IT was a pleasure to introduce the day conference in honour of Roger in which this collection of essays had its genesis, and to welcome everyone to it. It was also a pleasure to spend a day listening to the expertise of those engaging in discussion of subjects that Roger has made so much his own: Scottish historiography; humanism and literacy; Scottish political and religious thought; John Knox; George Buchanan; James VI and I; Scotland and England; Scotland and Europe; the Scottish Renaissance (if there was one); and the Declaration of Arbroath. We really needed a week rather than a day to do all of this justice.

Roger and I first met in the summer of 1985 in Edinburgh at a conference on sovereignty held by the Traditional Cosmology Society, where Roger was brave enough to be giving a paper and neither of us really had a clue about much else that was going on. The conference was largely dominated by anthropologists talking about incest and Louise Fradenburg talking about Lacan. The paper that Roger was giving was to become one of his most significant contributions to the literature of sovereignty and political thought in Scotland, and I estimate that hearing it held up the completion of my doctoral thesis by a good six months – but only for the better. This was ‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth-Century Scotland’, published first in SHR in 1987, and then published again in slightly revised form in Roger's magisterial Kingship and the Commonweal in 1998. (I have to say parenthetically here that I do – dimly – recall helping Roger celebrate the publication of that book at a conference Nicola Royan organised at St Andrews in 1999. The following day there was a total eclipse of the sun, and I have rarely been more grateful for one given the size of my hangover.)

‘Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist’ showed many of the characteristics of Roger's subsequent writing, along with the qualities that have made his work so accessible and so important to literary scholars as well as his fellow historians.

This is the second volume of a projected set of five. The first volume, Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917–1919, was published in 1991; since then, other studies have supervened. It is now intended to complete the series, down to 1945. The scheme is for Mr Robin Brodhurst, author of a biography of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, to edit the two volumes corresponding to Pound's time as First Sea Lord – June 1939 to October 1943. It is intended that I should edit the volume for 1943 to 1945.

The years between 1919 and 1939 were dominated by a series of naval arms limitation and disarmament conferences and the first four Parts of this volume acknowledge this. Part V, ‘The Sailors Meet’, deals with the encounters of serving officers and men of the two navies and their observations on each other's navy. Finally, Part VI, ‘Edging towards an Alliance’, details the hesitant and limited steps towards co-operation between 1937 and 1939 when a second world war looked increasingly likely.

The materials used for the Royal Navy have been drawn from the Admiralty papers at The National Archives, Kew, London; the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; and the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. For the United States Navy, I have drawn on The National Archives, Washington, DC; the Operational Archives, Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard; The Manuscripts Division of The Library of Congress, Washington; and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York. I have avoided using diplomatic or political documents where possible; many of the documents on foreign policy have been published in the series Documents on British Foreign Policy (London: HMSO, various) and Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, various).

Punctuation marks have been inserted on occasion to clarify passages or to mark omissions. At times, numbered paragraphs in official communications have been omitted, resulting in breaks in their sequence. Missing words are indicated thus: [——]. If there is some doubt about a word it is expressed thus: [? word]. Place names are contemporaneous. Places and dates of origin, where known or where appropriate, are placed at the head of documents. All Admiralty communications originated from London.

CIRCUMSTANCES OF PUBLICATION

The Householder's Philosophy, the first complete English translation of a work by Torquato Tasso, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 February 1588 as ‘the Philosophicall Discourse of the householder’. It was printed by John Charlewood for Thomas Hacket in the same year (STC 23702.5). As Kirk Melnikoff points out, Hacket had a ‘career-long penchant for publishing translations’, which ‘would have distinguished him from many other Elizabethan publishers’. ‘As a distributor of translated material’, Melnikoff adds, ‘Hacket was able to capitalize not only on the extensive resources of continental, scholastic, and classical material but also on the ever-growing numbers of middle-class readers.’ Hacket's desire to cater to this segment of readership is evident in his repeatedly issuing ‘books oriented towards the concern of the middling classes with self-improvement’, books that all ‘present thinly-veiled conduct guides for a bourgeois audience’. From 1583 onwards, Hacket worked almost exclusively with Charlewood, who, as Jason Lawrence observes, was ‘responsible at this time for the most significant body of Italian books to be printed in London which do not originate from [John] Wolfe’, the foremost London specialist in the publication of Italian books, who had also published in 1584 an incomplete translation of Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581) by Scipione Gentili in three separate volumes.5 Kyd's book was therefore placed at the perfect juncture of the printer's and the publisher's interests; in addition, as Erne remarks,

Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham had gained a formidable reputation during his command of the Mediterranean Fleet between June 1939 and March 1942; he had become known as a ‘fighting sailor’ as a consequence of his fleet's triumphs at Taranto and Matapan and its courageous and grim fight against the Italian fleet and air force and the Luftwaffe and U-boats in the latter part of his command. As a result, Cunningham remarked early in 1942, ‘there is now no fleet to go to sea in’. The deeds of Cunningham and the Mediterranean Fleet during this stirring time are dealt with in volume I of these papers.

Following America's entry into the war, there was a necessity for the Royal Navy to strengthen co-operation with the United States Navy. To achieve this, the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, turned to Cunningham, believing his great prestige and experience of combat conditions as a commander in a ferocious war zone would carry great weight with the Americans. Cunningham's brief term as head of the British Admiralty Delegation in Washington was to endear him to the Americans, so much so that they proposed him as Allied Naval Commander of the Expeditionary Force which was to invade North Africa in November 1942. The ‘Torch’ expedition was the start of almost two years of landings in the Mediterranean, embracing ‘Husky’ (the invasion of Sicily) in July 1943 and the ‘Baytown’ and ‘Avalanche’ landings in Italy in September 1943. His role as ANCXF was abruptly terminated in October 1943, when he was summoned to replace the dying Pound as First Sea Lord.

Cunningham was First Sea Lord from October 1943 to his retirement from active service in June 1946. In that time he presided over the invasion of Normandy (‘Neptune/Overlord’), operations in the Mediterranean, the sinking of the Scharnhorst and Tirpitz, the defeat of a late surge of U-boat activity, the British Pacific Fleet, and the problems of manpower, the futures of the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm, and the conversion of the Royal Navy from its swollen wartime strength to a much-reduced peacetime cadre.

As with many other Elizabethan writers, we know little about Thomas Kyd's life. On 6 November 1558, the parish register of St Mary Woolnoth recorded the baptism of ‘Thomas, son of Francis Kidd, Citizen and Writer of the Courte Letter of London’. Kyd's father, Francis, rose to be Warden of the Company of Scriveners in 1580, the official body supervising ‘a profitable and ancient trade’. Scriveners, officially known as ‘Writers of the Court Letter’, enjoyed ‘a monopoly on engrossing charters, contracts, testaments, and official documents’, functioning ‘not only as notaries and copyists, but also as money lenders’. The need for verbal accuracy in their profession made them insist that a scrivener's apprentice acquire a perfect knowledge of Latin grammar and be ‘erudite in the books of genders, declensions, preterites and supines’. Francis Kyd had evidently had a grammar school education and ensured that his son had the same good start in life. Thomas must have received his first education at home, for when he entered the nearby Merchant Taylors’ School on 26 October 1565, just before his seventh birthday, he was expected ‘to know “the catechysm in English or Latyn” and be able to “read perfectly and write competently”’.

The curriculum of Merchant Taylors’ envisaged six to eight years’ intensive study of Latin grammar, as codified in the official ‘King's grammar’ of John Lily, reading a graded sequence of Latin authors (Cato, Terence, Virgil, Cicero's Letters, Sallust, Caesar, Horace's Epistles, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti), and regularly composing Latin prose and verse, incorporating the figures of rhetoric. Although limited to Latin, the drilling in grammar, rhetoric, and classical prosody was so intense that it could hardly be matched in any modern university. Kyd published his Latin verse in his earliest work, Verses of Prayse and Joye (1586), celebrating Queen Elizabeth's escape from the Babington plot. The Spanish Tragedy includes several passages of Latin verse that Kyd wrote and also adapted to frame his quotations from classical Roman poets.

