[In the essay below, MacDonald analyzes Drummond's ideas of kingship and politics, and compares the poet's beliefs to the popular opinions of his day.]

Among the holograph manuscripts of the Scottish poet William Drummond of Hawthornden is a rough draft of a letter probably intended for his friend at court, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling.¹ It consists of a defense of a line in Drummond's own poem Forth Feasting, a piece written to celebrate the return to Scotland in 1619 of King James VI and I. Alexander seems to have written to Drummond telling him that King James himself had objected to the words, “No Guard so sure as Loue vnto a Crowne,”² that they were disputed as “a maxime of state,” and that “the contrarie was argued that it is better to gouerne a people by feare than by loue.” Drummond must have thought that his opinion needed some explanation, though he is obviously surprised that so orthodox a “maxime” met with royal disapproval.

He begins his defense by remarking that it is both an old and a new question, and then claims that he does “but assent to what great wits had long since concluded.” Under six heads he argues his case. (His arguments are not expressed very coherently, but lest I do Drummond an injustice, it is as well to remember that this is a rough draft.) First, he notes that love is nobler than fear.³ Love is everywhere, for love comes from God and on God a prince must model himself. Secondly, love was the instigator of man's social institutions, his cities, laws, and rulers, for man first raised these up from a love of company. Next, experience has shown that those princes that rule by fear are soon deposed, while those that rule by love thrive. Fourth, love is more universal and natural than fear. A prince cannot be feared without being hated, and hatred breeds his ruin. Fifth—and in this and the next head Drummond repeats himself—a prince should behave as a shepherd to his flock, and when he needs to punish he should do it with humanity. (Under a subhead of “obiectiones against this opinion” he goes on to say that by executing justice a prince does not make his subjects fear him, and love is not bought by gifts. Octavius was an example of a beloved prince who maintained justice.) Under his last head, Drummond lists examples of princes who have ruled by love and not by fear, or who have gained honor by clemency: Philip King of Macedon, Alexander the Great, and Trajan. Nero he quotes as an example of a ruler who tried both systems, governing in love for his first five years, and ending his reign in terror.

These arguments of Drummond's are commonplaces of Renaissance monarchical theory, and his line “No Guard so sure as Loue vnto a Crowne” is as unexceptional an expression of political orthodoxy as one could hope to find.⁴ No wonder he felt himself hard done by—almost everyone, popular writers or scholars, agreed that a country ruled by fear was unhappy, unstable, and immoral. The Arcadia itself exemplified the argument: Euarchus was the epitome of the cardinal virtues, an uncorrupted example to his people; Basilius, wrapped in his own base desires, left his country open to chaos and insurrection.⁵ The courtesy books echoed the common opinion, as Guazzo in The Ciuile Conuersation put it: “there is nothing more hurtfull then to bee hated … [and] nothing more helpefull then to bee loved.” And he concluded “that a good Prince ought to purchase to him selfe the name of the father of his Countrie. …”⁶

Renaissance theory was based on classical, with a leavening of Christian teaching. The ancients had generally held that a prince should be good, and his rule was likely to be most successful if he behaved humanely. Plato described his ideal king as a philosopher king, and likened him to a shepherd. Aristotle distinguished the absolute ruler from the tyrant, the first ruling according to the law and his subjects' consent, the other despotically, without regard to the wishes or needs of his people.⁷ The Romans reiterated the same commonplaces: a king, bearing the most responsibility and having the most power in the state, should, ideally, be the wisest and most virtuous man, an example to all his subjects. If he ruled well, it was because he was good; if he ruled badly, he stood in danger of becoming a tyrant.⁸ The Renaissance writers repeated what they found in Aristotle's Politica and in Cicero's Officina, and restated virtue as Christian duty. Some, like George Buchanan and Jean Bodin, proceeded to develop the concept of the mutual responsibilities of king and subject, and to open the question of whether it was ever right for an oppressed people to rebel and overthrow a tyranny.⁹

