet Virtew’s long contribution to the debate nevertheless serves to highlight a problem frequently engaged with in the earlier writing explored in this book – namely the uncertainty that the conventional didacticism of advice literature will not have the desired effect on the king’s morals. This anxiety is partly reinforced by The Proheme of the History,57 which takes the form of the translator’s address to his ‘Buke’ instructing it both on its appropriate content, and on the manner 55 For an edition see The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, ed. Priscilla Bawcutt, STS, fifth ser., 2 (Edinburgh and London, 2nd ed., 2003). 56 Interestingly, Hercules was depicted on James IV’s tapestry bed hangings, alongside Marcus Coriolanus, Susanna and Salomon. See ALHTS, II, p. 214. 57 See Mar Lodge Translation, pp. 27–34.

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in which it must present its material. The narrator exhorts the book to present to its reader examples from the past of princely chivalry or contrasting tyranny. He also discusses the origins of nobility – inherited and innate – that which springs from an ‘infusion naturall’ and ‘makes ane man sa full of gentylnes’. The narrator notes that the book’s recipient, James V, is a ‘nobyll prince’ who reigns in felicity, but his choice of verbs suggests that this particular reader also has much to learn. His book is told to ‘Leir’, ‘Persuade’ and ‘schaw’ ‘all kingis’ to eschew the wicked and avaricious, and to remind them how ‘the kingis life and governance / The murrour of levyng to his pepyll bene’. The king’s way of living, the narrator says, is reflected in that of his people ‘And thairfore kingis has na oppin rene / To use all pleseiris, as thaym likis best’. Other estates are also addressed during the Proheme – the nobility, the church and the knights – and reminded of their societal duties. But above all the book is intended for the king’s ‘ears’: Thocht thou pass furth (as bird implume) to licht, His gratius eris [to] my werk implore, Quahre he may se, as in ane myrrour bricht, So notable storyis baith of vice and glore, Quhilk nevir wes sene into his tongue afore, Quhairthrow he may be prudent governing Also weill his honour as his realm decore, And be ane virtuus and ane noble king

A detailed account of Bellenden’s exploration of the political consequences of ungoverned passion in his extensive prose canon is beyond the remit of this book. Nevertheless it should be noted that the Proheme’s concerns are entirely consonant with those presented in Bellenden’s translation of the first five books of Livy (which opens with the story of King Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece, his resulting banishment from Rome and the end of his dynasty) and in the main body of the Chronicles. In the latter Bellenden follows Boece’s work in presenting Scottish history as a series of edifying episodes in which tyrannical, sensual and corrupt rulers are gradually replaced by the virtuous and measured.58 In the chapters that narrate the falls of licentious rulers Bellenden’s Scots rendering of the Latin evinces a clear continuity of diction, image and emphasis from the Proheme apon Cosmography. For example, the wicked king Donald is contrasted with his virtuous brother, whom he succeeds to the throne of Scotland: ‘Eftir the deth of Kenneth Donald, his bruther, wes maid king, richt different fra him in condicionis, for skairslye had he rongin twa ȝeris quhen his abhominabill lust, be frequent cumpany of concubynis and ryottis surfett, brocht þe pepill to inmoderatt excess …’ (Book X, ch. 12).59 Donald gives more time to the pleasures of hunting and hawking than to the defence of the realm, and his misrule is compared by the narrator to ‘þe corrupit lyfe of Sardanapall’.60 Worse still, his people imitate his vices. The nobles of the realm who are ‘lovaris of vertew’ exhort the king to remember ‘quhat myschevous end followis on wile and brutall lustis’, 58 Compare Mason, Kingship, p. 97, fn. 61. 59 Chronicles of Scotland, II, p. 54. 60 Chronicles of Scotland, II, p. 55.