In addition to a thorough acquisition of Latin, Kyd may have owed to Merchant Taylors’ School his first exposure to drama. The headmaster Richard Mulcaster had been educated at Eton under Nicholas Udall, who had combined two Latin comedies (Plautus's Miles Gloriosus and Terence's Eunuchus) for his Ralph Roister Doister, the first English classical comedy (1567).

In Chapter 2, I quoted the eulogy of Sir David Lyndsay, poet and herald at the court of James V, for William Dunbar, ‘quhilk language had at large’. Dunbar is one among twelve deceased vernacular poets named as paragons of their art in the prologue to Lyndsay's Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (1530). First comes the English literary triumvirate, ‘Chawceir, Gower, and Lidgate laureate’ (line 12); next, a series of Scottish writers: Walter Kennedy, Dunbar, and seven further names all also mentioned either in Dunbar's Lament for the Makars or The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie. Lyndsay praises these poets in terms of their ‘rethorick’ (line 11) and ‘sweit sentence’ (line 14), claiming that ‘Thocht thay be ded, thar libels bene levand’ (line 20). But in the stanzas that follow, all are surpassed by the superlative skill and learning of ‘Albione’'s pre-eminent poet, Gavin Douglas:

Lyndsay's eulogy evidences Douglas's high literary reputation in Scotland and, though to a lesser degree, England throughout much of the sixteenth century. It also suggests some of the important differences between Douglas and the other English and Scottish poets examined in this book, not least, his particular agon with the concept of authorship. The most obvious difference is Douglas's noble status, both as a member of the powerful ‘Red’ Douglas family and, from 1516, bishop of Dunkeld. Douglas's material ‘prerogative’ would have greatly exceeded that of the court servitors and minor ecclesiastics Skelton, Dunbar, and Hawes.

Barking abbey calendar

London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho A V

[fol 2v, under 4 August] Simonis de Monte Forti

Barking abbey calendar

Oxford, University College, MS 169

[fol. 4v, under 4 August] Simonis de Monte Forti

Beaulieu abbey calendar?

London, British Library, Harley MS 2951

[fol. 129v, under 4 August] Anno Domini MCClxv occisus est Symon de Monteforti

Tavistock abbey calendar

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 210

[p. 30b] 1265. Sancti Simonis de Monte Forti die .4. augusti

Evesham abbey calendar

London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 427

[fol. 13r, under 4 August] Occisio Symonis Montis Fortis sociorumque eius

Evesham abbey calendar

London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A VI

[fol. 183r] Anno Domini MoCCmolxovto <Occisio> Symonis Montis Fortis sociorumque eius pridie nonas augusti

Barking abbey calendar

London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho A V, fol. 2v

[4 August] Of Simon de Montfort

Barking abbey calendar

Oxford, University College, MS 169, fol. 4v

[4 August] Of Simon de Montfort

Beaulieu abbey calendar?

London, British Library, Harley MS 2951, fol. 129v

[4 August] In the year of our Lord 1265 was killed Simon de Montfort

Tavistock abbey calendar

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 210, p. 30b

1265. Of Saint Simon de Montfort on the 4th day of August

Evesham abbey calendar

London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 427, fol. 13r

[4 August] The killing of Simon de Montfort and his companions1

Evesham abbey calendar

London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A VI, fol. 183r

In the year of our Lord 1265. The killing of Simon de Montfort and his companions on 4 August

The crisis in the supply of Naval ship timber in 1803–04 was the result of two related pressures. The first was the expansion of British Naval commitments after war with France was renewed in May 1803. The British fleet then comprised approximately 608 ships of all sizes, 81 of them being 74-gun ships, the backbone of the line of battle. By 1813 there were a total of 899 ships, 143 of them 74s. The victory at Trafalgar did not eliminate wearisome, wearing blockade of enemy ports and the very success of the Navy increased its tasks. Defeated at sea, French imperial power expanded dramatically on land. From 1806 the introduction of Napoleon's Continental System, his determination to outbuild Britain by sea and, after 1812, a war with the United States of America, imposed fresh duties calling for more ships. To meet these commitments and retain British Naval dominance, a regular, reliable and, if possible, reasonably priced supply of ship timber was essential and was becoming more difficult to acquire.