Of the writers that we can be sure that Drummond read, three can be taken as representative: Erasmus, Buchanan, and King James himself.¹⁰ Erasmus in The Education of a Christian Prince came down heavily on the side of love as a crown's best guard: “… when you hold people bound to you through fear, you do not possess them even half. You have their physical bodies, but their spirits are estranged from you. But when Christian love unites the people and their prince, then everything is yours. …”¹¹ Buchanan in his most important treatise De Jure Regni apud Scotos said much the same: “I would have him [the king] loved by his people and protected by his people's goodwill, not by their dread of him, for these are the only weapons which make kings unconquerable.”¹² (Buchanan reiterated Aristotle's distinction between a good king and a tyrant, and gave examples of the unpleasant fates of tyrants: Drummond may have drawn on these, and he may have gathered his argument that love was the first principle of society from Buchanan's eighth heading.) James himself had much to say on the position and duties of a king. In the Basilicon Doron he holds to a view of monarchy which owes much to the Old Testament, and sees kingship as patriarchal. The tyrant (in Aristotle's distinction) thinks the people are his prey, while the good king seeks his subjects' good, and acts “as their naturall father and kindly maister.”¹³ In his later writings and speeches James's view of monarchy became yet more glorified. A king could be compared not only to a father of a family, or to a head of a body, but to a god. Though he should be a paragon of the Christian virtues, a king was beyond the laws of man. He was only answerable to God.¹⁴

There is nothing in James's writings apart from this autocratic tone which might have led Drummond to suspect that his king did not subscribe to the common opinion that “No Guard so sure as Loue vnto a Crowne.” Even James's stern advice to kings to settle first their countries with the “seueritie of justice” and only then to mix justice with mercy (given in the Basilicon Doron) was normal Renaissance theory, and Sidney had Euarchus behave in just this fashion.¹⁵

In his own writings Drummond held to a middle course. He agreed with James that “Kings were raised to govern People, by Almighty God,”¹⁶ but his criticism of the conduct of Charles shows that he felt that a king should be wise and responsible as well as Divinely enthroned. He distrusted Buchanan's theories of the rights of the people, and mocked his De Jure Regni apud Scotos in a satire.¹⁷ On the particular question of rule by love or fear he said: “The impregnable Fortress of a Prince is the Love of his Subjects, which doth only arise from the Height of his Clemency. …”¹⁸

Yet the opposing argument was well-known, even notorious. “I am not ignorant,” Drummond said in his letter, “that new politicians would perswade princes of the contrarie,” that it was indeed better to rule by fear rather than love. Apparently neither was James, for he expressed this “maxime of state” in the same phrase as the first of the new politicians: Machiavelli. The seventeenth chapter of The Prince is concerned with this very argument: “Of cruelty, and clemency, and whether it is better to be belov'd or feard.”¹⁹ Machiavelli's arguments are short and brutal. They are based upon the belief that men are naturally untrustworthy and selfish, and respond better to the rod than the reward. Expediency is all; the good of the state comes before personal virtue. A prince should not seek to avoid cruelty, if he must be cruel for the general good: “it is impossible for a new Prince to avoyd the name of cruell, because all new States are full of dangers.” It is, secondly, much safer for a prince to be feared than loved, for “Love is held by a certainty of obligation, which because men are mischeivous, is broken upon any occasion of their own profit. But feare restrains with a dread which never forsaks a man.”²⁰ However, Machiavelli concludes, a king can be feared and yet not hated, for if he is fair and observes the law, and does not exploit his subjects, yet though he is not loved, he will be respected.

Such opinions would surely have been anathema to James, with his grand concept of himself as father, head, or god. The dispute must have been academic, and Drummond's hurried, touchy letter was in all probability, superfluous.

Notes

1. National Library of Scotland, MS 2062, ff. 237-40.

2. William Drummond of Hawthornden, The Poetical Works, ed. L. E. Kastner, Scottish Text Society (Edinburgh, 1913), I, 149, line 246.