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and eventually imprison him for his vices. During the time of the Danish attacks on the British Isles, Ethus becomes king of Scotland. He has many ‘giftis of nature’ yet is ‘richt vnabill to governe the realme’ because he had ‘moir sycht to his lust þan commoun wele … and seruit his vnbridillitt lust, but ony respect to polesye civill’ (Book X, ch. 16).61 He meets the same fate as Donald, imprisoned by his nobles for the public good. Particularly striking are the accounts of how sexual corruption during minority has lasting ill effects. For example, King Culyne disregards the good advice of his nobles and ‘gevin be þe rage of ȝouth to insolence and vnbridillit lust’ he brings his realm to misery (Book XI, ch. 5).62 When reproved for his poor rule he merely defends himself by saying that ‘ȝoung children war nocht like þe condicionis of agitt personis’. His court fills with flatterers who dedicate themselves to the king’s ‘pleseir and sensualite’ even assisting him in such crimes as raping virgins and perpetrating incest with his sister and daughters. Eventually his body is so ‘waistit’ through his amorous exploits that he dies of a ‘schaymfull infirmite’. Exemplariness is found in those kings who, like Ethus’s successor Gregor, dedicate themselves to the service of God and the common profit and therefore win military victories against their aggressors. Even in his youth Gregor is ‘drawin fra effeminate werkis’ and lives his life ‘withoute luste or coversacioun of woman’ (Book X, ch. 7).63 This is a model far removed from the ostentation of the early sixteenth-century Stewart court. V William Stewart was, like Lyndsay and Bellenden, in royal service during the 1520s. Like Bellenden he probably graduated from the University of St Andrews (in 1496), and also like Bellenden, he produced a translation, during the 1530s, of Boece’s Scotorum Historiae, but in verse. In addition, he is the author of a number of shorter occasional and advisory poems preserved in the Bannatyne and Maitland Folio manuscripts. Many of these express anxieties about negative influences on impressionable young monarchs, and often use the same moralistic allegorical language as employed by Lyndsay and Bellenden in so doing. His ‘Precellent prince haueand prerogative’ (Maitland Folio CLV) is addressed to the king in his ‘tendir age’ (9), and opens beseeching James ‘aganis þi lust to stryve’ and to ‘luif þi god aboue all eirdlie thing’ (3–4). In this poem he shares with Bellenden, and with earlier poets like the author of King Hart, the fear that youth and its natural inclinations prohibit the acquisition of royal wisdom – ‘That nature to þe wisdome ȝit denyis’ (10). This dread of the consequences of the king’s youthful misconduct is also present in several of his other works. For example, ‘Rolling in my Remeberance’ (Maitland Folio CXXXV),64 ends with a prayer that the king be delivered ‘With wit fra ȝouthis feirfull rage’ (46–7). In ‘Precellent prince’, Stewart explores the remedies for this rage of youth. He urges the young king to ‘submit’ to 61 Chronicles of Scotland, II, p. 68. 62 Chronicles of Scotland, II, pp. 99–101. 63 Chronicles of Scotland, II, p. 70. 64 See The Maitland Folio Manuscript, ed. William A. Craigie, 2 vols, STS, 2nd Ser., 7, 20 (Edinburgh and London, 1919–27), II, pp. 370–72.

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‘counsale sage’ (11) and issues conventional advice on the importance of winning honour, avoiding flatterers, and above all on the king’s obligation to rule his self: ‘quha him selfe can not qyde nor avance / Quhy sould ane province do on him depend’ (45–6). But, like Lyndsay’s Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo and Bellenden’s two Prohemes, Stewart’s address to the king in his ‘tendir age’ (9) is full of cautious expectation but also anxiety that royal potential will remain unfulfilled. Stewart regards charity, temperance and truth as essential to good royal rule. In one of his most striking poems, he advocates this idealized form of personal morality by redeploying the language and conventions of the amatory vision, thereby enticing his reader through poetry to transfer his worldly desires to a love of the spiritual and ethical. In this allegorical work, ‘This hyndir nicht neir by þe hour of nyne’, a poem entitled in the Maitland Folio ‘Quod williame stewart to þe king’ (CXXVIII), and also found in the Bannatyne Manuscript (fols 228–31), a very sensuous ‘ladie verite’ (16) – ‘Hir bodie bair wes bricht as beriall’ (9) – appears to the poet to complain of her long banishment from the realm. Although Lady Verite is clearly a descendant of female personifications and interlocutors such as Boethius’s Lady Philosophy, she is highly eroticized in the narrator’s description of her ‘cristell corps … / Off alkyn clething nakit’ (6–7) and becomes for him an object of adoration. Thus, there is no ‘delight’, as there was in Bellenden’s Proheme, to compete for the reader’s affections, only the desirable, Verite, who unchallenged, becomes the narrator’s ‘lady Sowerane’ (27). The narrator therefore becomes as a lover might, a humble supplicant for her goodness, and a conduit for her wise counsel. At the narrator’s request, the lady instructs him that Scotland will only be in ‘peace and rest’ when wayward ‘bairnys’ (35) such as ‘ȝoung counsale’, ‘singular proffeit’, ‘Dissimulance’, ‘flatterie’ and ‘ignorance’ (43–7) are banished from the ‘counsale Sessioun and frome parleament’ (36) of the youthful king.65 According to Verite, the king’s rightful servants are ffirst iustice prudence force and temperance Wit commoun wele and auld experience Concord correctioun cwnning and constance Luif lawtie science and obedience Gud conscience, treuthe and intelligence Mercye mesoure faythe hoip and chirrite … (65–70).