In 1801 the annual timber consumption in the royal dockyards was over 36,000 loads. After 1803 it rose to 53,000 loads, in 1812 it had reached 74,000 loads, and although this figure fell with peace, it fell only to the figure for about 1803. After 1815 Britain was concerned to maintain a navy of a two-power standard against France and Russia and old 74s were replaced by 80-gun ships, heavier, longer, more powerful and consuming more timber. Yet defence costs were being reduced in deference to peace and Naval estimates were fixed at approximately £6 million annually until 1830.

The standard unit of measurement for ship timber was the load, of between 40 and 50 cubic feet. The average oak of ship timber size contained approximately one such load and provided, approximately, a ton of shipping. An average 74-gun ship, between 1,600 and 1,900 tons, required about 3,000 loads of timber, mainly oak but also elm, beech, ash and fir, and was built at an approximate total cost of £60,000, of which about £35,000 represented hull timber. The masts and yards cost an additional £3,000–4,000.

The royal forests could only supply a fraction of the Navy's needs, approximately 4,000 loads annually.

ONE of the defining features of the work of Roger Mason is a concern with the way in which political ideologies informed the political expectations and actions of the secular and ecclesiastical elites of late medieval and early modern Scotland. Mason's approach has never been an exercise in abstract intellectual history, but rather an attempt to understand how the views, arguments and writings of medieval thinkers, scholars and moralists might have shaped the way individuals and groups conceived of their role, duties, and obligations within the social and political structures of the realm. A persistent theme in Mason's work has been the relationship between kingship and royal government on the one hand, and the rights and beliefs of those subject to the authority of the crown on the other. The starting point for a series of thought-provoking and elegant ‘Masonic’ studies is the presumption that medieval kings and their administrators did indeed have ideas about the nature and reach of monarchical powers and rights and looked to find persuasive ways to articulate and promote these concepts in the public sphere to their own subjects. In this regard Mason has embraced ‘Renaissance Kingship’ as a useful umbrella term, denoting a royal lineage and establishment that consciously sought to enhance its status and the fullness of its authority through a variety of means. Renaissance monarchy was distinguished by a sustained emphasis on the supremacy of the king's legal authority within and throughout the realm. The (theoretically) unassailable nature of the monarch's power was promoted through the patronage of architectural, literary, and artistic works that stressed the elevated nature of royal ‘majesty’ and encouraged automatic deference to the king. The Renaissance court manipulated chivalric and religious sentiment and symbols to focus loyalty on the crown and used ceremony and ritual to stress formal hierarchy and the king's place as the font of social distinction and honour. Chronologically, the advent of Renaissance kingship in Scotland is usually placed, by Mason and others, in the reign of James III (1460–88). However, another reign that has been proposed as marking a significant change in the articulation and assertion of royal rights and ambition within Scotland is that of James I (1406–37).

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.

William Caxton's literary criticism offers an unusually direct, if not always entirely ingenuous, account of ideas of authorship during the final decades of the fifteenth century. The epilogue to Caxton's 1478 edition of Chaucer's Boece (STC 3199, fols 93r–94v) and the proem to his 1483 second edition of The Canterbury Tales (STC 5083, sig. A2r–v) are regularly quoted as evidence of changing attitudes towards Chaucer at the end of the English ‘medieval’ period and the inception of a ‘modern’ idea of English literary history. Less frequently discussed, but demonstrating the plasticity of the concept of authorship in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, is the ending and epilogue to Caxton's 1483 edition of The House of Fame (STC 5087, sig. D4r).