3. Love and fear as defined in natural philosophy: in the Renaissance systematization of Aristotelian physics the sentient appetites were divided into two chief parts or faculties, the concupiscible and the irascible. A particularly Christian refinement of this organization, such as given by Franciscus Titelmann in Compendium naturalia philosophiae (Paris, 1545), made love, as Drummond wrote, “the principall end marke of the concupiscible parte.” As Titelmann puts it: “simpliciter tamen amor in concupiscibili est prime radix omnium aliarum passionum” (209-10). The more usual arrangement, however, seems to have been that adopted by the Ramists, who balanced the concupiscible and irascible parts one against the other (being, of course, opposites), and likewise balanced their constituent parts. Thus Johannes Scharfius in his Physica (Lipsius, 1626) subdivided the concupiscible faculty into the three parts laetitia, amor, and spes, and the irascible faculty into tristitia, metus and ira (Bk. 7, Ch. III).

4. The most obvious possible source of Drummond's opinions seems to have been one he missed; it should nevertheless be mentioned here. In his Discours sur les moyens de bien gouverner et maintenir en bonne paix un Royaume ou autre Principauté. Contre Nicolas Machiavel Florentin (Geneva, 1576), Innocent Gentillet argued the question, coming down firmly on the side of love. Drummond had the work in his library, and although he may have gathered the last two heads in part from Gentillet's argument, he does not seem to have gone directly to Gentillet.

5. Walter R. Davis, “A Map of Arcadia,” Sidney's Arcadia (New Haven, 1965), 146 et seq. for a discussion of this point.

6. Translated by George Pettie, Tudor Translations (London, 1925), I, 208-9. As an example of a contemporary expression of the theory, Ben Jonson's dictum that “the mercifull Prince is safe in love, not in feare …” is typical. See his Discoveries, in his Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), VIII, 600.

7. The most important text to the Renaissance was undoubtedly Aristotle's Politica Drummond had this book in his library. Aristotle's first concern was to categorize and evaluate the various types of government, and in so doing he made the important distinction between the absolute monarch and the tyrant. The first acted as the guardian of his people, the second treated them as his prey. Aristotle pointed out that the effects of tyrannical cruelty were unrest and revolution (see esp. Politics, Book V, Ch. XI).

8. See the summary of classical and medieval ideas of kingship in the introduction of Lester K. Born's translation of Erasmus' The Education of a Christian Prince (New York, 1936), 44-130.

9. George Buchanan's De Jure Regni apud Scotos defended the people's right to depose a sovereign if he (or she—since the specific monarch was Mary Queen of Scots) had become a tyrant; this was revolutionary doctrine for 1579, and particularly relevant to the civil wars of the next century. In his political pamphlets Drummond, however, supported the orthodox monarchical theory. Jean Bodin's Les six Livres de la République can be seen as supporting the monarch against his subjects; Bodin's first concern was to define the qualities of sovereignty, and he concluded that a tyrant was as much a sovereign, and had as much right to his power, as the most upright of kings. The tyrant would of course be punished for his misdeeds by God (James used this same argument; in his speech of 1609, for instance, he told the Commons that a king was punished by God's laws, not man's).

10. Drummond had the quoted works in his library, and judging by the tone of his arguments in his letter, he was remembering or quoting from them. See my The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1970).

11. Erasmus, 180.

12. Buchanan, trans. D. H. MacNeill (Glasgow, 1964), 49.

13. Basilicon Doron, ed. J. Craigie (Edinburgh, 1944-50), I, 54.

14. The Speech of 1609, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), 307.

15. Davis, 148.

16. Works (Edinburgh, 1711), 175.

17. “Considerations to the Parliament,” Works (1711), 185. Drummond recommended that “Buchanan's Chronicle shall be translated into the vulgar Scottish, and read in the common Schools; and the Books of the Apocrypha being taken away from the Bible, his Book, De jure Regni, be in the Place thereof insert.”

18. Works (1711), 173.

19. The Prince, trans. E. Dacres (repr. London, 1929), 74-78. Drummond had a copy of the French translation (Library 1092).

20. Ibid., 75-76.