This sequence is reminiscent of the allegorical section of Aristotle’s regiment in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, or of King Hart’s narrative. However, despite the incandescence of its vision of truth, Stewart’s poem lacks the optimism of the earlier romance, and the comic resignation of Hart’s story. When the apparition vanishes, the narrator rises suddenly and picks up his paper and pen. He reports all he has seen and also exhorts his ‘sowerane lord vnto þis tale attend’ (78). He makes a direct appeal to the king to ‘Schaip sum Remeid’ (85), to escape the abuse he and his people have long suffered, and to consider the eternal consequences of his actions. But, despite registering the culpability of the king’s self-interested advisors, Stewart 65 MacDonald (1996), ‘William Stewart’, pp. 179–200 (189). Compare line 44 in Stewart’s poem with line 813 in King Hart.

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does not exonerate James: the king himself is accused of having allowed ‘weydis’ to grow over the ‘corn’ (86). The poem both chastises the young king and exhorts him to change. Nevertheless, the moral transformation of the monarch remains a thing of the future, as yet unaccomplished, not a reality that Stewart can confidently and comfortingly anticipate. VI Taken together, the writings on young kingship and amorousness which emerge from the minority and early personal rule of James V are not as optimistic about the monarch’s potential for sagacious governance of himself and others as those of the fifteenth century. The poetic voices of these texts are more often of one accord, inevitably as a result of their authors’ shared environment, than the plural responses to royal sexuality made by their fifteenth-century predecessors. The writings of Stewart, Lyndsay and Bellenden regard the young king’s vulnerability to the strength of his own desires and misguidance by his unscrupulous guardians, as inevitable and perhaps ultimately unsolvable. These three poets position themselves as commentators on and correctors of the king’s youthful waywardness in lieu of exemplary guidance emanating from traditional quarters such as the church. Yet their works express a profound lack of confidence in this advisory and poetic project. Very often love is portrayed as the portal to a host of other moral failings, not, as in some of the fifteenthcentury poems covered in this book, as something that can either be beneficial to royal rule or that can, if well governed, successfully coexist with the public duties of monarchy. The possibility of harmonizing desire and reason is acknowledged by fifteenth-century writers such as Henryson as an exacting challenge, but something to be striven for by all estates. The necessity of restraining love with virtue because sexual desire is an inescapable part of human experience is explored and aspired to in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour and Archibald’s tale in The Thre Prestis of Peblis. The acceptance of physical desire as ennobling is central to the agendas of The Kingis Quair and Lancelot of the Laik. The centrality of love to the discussion of royal and self-government is embraced by all of the fifteenth-century poets whose works have been explored in the chapters of this book. The early-sixteenth century poets demonstrate an awareness of and engagement with this rich tradition of writing on royal amorousness that precedes them. But as this epilogue has suggested, they forge new, and more moralistic poetic directions in the Scottish approach to writing on kingship and love. These new and chastened perspectives may perhaps be understood as a response to what must have seemed to contemporary observers to be the almost intractable problem of royal minority. By the early years of the sixteenth century the succession of infant, child and adolescent Stewart kings, all of whom had to be carefully raised to the duties of government, stretched back over a century and seems to have had a strong hold on the cultural memory. In 1513 the Battle of Flodden resulted in the premature loss of a vibrant and promising monarch, and with him much of his nobility and senior churchmen. But James IV, as strong and successful a king as he had been, was also quickly identified by contemporaries and successors as sensual and wilful. The shocking defeat of the battle perhaps moved

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those who survived to take a more determinedly didactic approach to the education of the monarch for the future security of Scotland. Lyndsay, Bellenden and Stewart embrace this task with a salutary mixture of zeal, self-doubt and political anxiety. Their legacy is immense. They carry forward, but also carefully revise, the fifteenthcentury Scottish tradition of writing on love and kingship. In so doing they help to shape the literary perspectives on royal amorousness generated in the aftermath of James V’s reign, during that of his daughter Mary and grandson James VI.

