• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

lLo- ScV SHSb Gt PUBLICATIONS OF THE SCOTTISH HISTORY SOCIETY THIRD SERIES VOLUME XL V THE LETTERS OF JAMES THE FOURTH 1505-1513 1953 ROBERT KERR HANNAY THE LETTERS OF JAMES THE FOURTH 1505-1513 Calendared by ROBERT KERR HANNAY, LL.D. H.M. Historiographer in Scotland Edited with a Biographical Memoir and an Introduction by R. L. MACKIE, M.A., B.Litt. assisted by ANNE SPILMAN, M.A. EDINBURGH Printed by T. and A. Constable Ltd. Printers to the University of Edinburgh for the Scottish History Society 1953 ^-2%*N0g \ 1953 Z2' Printed in Great Britain CONTENTS PAGE ROBERT KERR HANNAY. A Memoir . vii INTRODUCTION xxi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS .... Ixxi LETTERS OF JAMES IV, 1505-1513 . 1 INDEX 325 A generous contribution from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland towards the cost of producing this volume is gratefully acknowledged by the Council of the Society. ROBERT KERR HANNAY A Memoir Robert Kerr Hannay was born in Glasgow, at 16 Wood- side Terrace, on 31st December, 1867. He was the eldest of the six children of Thomas Hannay, ironmaster, and Elizabeth McDowall, the daughter of a minister of the United Presbyterian Church. His mother, ‘ though a woman of deeply pious and even puritanical and prudish leanings,’ wrote one who knew them both, ‘ with more than a tinge of anxious melancholy, was yet blessed with a deeply innate sense of humour. It was from her that he inherited that genuine “ eye ” for the incongruous and ridiculous that was to delight so many of his friends.’ Much of his childhood and boyhood, however, was passed, not in the family home at Bridge of Allan, but in Glasgow, with his aunts, wealthy and pious old ladies. He always spoke of them with affection, even when he recalled the tract-distributing expeditions in which he was com- pelled to take part, but he felt that in these too quiet years he lost something which neither they nor Albany Academy—the private day-school which he attended— could supply. His mother was evidently of the same opinion : in the summer of 1883, after he had left Albany Academy for good, she invited a member of the Glasgow University rugby team to act as his purse-bearer and cub- leader on a lengthy walking tour. ‘ The most characteristic feature of the outer man then,’ wrote the cub-leader, Mr. J. S. Hamilton, ‘ was his strikingly handsome face and figure. Already six feet three inches—he attained six feet five inches ere long—he was no willowy stripling, but well-proportioned, with an athlete’s upright carriage, facing life boldly with that humorous challenge in his fine eyes and lofty bearing, which was more marked in the youth than in the hard-working scholar of later years. I was constantly amazed at the tireless outpouring of physical energy, of which, for a rapidly growing boy, he was capable. viii LETTERS OF JAMES IV He would play hard tennis from just after breakfast till twilight, with no break except for lunch, then after a bath and change and supper sit down at the piano and, playing his own accompaniments, sing over dozens of his favourite songs, interrupted only by family worship, till around midnight. Next day it might be a twenty-five or thirty- mile tramp over or round the Ochils, or a long day’s cricket, or a hundred-mile bicycle ride, but always finishing with a similar evening at the piano. As a schoolmaster for over forty years I have encountered some youths with exceptional physical endowments, but none to match Hannay’s zest in sheer activity.’ This first expedition, in the summer of 1883, was fol- lowed by others in succeeding years, to the Highlands, to the Outer Hebrides, to London, and elsewhere. Of the years which he spent at Glasgow University, where he matriculated in Session 1884-5, Hannay has said little. He rowed and played cricket—cricket that was above the Scottish University standard, for while he was still in his teens he was chosen to keep wicket for the West of Scotland in a representative East v. West match. More is known about his career at Oxford. He entered University College, then a small college of about eighty undergraduates, in 1889. For a time it seemed as if he might be deflected from scholarship into athletics. He was an exceedingly active member of both the Rugby XV and the Association XI of his college, play- ing in as many as sixty matches in one term, often at the rate of two per diem. He soon found his way into the University XV, where his height, weight, and dash made him a formidable forward. The rowing men also had their eyes on him as a most promising recruit for the middle position in the University boat. But he could