Lyke as ye haue herd me endyte Caxton's text breaks off at line 2094, part-way through the description of the Whirling Wicker. For Chaucer's account of the diverse ‘tydynges’ that multiply within, and the arrival of the enigmatic ‘man of greet auctoritee’ with which Fame ends, Caxton substitutes the following ending and epilogue:

Explicit

The origins of Edward's Scottish war date back to 1542, when Henry VIII had signed a new agreement with the Emperor, committing him to an attack on France. Remembering what had happened in 1513, and realising that James V bore him no particular good will, the King decided that on this occasion he would take the Scots out first. By magnifying border grievances in the autumn of 1542, and by sending the Duke of Norfolk on a large-scale and provocative raid into the Lowlands, Henry succeeded in inducing James to send a large, but not very well equipped army into the Debatable Land north of Carlisle. There, on 23 November, it was caught and defeated at Solway Moss by a smaller but much more professional English force. This battle was no bloodbath, but it did result in the capture of a sizeable number of Scottish peers and lairds, and put Henry into a very strong position both militarily and politically. Three weeks later James V died (allegedly from a broken heart but more probably from venereal disease) and was succeeded by his daughter Mary, who was barely a week old. Seizing the opportunity created by this situation, Henry began to press the regency government of Scotland for a marriage between their infant queen and his own son Edward, then aged about five. The advantages of this from the English point of view were obvious, and the Scots were not happy. However, the regent, the Earl of Arran, was in no position to resist, and Henry hammered home his advantage by making his prisoners swear to support his campaign as a condition of their release. The result was the signing of treaties at Greenwich in July 1543, one of which agreed to the proposed marriage. The outcome was predictable. Resistance to the treaty built up in Scotland, led by the Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews, David Beaton, and in December of the same year the Scots Parliament repudiated it, leaving Henry very much where he had been before Solway Moss, except that he now faced a settled hostility from the north.

He was understandably angry, particularly as his preoccupation with Scotland had caused him to miss his cue in attacking France, which should have happened in the summer of 1543.

[fol. 2v]

<Chaunter> mestut <mun quer> *** <dure langage>

Tut enplurant fu fet le chant de nostre barnage

Qui pur la pes si loins apres se lessa detrere

Sun cors trencher pur ben saver la gent de Engletere.

Ore est occis la flur de pris ke tant saveit de guere

Li quens Munfort sa dure mort enplura Engletere.

Si cum qui par un mardi fini la bataylle

Tut a cheval firent le mal san ren de petaylle.

Ore est apert cum sire Edeward cunquit la mestrie

Mes pur sa mort li quens Munfort cunquit victorie.

Atort est tue e demembre ore ad Deu la vie aye

Cum li martyr de Canterberi se finist sa vie.

Ne voleit pas seint Thomas ke perist seinte eglise

Li quens ausi cumbaty e murut sen fayntise.

Pur nus saver e deliverer de males leys enterre

Se cumbatist e mort suffrit. Tut arme sur la †bere†

Pres de sun cors li bon tresors une here truverent

Li faus ribaus \tant/ firent maus ke si li tuerent.

Mult fu pite quant demembre remistrent li prudume

Ke de gerrer pur nus sauver si ben saveit la sume.

Huge Despenser li noble ber la dreiturel justise

Ore est atort livre a mort ne sey en quele guyse.

Chaunter mestut (205)

Dublin, Trinity College, MS 347, fols 2v–3r

*** harsh words must I sing, my heart *** All made tearfully was the song about our barons,

who let themselves be destroyed for the sake of a peace so far off and let their bodies be slashed to protect well the people of England.

[5] Now is slain that precious flower, Montfort the earl, who knew so much about war. The land will deeply lament his cruel death.

[7] It was on a Tuesday, so I believe, that the battle ended. The calamity was that it was all on horseback, without any infantry.

[9] Now is it clear how Sir Edward's side won the day. But in spite of his death Montfort the earl won the victory.

[11] He was wrongly killed and dismembered. Now God has protected his life. He ended his life like the martyr of Canterbury.

[13] Saint Thomas did not wish holy church to perish. The earl, too, fought and died without relenting.