Select Bibliography The demands of space necessarily limit this bibliography. It is intended as a guide to the works that have most influenced this book and to major primary texts cited. Other works are referred to in full in the footnotes to separate chapters. Facsimiles Beattie, William, The Chepman and Myllar Prints: Nine Tracts From the First Scottish Press, Edinburgh 1508 (Edinburgh, 1950). Boffey, Julia and A.S.G. Edwards, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Kingis Quair’. A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 with an introduction by Julia Boffey and A.S.G. Edwards and an Appendix by B.C. Barker-Benfield (Cambridge, 1997). Fox, Denton and William A. Ringler, The Bannatyne Manuscript: National Library of Scotland Advocates, MS. 1.1.6 (London, 1980). The Thrie Tailes of the Thrie Prestis of Peblis, English Experience, 106 (Amsterdam and New York, 1969). Printed Primary Sources Aikman, J., ed. and trans., [George Buchanan] The History of Scotland, 2 vols (Glasgow and Edinburgh, 1827–29). Amours, F.J., ed., The Original Chronicle of Andrew of Wyntoun, 6 vols, STS, 1st Ser., 63, 50, 53, 54, 56, 57 (Edinburgh, 1903–14). Arn, Mary-Jo, ed., ‘Fortunes Stabilnes’: Charles of Orléans’s English Book of Love, A Critical Edition, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 138 (Binghamton, New York, 1994). Bawcutt, Priscilla, ed., The Shorter Poems of Gavin Douglas, STS, 4th Ser., 3 (Edinburgh and London, 1967, 2nd edn 2003, fifth ser., 2). Bawcutt, Priscilla, ed., The Poems of William Dunbar, 2 vols, Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 27–8 (Glasgow, 1998). Bennett, J.A.W., ed., Devotional Pieces in Verse and Prose, STS, 3rd Ser., 23 (Edinburgh and London, 1955). Benson, L.D. and F.N. Robinson, eds, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn (Oxford and Boston, 1987). Bergen, Henry, ed., Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, 4 vols, EETS, ES, 121–4 (London, 1924–27). Bliss, A.J., ed., Sir Orfeo, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1966). Blyth, Charles R., ed., The Regiment of Princes: Thomas Hoccleve, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1999).

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Index

Abell, Adam, 137 ‘Roit or Quheill of Tyme’, 119 Alexandri Magni Iter ad Paradisum, 65 Alliterative Morte Arthure, The, 50 n.33 Arbuthnot, Alexander, 78, 152 Archibald, Elizabeth, 95 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 114 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 21 Arundel MS see Manuscripts Asloan, John, 14, 126–7 Asloan MS see Manuscripts Ayala, Pedro de, 58 n.63, 137, 139 Ballad of King Orfeo, 84 Bannatyne, George, 14, 155–6 Bannatyne Manuscript see Manuscripts Barbour, John, The Bruce, 78 n.52 Barlaam and Josaphat, 121, 124 Barry, Henry, Rector of Collace, 77 Bawcutt, Priscilla, 156, 162 Beaufort, Joan, 24, 29 Beauforts, the, 21 Beauvais, Vincent of, Speculum Historiale, 122 Bellenden, John, 1, 13, 14, 15, 131, 155, 160, 170–75, 177, 178 Poems, 170–71 Chronicles of Scotland, The, 114, 170, 171, 174–5 Proheme apon the Cosmographe, The, 161, 171–4, 176 Proheme of the History, The, 171, 173–4, 176 Traduction of Titus Livius, 161, 174 Bellenden, Katherine, 170 Bellenden, Patrick, 170 Bellenden, Thomas of Auchnoull, 171 Bernardus de Cura Rei Famuliaris, 55

Boccaccio, Giovani, Decameron, The, 119–20 Boece, Hector, 58 Scotorum Historiae, 114, 161, 170, 175 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, The, 22–3, 25, 33 n.53, 38, 79, 87 n.46, 92, 95, 99, 176 Bonet, Honoré, L’Arbre des Batailles, 5 Boswell, Alexander, Lord Auchinleck, 83 n.27 Bower, Walter, Scotichronicon, 10–11 n.38, 20 n.3, 22, 25, 26, 28, 36, 44, 52, 85–6, 88, 122 n.71 Boyde, Marion, 137 Boyds, the, 12, 136 n.33 Bromyard, John, Summa praedicantium, 111, 113 n.43, 114, 122 Bruce, Robert, 142 Buchanan, George, 58 Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, 118 n.60 Buik of Alexander, The, 77–8, 141, 160 n.16 Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, The, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 14, 16, 37, 49, 60, 61–78, 132, 138, 141–2, 145, 160 n.16, 176, 177 Buke of the Chess, The, 7, 57, 42 n.7 Campbell, Duncan, 7th Laird of Glenorchy, 15, 65 n.21, 76–7 Campbells of Glenorchy, 77 Carpenter, Sarah, 161 Cary, John, 78 Castle of Perseverance, The, 143 n.64 Caxton, William, 58–9 ‘Book callid Caton’, 107 n.16 Golden Legende, The, 37 n.70, 122