not forget that he was the eldest of a family of six, and that the expenditure of time and money involved in keeping up with the University XV’s exacting programme of travelling to distant matches was incompatible with the claims of his young brothers and sisters. It was the sacrifice of time especially that would not square with his conscience. So LETTERS OF JAMES IV ix he resigned his place in the University XV and his chance of a place in the University boat, and applied himself steadily to the regular course of reading which, in a thoroughly businesslike way, he had sketched out for himself. He read hard, harder in the Long Vacation than in term time, but gained only a Second both in Mods, and in Greats. ‘ It struck me,’ writes that same shrewd and sympathetic observer—and his remarks explain much that puzzled those who knew Hannay only in the later part of his career—‘ that as a candidate for Oxford Greats he was decidedly lacking in a taste for literature and philosophy, and only superficially familiar with the best of our fiction, poetry, and history. With the greatest of our poets, in particular, he seemed to have little but a mere school knowledge ... I cannot recall, in all the years of my contact with him, any hint of any knowledge either of Scott’s novels or of Burns’s poems. There was indeed in his family, though otherwise high-minded and refined, only a meagre interest in books, except in Hannay’s case, and there it was limited to the works of Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, et hoc genus omne. These he read with enormous gusto, and could recite any passage with huge delight.’ Hannay received his Oxford B.A. in 1894, his Glasgow M.A. in 1895 and his Oxford M.A. in 1897. After a short spell of teaching in the Royal High School, Edinburgh, he went in the autumn of 1895 to University College, Dundee, as Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. He was also, between 1895 and 1898, Assistant to the Pro- fessor of English. In 1899 he married Jane Ewing Wilson, the second daughter of the Rev. J. S. Wilson, D.D., for many years minister of New Abbey. ‘ She was a remarkably gifted woman ’ wrote one who knew her well, ‘ with abilities far beyond the common. She brought out Hannay’s powers, and helped him in all manner of ways, and he had the most profound admiration and respect for her judgment and scholarship, and gifts as a speaker and administrator.’ In 1901 he went to St. Andrews as Lecturer in Ancient LETTERS OF JAMES IV History and Archaeology. His classes, for the first few years of his stay, at least, were composed almost entirely of students who took Ancient History for the sole reason that they could not get an Honours degree in Classics without it. If they did not catch fire from him, they at least tolerated his enthusiasms, one of them confessed, for the sake of ‘ the ready smile, the unconventional anecdote, and the whimsical greeting.’ At the same time they recognised that there was more in him than came out in his lectures. ‘ The bejant who fails to acquire the genial friendship of his nod,’ wrote the same student, ‘ the intimacy of his sprightly stories, the inspiration of his serious moments, has failed to realize what his Alma Mater can impart.’ He kept open house for his students on Sunday afternoon, helped the struggling University cricket eleven in the early stages of its career, and sang at concerts in the Students’ Union. His voice, though not naturally rich, or even melodious, was well trained and controlled. As conductor of the University Musical Society, as Organist and Choirmaster in the University Chapel, he put his musical scholarship and sound musical taste at the disposition of the student community, taught its members to regard some of their favourite Victorian hymn tunes as ‘ immoral music, the sort of thing that would have landed its composer outside the walls of Plato’s ideal city,’ gave his choir Bach instead of Stainer and Bacchus Dykes, and made the mediaeval walls of Bishop Kennedy’s Chapel echo for the first time since the Reformation to the sound of mediaeval plainsong. R. L. Stevenson imagined St. Andrews to be ‘ an ineffectual seat of learning,’ where ‘ teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion.’ Had Hannay succumbed to its influence he would not have been the first to do so— there was a Professor of History who in 1826 confessed to the University Commission that he had not delivered a lecture for sixteen years. He was fortunate, however, in the guidance of his wife and in the friendship of John Herkless, later Principal of the University, at that time Professor of Ecclesiatical History in St.

Load more

  431

Copy Link