9 - A Disciple of Buchanan in the Marian Civil War: Thomas Maitland’s ‘The Consecration of James VI, King of Scots’ (‘Jacobi VI, Scotorum Regis Inauguratio’)

Summary

ROGER Mason redefined how we think about the exercise of kingship amongst the monarchs of the Stewart dynasty, and led the way in re-interpreting and re-evaluating (and in several cases, evaluating for the first time) many of the major texts of the Renaissance and Reformation in Scotland, including the Latin histories of John Mair and Hector Boece, the Complaynt of Scotland, the Trew Lawe, and the Basilikon Doron. Mason also spent much of his earlier career evaluating the political theology of John Knox within a British and covenanted context, which resulted in his critical edition of a wide range of the reformer's letters and tracts ‘on rebellion’. However, perhaps his greatest gift to Scottish History is the critical edition of George Buchanan's De Iure Regni Apud Scotos Dialogus (‘A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots’), edited with Martin Smith and first published in 2004, which gave scholars access for the first time to a clear and fully referenced translation of Buchanan's major ideological statement on the nature of kingship and how to deal with tyrants. Buchanan's ideas had a broad and long cultural afterlife, influencing the thought of leading reformed intellectuals including Andrew Melville, and serving as a source of justification for radicals ranging from republicans in the seventeenth century through to the soldiers of the American Revolution. Like Buchanan, Mason has had considerable intellectual influence on younger generations of scholars as a mentor, whether to the classes he taught for almost four decades at St Andrews, to the many colleagues he has offered a ‘killer question’ to in seminars and conferences or, above all, to his many PhD students. As one of those former students, it seems appropriate that this chapter focuses on Buchanan's relationship with his own supposed acolyte, Thomas Maitland. It is also appropriate, given Mason's interest in texts, that this relationship is revealed to us in a previously overlooked poem by Maitland, the ‘Jacobi VI, Scotorum Regis inauguratio’ (‘On the Consecration of James VI, King of Scots’). This poem, like all Maitland's extant poetry, exists solely in Latin in a single witness – the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum, the anthology of Scottish neo-Latin poetry edited by Arthur Johnstone and Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit and published at Amsterdam in 1637.