196

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

Cessolis, Jacobus de, Ludus Scaccorum, 7 Charles d’Orléans, English poems, 26, 27 n.23 Charles, Dauphin of France (later Charles VII), 21 VII, King of France, 62 Charteris, Henry, 14, 78, 128, 161 Charteris, Robert, 14, 103, 118, 128–9 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9, 14, 31 Boece, 92, 93, 98 n.85 Canterbury Tales, The, 104, 146 n.78 ‘The Knight’s Tale’, 21, 24, 98 n. 84 ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, 91 n.57, 146 n.78 ‘The Monk’s Tale’, 33 n.53 Legend of Good Women, The, 42, 43 Parliament of Fowls, The, 42 Lak of Stedfastnes, 152 n.100 Troilus and Criseyde, 97 Truth, 38 Chepman, Walter, 57, 58, 80, 83, 87, 89, 126 Chepman and Myllar Prints, 57, 80, 83, 87, 89, 127 n.90, 133, 152 Clariodus, 57, 85, 91 n. 57 Cochrane, Thomas, 169 Cockburns, the, of Ormiston, 14, 128 Cockburne, James, 129 Codenore, Lord Grey of, 21 Comyns, the, 22 Complaynt of Scotland, The, 57, 84, 127 Consail and Teiching at the Wysman gaif his sone, The, 36 Craft of Deying, The, 121 n. 68 Cronycle of Scotland in a Part, The, 57 Crichton, William 3rd Lord, 119 Crichtons, the, 12, 136 n.33 Cummyn, Sir William of Inverallochy, 59 Davidson, Thomas, 14, 171 Delany, Sheila, 135 De Regimine Principum, 2, 33, 86–7, 93, 154 De Worde, Wynkyn, 37 n.70, 127 n.92 Doig, James, 157 Douglas, Archibald, 6th earl of Angus, 160, 169 Douglas, Gavin, 126, 172 Eneados, 73 n.35, 80, 81 n.8, 132 Palice of Honour, The, 34 n.54, 128, 132, 133, 134, 172–3 Douglas, Marion, 170

Douglases, the, 11–12, 21, 136 n.33 Drummond, Margaret, 137 Drummond, William of Hawthornden, 58, 82 n.17 Dubh, Donald, 82 Dunbar, Janet, 119 Dunbar, William, 1, 14, 142, 155–60 Ballade of Lord Barnard Stewart 102 ‘Blythe Aberdeane, thow beriall of all tounis’, 158 n.12, 165 Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, 162 ‘Gladethe, thoue queyne of Scottis regioun’, 159, 164 n.33 Goldyn Targe, 34 n.54, 102, 132, 133, 134 I maister Andro Kennedy, 151 ‘I that in heill wes and gladnes’, 58, 62, 133 ‘Madam, your men said thai wald ryd’, 156–8, 162 ‘Now lythis off ane gentill knycht’, 142 n.60 ‘Schir, ye haue mony seruitouris’, 139, 142 ‘Schir, for your grace bayth nicht and day’, 159–60 ‘Sen that I am a presoneir’, 133, 142, 163 ‘Sir Ihon Sinclair begowthe to dance’, 142 n.60, 157 ‘This hinder nycht in Dunfermeling’, 1, 155–7 ‘This hinder nycht, halff sleiping as I lay’, 132, 150 Thistle and the Rose (‘Quen Merche wes with variand windis past’), 15, 143, 158–9, 165, 171 Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, 42 n.7 Duncan, King of Scots, 86 Duncan Laideus’ alias Macgregouris Testament, 15, 151 Edward V, King of England, 60 Edward VI, King of England, 81 Elphinstone, William, 82 n.20 Epistola Alexandri ad Aristotelem, 64 Erskine, Margaret, 162 Erskine, Thomas 2nd Lord, 76–7 Everyman, 121, 152 Ewen, Thomas, 126 n.88

