George Buchanan

Scottish historian and poet

• Born: February 1, 1506
• Birthplace: Moss, near Killearn, Stirlingshire, Scotland
• Died: September 28, 1582
• Place of death: Edinburgh, Scotland

George Buchanan’s political thought and historical scholarship influenced ideas about limited monarchy and constitutional theory. In his work De juri regni apud Scotos, he argued that monarchs rule by the will of the people.

Early Life

George Buchanan was the third son of Thomas Buchanan and Agnes Heriot, farmers in Stirlingshire. Thomas Buchanan died around 1513, and George’s uncle, James Heriot, sent him to study Latin in Paris when George was fourteen. After the death of his uncle less than two years later, George returned home.

At seventeen he enlisted in the Scottish army and served at the Siege of Werk in 1523. In 1524, Buchanan attended the lectures of John Major, an important theorist of conciliar church government at St. Andrews University in Edinburgh. Buchanan received his bachelor of arts degree from the university in 1527. Buchanan followed Major to Paris and took his master of arts degree there in 1528.

He set off on his career as a Humanist and educator in the same year by taking up a position teaching grammar at the college of Saint Barbe. Leaving his college post in 1531, he became private tutor to the Scottish earl of Cassilis. While tutoring, Buchanan found the time to publish Rudimenta , his 1533 Latin version of Thomas Linacre’s Rudiments of Latin Grammar. In 1535, Buchanan and Kennedy together returned to Edinburgh. In the same year, Buchanan penned his satire on the Franciscan community, Somnium . From 1536 to 1538, he served King James V as a tutor to one of the king’s illegitimate sons. Also, at the behest of the king, Buchanan wrote Franciscanus et fratres (1537), another satire against the Franciscans, whom the king suspected of plotting against him.

Although Buchanan acted on the king’s commission, his reformist attack on the morals of the Franciscans angered the Scottish cardinal David Beaton. In 1539, Beaton had Buchanan arrested and would have had him prosecuted if the poet had not escaped and fled, first to London, then to Paris, and finally to settle for a time in Bordeaux.

Life’s Work

After fleeing Scotland in 1539 and until his return home in 1561, Buchanan assumed the role of an itinerant Humanist, teacher, and poet, with politically progressive sympathies and unorthodox religious views. He taught at the College of Guienne in Bordeaux, from 1539 to 1543. Around 1544-1545, he taught briefly in Paris, then returned to Bordeaux for a stay of two years. At Bordeaux, he translated Euripides’ Medea and Alcestis into Latin and wrote two dramas of his own, Baptistes (1534; Tyrannical-Government Anatomized: Or, A Discourse Concerning Evil-Councellors , 1642) and Jepthes (1578; Tragedies , 1983). The former drama displayed his sympathy with protorepublican and antityrannical views.

Buchanan taught in a new Portuguese university in Coimbra in 1547. He was, however, apprehended and tried by the Portuguese Inquisition on charges of eating flesh during Lent, writing against the Franciscans, and other matters. He was sequestered in a monastery for reeducation in Catholic orthodoxy. Fortunately, he was allowed to leave Portugal in 1552. He sailed to England and then returned to Paris in 1553, where he taught for a brief time at the College of Boncourt and then worked as a tutor to the son of the governor of French territory on the Italian coast. While serving in this capacity, he lived alternately between Italy and France. During this time he worked on De sphaera (1555; The Sphera of George Buchanan , 1952), an astronomical poem in five books, and wrote Epithalamium (1558) to commemorate the marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots , to the French dauphin, Francis.

The exact date of his return to Scotland is in doubt, but certainly Buchanan was in Edinburgh by 1561. Safe in Scotland from the reaches of the Inquisition on the Continent, Buchanan now participated in efforts to establish a reformed Scottish church and a university system, and to reform governmental affairs. During this period, he became a member of a commission to revise the Book of Discipline, headed a commission to examine the foundations of St. Andrews and other universities, and served in the Scottish general assembly from 1563 to 1567.

At court, Buchanan wrote celebratory verses to commemorate the marriage of Queen Mary and Lord Darnley (Henry Stewart). After Darnley’s murder in 1567 and the queen’s precipitous remarriage to James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, however, Buchanan and his patron, the earl of Moray, opposed the queen. They then prepared a legal case against her. Buchanan was sent to England to confer with Queen Elizabeth I about the matter. He also published the De Maria Scotorum regina (Detection of the Actions of Mary Queen of Scots, Concerning the Murder of Her Husband, and Her Conspiracy, Adultery, and Pretended Marriage with the Earl Bothwel , 1689), his history of Queen Mary’s reputed involvement in Darnley’s murder and in other crimes.

In 1569, Buchanan, in the midst of this political turmoil, was appointed tutor to the young James VI, a post in which he remained until the young king reached the age of emancipation. In the course of his educational and governmental duties in the 1560’s and 1570’s, Buchanan still found time for significant literary activity. He wrote new verses, completed the poem De sphaera, compiled his history of Scotland–De rerum Scoticarum historia (1582; The History of Scotland , 1690) and, perhaps most important, wrote De jure regni apud Scotos (1579; De jure regni apud Scotos: Or, A Dialogue, Concerning the Due Priviledge of Government in the Kingdom of Scotland, 1680).

De jure regni apud Scotos contains his principal political ideas, and it attained such popularity that there were six new editions of it within two years. The work was written in part to defend those who had deprived Queen Mary of her authority on the grounds that she had violated the natural law that valued the maintenance of the common good above all else. For Buchanan, the good monarchy was a limited monarchy, constrained by law. The king or queen held office through the people’s mandate. Tyrannicide was permissible in extreme cases. Buchanan’s views were presumably shaped by the conciliarist theory of his old teacher, John Major, as well as the political writings of his contemporary, John Ponet.

Many political historians continue to view Buchanan’s work as preliminary to the later formulation of English constitutional theory in the works of John Milton, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. It was thus after a long, active, and productive life, that Buchanan died on September 29, 1582.

Significance

Buchanan’s political writings and dramas helped to validate the notions of limited monarchy, of subjects holding their kings accountable under the law, and of expelling tyrannous rulers. His work helped pave the way for later seventeenth proponents of constitutional theory.

Bibliography

Clarke, M. L. “The Education of a Prince in the Sixteenth Century: Edward VI and James VI and I.” History of Education 7, no. 1 (1978): 7-19. Considers Buchanan as pedagogue to James VI and I.

Macfarlane, Ian Dalrymple. Buchanan. London: Duckworth, 1981. Most comprehensive biography of Buchanan available with careful attention paid to the literary works.

Oakley, Francis. “On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan.” Journal of British Studies 1 (May, 1962): 1-31. Analyzes the role of conciliarism in the political thought of Major and Buchanan.

Skinner, Quentin. “The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution.” In After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, edited by Barbara C. Malament. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980. Examines the thinking of Buchanan, John Know, Christopher Goodman, and John Ponet on the question of political revolution.

Walters, Barrie. “Pierre Bayles’ Article on George Buchanan.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 20(1998): 163-173. Examines Bayles’ view of Buchanan.

Williamson, Arthur H. “George Buchanan, Civic Virtue and Commerce: European Imperialism and Its Sixteenth-Century Critics.” Scottish Historical Review 75, no. 1 (1996): 20-37. Argues that Buchanan opposed imperialism while advocating conditional monarchy and republicanism.

Williamson, Arthur H. “Scots, Indians, and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilization: 1519-1609.” Past and Present 150 (1996): 46-83. Explores Buchanan’s defense of Scottish civilization against English and continental imperialist ideology.