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 First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing

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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 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-3155-9110-0 (ebk) Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xi

Introduction The Wooing of the King 1

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 179 Index 195 This page intentionally left blank Preface

It is often observed that little love poetry survives from fifteenth- and early sixteenth- century 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 This page intentionally left blank 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. This page intentionally left blank Abbreviations

ALHTS Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, ed., T. Dickson and J.B. Paul, 11 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–1916) APS Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, ed., T. Thomson and C. Innes, 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1814–75) BL British Library, London CR Chaucer Review DNB The Dictionary of National Biography, ed., L. Stephen and S. Lee (Oxford, 1908) DOST 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) EETS Early English Text Society; ES Extra Series; OS Original Series ELR English Literary Review ES English Studies IMEV 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) IR Innes Review MÆ Medium Ævum MED The Middle English Dictionary, ed., H. Kurath and S.M. Kuhn et al. (Michigan and Oxford, 1956–) MLQ Modern Language Quarterly NAS National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh NM Neuphilologische Mitteilungen OED The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, 20 vols (Oxford, 1989) PQ Philological Quarterly RES Review of English Studies SHR Scottish Historical Review SLJ Scottish Literary Journal SP Studies in Philology SS Scottish Studies SSL Studies in Scottish Literature SSR Scottish Studies Review STC 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 STS Scottish Text Society TEAMS The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages This page intentionally left blank 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 pseudo- Aristotelian 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 Forbes- Leith 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. The Wooing of the King 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). 6 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. The Wooing of the King 7 is The Buke of the Chess,26 a verse translation of the highly influential thirteenth- century 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. 8 Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 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 non- narrative 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 See Mapstone, ‘Advice to Princes’, pp. 408–51. 29 Meroure, p. xliv. 30 Meroure, p. 96. 31 Meroure, p. 130. 32 Meroure, p. 131. 33 Meroure, pp. 135–6. The Wooing of the King 9 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. 10 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 fifteenth- century 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 The Wooing of the King 11 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. 12 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 fifteen- years-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. The Wooing of the King 13 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. 14 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). The Wooing of the King 15 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. 16 Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 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). The Wooing of the King 17 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. This page intentionally left blank