Index Fasciculus morum, 111 Flodden, Battle of, 160, 169, 177 Florimond of Albany, 57 Floire et Blanceflor, 83 Fordun, John of, 58 Chronica Gentis Scotorum, 50 n.32, Fox, Denton, 89 Fradenburg, Louise Olga, 58 Francis I, King of France, 164 Fuerre de Gadres, Li, 64, 77 Geddes, Matthew, 132 Gerson, Jean, 8, 114 Vivat Rex, 114 Gesta Romanorum, 69, 95, 113 n.43, 114, 122 Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum, 1, 33 Gologras and Gawane, 55, 57, 58, 127 n.90 Gourlaw, Robert, 58, 78 Gower, John, 3, 9, 19, 28, 31 Confessio Amantis, 3–4, 6, 24–6, 33–5, 37, 49, 71, 95, 104, 112–13, 146 n.78 Gude and Godlie Ballatis, The, 47 Hadley Williams, Janet, 162, 168 Hamilton, James, second earl of Arran, 160, 169 Hary, Wallace, The, 34 n.54, 47 n.22, 78 n.53, 89 n. 53, 128 Haute, Richard, 60 Haute, William, 60 Hay, Sir Gilbert, 4, 62–3, 65, 67, 69 Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis, The, 4–5, 33, 36 n.66, 52, 56, 62, 143 Buke of the Law of Armys, The, 5, 56, 62 Buke of the Ordre of Kychthede, The, 5, 10, 48, 49, 55, 56, 59, 62 Henry IV, King of England, 21–2 Henry V, King of England, 21–3 Henry VI, King of England, 21–2 Henry VII, King of England, 113 n.44 Henry VIII, King of England, 137 Henryson, Robert, 1, 129, 152, 177 In Praise of Age, 88 Morall Fabillis, 15, 36, 91, 97 n.80, 99, 100, 102, 123, 149, 166, 170

197

Orpheus and Eurydice, 10, 11, 14, 16, 34 n.54, 79–102, 118, 123, 127 n.90, 166 Testament of Cresseid, 6, 34 n.54, 90, 97, 98 n.86, 101, 112 n.39, 128, 151, 163 Hepburn, Adam of Hailes, 29 Hepburn, Margaret, 29–30 Hepburn Patrick, first Earl of Bothwell, 29 Historia Alexandri, 77 Historia de Preliis, 64, 66 n.23, 67, 70, 71, 73 Hoccleve, Thomas, 19, 28 Letter of Cupid, The, 30, 35 Regiment of Princes, The, 3, 6, 22–3, 25, 112, 116 Holdsworth, Richard, 59 Holland, Richard, Buke of the Howlat, The, 127 n.90, 172 Ireland, John, Meroure of Wyssdome, The, 7–8, 10, 33 n.51, 111, 114–16, 126, 148 n.83 Interlude of Youth, The, 132 Innocent VIII, Pope, 108 James I, King of Scots, 1, 15, 116, 141 Kingis Quair, The, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 17, 19–39, 43, 47 n. 23, 50 n.32, 94–5, 143, 169, 172, 177 Imprisonment in England, 11–12, 20–23, 165 Letters, 21 Marriage to Joan Beaufort, 24 Personal rule, 26, 28, 52, 85–6, 108 James II, King of Scots, 11, 28, 88, 93, 107 n.19, 116 Minority 12, 136 n. 33 James III, King of Scots, 7, 11, 15, 52, 55, 56, 82 n.20, 103, 106, 108, 114, 116, 117, 143, 169 Marriage, 118–19 Minority, 12, 65, 136 n. 33, 137 James IV, King of Scots, 7–8, 58, 65, 82, 88, 102, 106, 109, 110, 113 n.44, 114, 116, 119, 148 n.83, 151, 156, 169, 177 Marriage to Margaret Tudor, 157–60, 163 Minority, 76, 139 Mistresses, 137

198

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

James V, King of Scots, 8, 15, 109, 143, 152, 160, 169, 177, 178 Marriage to Madeleine of Valois, 162, 164 Minority, 65, 136 n.33, 137, 155–78 James VI, King of Scots, 10, 65, 76, 152, 154, 178 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, 114 Julius II, Pope, 82 Kennedy, Janet, 137 Kennedy, Walter, 152, 162 Kennedys, the, 12 King Hart, 11, 13, 15, 16, 109, 117, 131–54, 157, 175, 176 King Orphius, 83–4, 118 Kyng Alisaunder, 71, 76 n.41 ‘Lamentacio domini Dalphini Franciae pro morte uxoris suae, dicta Margaretae’, 93–4 Lancelot do Lac, 41, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57 Lancelot of the Laik, 3, 9, 10, 13, 15, 16, 37, 39, 41–60, 67 n.27, 118, 177 Latini, Brunetto, 33 Lay of Sorrow, The, 30 Legends of the Saints, The, 37 n.70 Leslie, John, 58, 82 n.17 History of Scotland, 118–19 Lewis, C.S, 134 Liber Extravagans, 88 Liber Pluscardensis, 86–7, 93 Lindsay, Robert of Pitscottie, 82 n.17, 137 Livingstons, the, 12, 136 n.33 Louis XII, King of France, 82 Loutfut, Adam, 59 Lufaris Complaynt, The, 30, 35 Lull, Raymon, Libre del Ordre de Cavayleria, 5, 58–9, 62 Lyall, R.J, 156 Lydgate, John, 9, 14 Complaint of a Lover’s Life / ‘The Maying and Disport of Chaucer’, 42, 98 n.83, 98, 127 n.90 Fall of Princes, The, 81, 98 n.84, 113 n.43 Henry VI’s Triumphal Into London, 135 n.26

Mumming at Bishopswood, 81 Siege of Thebes, The, 4 Stans Puer ad Mensum, 28 Temple of Glass, The, 24 Troy Book, 63 n.12, 126 n.88 Lyndsay, Sir David, 1, 13, 15, 16, 60, 128, 129, 131, 137, 142, 155, 160, 161–70, 175, 177, 178 Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, 113 n.45, 114 n.46, 120, 123, 136, 139, 144, 147, 161 Answer to the Kingis Flyting, The, 10–11, 161–4, 166, 169 Complaynt of Schir David Lindesay, The, 139, 167–8, 170 Deploratioun of the Deith of Quene Magdalen, The, 164–5 Dreme of Schir David Lyndesay, The, 84, 96, 166, 168, 171 Monarche, The, 84, 96 Squyer Meldrum, 58 Testament of the Papyngo, The, 62, 139 n.45, 142, 152 n.96, 168–70, 173, 176 Testament of Squyer Meldrum, The, 151 MacDonald, A.A., 89 Macdougall, Norman, 82 MacQueen, John, 124 Macrobius, Somnium Scipionis, 45, n.15, 94 Maitland, Sir Richard of Lethington, 152–3 Poems, 138 n.40, 149, 152–4, 158 n.13, 164 n.33 Major, John, 58 Malory, Thomas, Morte d’Arthur, 58 Mannyng, Robert of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, 107 n.16 Manuscripts, Brussels, Royal Library 4628. 93 n.66 Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library, 2553 (Maitland Folio), 15, 87, 127, 131–34, 137, 138, 151, 152–4, 156, 159, 175 St John’s College, g.23. 69 Trinity College, 1157. 47, n.20 Trinity College, O.3.12. 132 n.6 University Library, Gg. II. 6. 37

Index University Library, K.k. 1.5. 14, 36 n.60, 41, 43, 55, 59, 60, 69, 121 n.68, 126, 148 University Library, Ll.5.10 (the Reidpeth MS). 132–3, 156 Edinburgh, National Archives of Scotland, GD 112/71/9. 63, 76, 77 n.50 National Archives of Scotland, RH 13/35. 14, 83, 99 n.88, 103, 118, 128 National Library of Scotland, 16500 (Asloan MS) 5, 14, 57, 78 n.54, 80, 89, 103, 118, 120, 122, 163 National Library of Scotland, 1746. 119 n. 62 National Library of Scotland, Acc. 9253. 33 n.50, 50, 56, 62 National Library of Scotland, Adv 1.1.6 (Bannatyne MS) 1, 14, 80, 87, 97–8, 99 n.88, 97, 116, 127, 140 n. 49, 152 n. 100, 153, 156, 171, 175 National Library of Scotland, Adv. 17.1.22. 29 n.29 National Library of Scotland, Adv 19.2.1 (Auchinleck MS) 83 National Library of Scotland, Adv 35.6.7. 28 University Library, Laing III 467. 87 London, British Library, Additional 5467. 29 n.29 British Library, Additional 22139. 4 British Library, Additional 31922. 47, n.20 British Library, Additional 38690. 29 n.30 British Library Additional 40732. 63, 76 British Library, Arundel 285. 127 n.92 British Library, Harley, 682 20 n.4 British Library, Harley 2252. 111 British Library, Harley 3810. 97 n.79 British Library, Harley 6149. 58 n. 70, 59 British Library, Harley 6919. 127 n. 92

199

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Arch. Selden. B.24. 14, 19, 47 n.47, 139 Bodleian Library, Ashmole 61. 83, 97 n.79 Bodleian Library, Douce 148. 63 n.12, 126 n. 88 Bodleian Library, Fairfax 8. 93 n.66 The Queen’s College, 161. 58 n.70 Paris, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal 3523: 93 Mapstone, Sally, 49, 59, 128 Margaret Tudor, Queen of James IV, regent of Scotland, 157, 169, 170 Mary, of Guelders, 12 Mary, of Guise, 154 Mary, Queen of Scots, 15, 65, 152, 154, 178 Mason, Roger, 36, 56, 171 McDonald, Craig, 8 Medwall, Henry, Nature, 132 Mundus et Infans, 136, 143 Myllar, Andro, 57, 80, 83, 87, 89, 102, 126 see also Chepman and Myllar Prints Nicholson, Ranald, 106 Neville, Richard, 29 n.30 Nevilles, the, 112 Ovid, 24, 35 n.58, 79 Metamorphoses, 79, 96 Ovide Moralisé, 79 Paris, Alexander de, Roman d’Alexandre, 64, 67, 72 n.33, 73 Pigouchet, Pierre, 102 Pinkerton, John, 131–3, 135, 150, 152 n.97 Pizan, Christine de, Epistle of Othea, 81 n.10 Livre du Corps de Policie, 60 Porteous of Noblenes, The, 57, 127 n.90 Premierfait, Laurent de, 119 n.64 Prose Lancelot, 83 Quare of Jelusy, The, 9, 19, 30–39, 43, 50 n.32 Ratis Raving, 36 n.66, 37 n.69, 89, 126, 139, 146 n.77, 149 Rauf Colyear, 57

200

Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540

Ravenscraig, 14 Richard II, King of England, 3, 23 Robert I, King of Scots, 88 Robert II, King of Scots, 12–13 Robert III, King of Scots, 12–13, 21, 169 Rolland, John, Court of Venus, The, 77 Roman de la Rose, Le, 140, 163 Roman de Toute Cheualerie, 71, 73 Sacchetti, Franco, Il Trecentonovelle, 112 n.40 St Martin, 125 Sauchieburn, Battle of, 12, 82, 119 Scot, Alexander, 152 Scottish Troy Book, The, 63 n.12, 126 n.88 Scrope, Stephen, 81 n.10 Secretum Secretorum, 1–4, 49, 52, 62 n.5, 69, 70 Sevyne Sages, The, 7 Shakespeare, William, All’s Well that Ends Well, 119 Shirely, John, 28, 81 n.13 Dethe of the Kynge of Scotis, The, 21–2, 141 Governance of Kynges and Prynces, The, 29 Les Bones Meurs, 28–9 Sidrak and Bochas, 37 Sinclair, Henry, Duke of Orkney, 29 Sinclair, Henry, 3rd Lord, 14, 19, 29, 30, 172 Sinclair, Oliver, 19 n.2, 56, 62 Sinclair, William, Earl of Orkney and Caithness, 33, 56, 62 Sinclairs, the, 33 Of Ravenscraig, 29, 38 Of Roslin, 29 n.31 Singleton, Hugh, 127 n.92 Sir Colling, 118 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 46 Sir Orfeo, 83–4, 92, 96 n.78, 97 Spearing, A.C., 23 Spectacle of Luf, The, 4–7, 57, 58, 63 n.13, 116, 120, 163 Speculum Morale, 122 Stewart, David, Duke of Rothesay, 28 Stewart, Sir James of Lorne, 29

Stewart, John, Duke of Albany, 160, 169 Stewart, Margaret (daughter of James I, wife of the Dauphin), 93 Stewart, Margaret (daughter of James II), 119 Stewart, Robert 1st Duke of Albany, 21 Stewarts, the, of Albany, 12 Stewart, William, 13, 131, 152, 155, 160, 175–7 ‘Precelland prince haueand prerogative’, 175–6 ‘Rolling In my Remeberance’, 139, 175–6 ‘Quod williame stewart to þe king’, 176 ‘This hyndir nicht neir by þe hour of nyne’, 176 Talis of the Fyve Bestes, The, 78 n.54 Thewis of Gudwomen, The, 69, 148 Thre Prestis of Peblis, The, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 103–29, 177 Touris, William of, Contemplacioun of Synnaris, The, 6, 122, 127 Trivet, Nicholas, 99 Van Heijnsbergen, Theo, 171 Vegetius, De re militari, 58 n.70 Virgil, Georgics, 79, 97 Vitry, Jacques de, 122 Voeux du Paon, Les, 64, 68, 77, 141, 160 n.16 Voragine, Jacobus de, Legenda Aurea, 37, 121–2 Voyage d’Alexandre au Paradis Terrestre, Le, 64 Walton, John, 38 Wars of Alexander, 66 n.23 Wars of Independence, 12 White, Thomas, 14, 128 Woodville, Joan, 60 Wyntoun, Andrew of, Original Chronicle, 20, 58, 67 n.27, 78 n.51, 120 n.67