SOURCE: Rae, Thomas I. “The Historical Writing of Drummond of Hawthornden.” The Scottish Historical Review 54, no. 157 (April 1975): 22-62.

[In the following essay, Rae analyzes The History of the Five Jameses, examining the circumstances of its publication, Drummond's sources, and what the work reveals the author's political attitudes.]

William Drummond of Hawthornden is a figure well-known to the student of Scottish literature for his poetry, and to the scholar and bibliographer for his gift of books in 1627 to the then recently-founded library of Edinburgh University. He is less well-known as a writer of history, a pursuit he turned to in his later years; in this he followed in the footsteps of his English contemporaries and friends, Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, who similarly turned their attention from the writing of lyric poetry to the writing of history. Drummond's major historical work was The History of the Five Jameses, the history of a turbulent period in Scotland of just over 120 years, which was published five times within some sixty years of his death. This suggests a degree of popularity among the reading public, although not necessarily in Scotland for the four early editions were published in England. But Drummond did not lack Scottish admirers during this period. The poet George Lauder enthusiastically wrote of him:

The Stuart's Story was a Subject fit,
And both requir'd his Pen, and crav'd his Wit.
Those Five Great JAMES'S, to the World well-known,
At Home were Strangers still unto their own:
And he must set them on the stage again
To speak their Country's Language smooth and plain,
So sweetly flowing in a flourished Phrase,
That Tully's soul his Stile doth lead and raise;
And such Remarks, wise Sentences, Advices,
Good Counsels, Precepts, his whole Labour graces,
That on Parnassus he may claim his Seat
Next that great Roman rich in Rules of State.(1)

To Thomas Ruddiman, the editor of the 1711 edition of Drummond's works, he was ‘a judicious and exact Historian’; but Ruddiman may have had other reasons for being prejudiced in his favour. There was criticism too. Sir Robert Sibbald, writing in his Memoria Balfouriana, asserted that Sir James Balfour of Denmilne as a historian was mainly concerned to supply what was wanting in the writings of other Scottish historical writers, including Drummond.²

Drummond's historical writing has not received much recognition in more recent times from historians of Scotland, partly because the work has always been regarded as derivative but mainly because, unlike the writing of Knox, Buchanan, Spottiswoode and Calderwood, it chronicles no part of the lifetime of the author and therefore cannot be used as a quarry for reasonably reliable source material. It is for this reason that David Laing asserted that ‘his work must be held as one only of subsidiary importance’.³ But it is this very fact that makes Drummond interesting as a historical writer—that the period he wrote about ended almost a century before he put pen to paper. Accordingly he was not concerned, as Knox and Buchanan for example largely were, with explaining events in which he himself had taken part, nor with justifying the attitudes, religious or political, which had led him to participate in them; rather he was looking at the past more in the manner of a true historical writer, from the viewpoint of the times in which he was writing and with attitudes formed from those times. In any assessment of Drummond as a historian these attitudes, the ideas in his mind which moulded his historical thinking and interpretation, must be examined. But before we can do this it is necessary to look at the work itself, the way in which it evolved, and the source material he used; only then can we analyse his method and thought and the critical standards he adopted towards his sources.

The History of the Five Jameses, ostensibly edited by Drummond's son, was first published in London in 1655 by the English lawyer, John Hall, six years after Drummond's death. Hall, who died in the following year, was himself a historical writer and in 1651 had published in Edinburgh (where he had travelled in the wake of Generals Cromwell and Fairfax) a volume entitled The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered and Exemplified out of the Scottish History; this was essentially a work of anti-monarchical political propaganda rather than history, and the historical section was based heavily on Buchanan. Drummond's History was not his only work to be published in England at this time; in the following year, 1656, an edition of his poems, probably intended to be a companion volume, was edited by Edward Philips, who was a nephew of John Milton. Philips stated that he based his edition of the poems on manuscripts provided by Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit, Drummond's brother-in-law, a notorious trimmer who had visited London in the years 1654 and 1655 in an attempt to recover the administrative offices in Scotland from which he had earlier been dismissed by Cromwell.⁴ It is probable that John Hall received a manuscript of the History from the same source. Scotstarvit, closely related to the author and a connoisseur of contemporary Scottish culture, almost certainly possessed a copy. Probably several copies existed in manuscript and Drummond's biographer has asserted that, before publication, ‘several transcripts of it had been made, by means of which some notion of it had got about in Drummond's life time’.⁵ Such transcripts, however, have not survived in any great number, unlike those of the Scotichronicon or Pitscottie's Chronicle which were being made for Scottish antiquaries about this time; and it is unlikely that the work had any wide circulation in manuscript.⁶ Once published, however, it achieved a degree of popularity. It was reprinted in London by Thomas Fabian, twice in 1681 and again in 1682; and finally in Edinburgh by Thomas Ruddiman in 1711 as part of a complete edition of Drummond's Works. Textually these printed versions vary from each other only in minute details, with Ruddiman's edition correcting, from Drummond's original manuscript, the printers' errors which had occurred in the earlier editions.

The plan of Drummond's History is a simple one. The book is divided into five sections, one for each of the five kings of whose reigns he treats. Within each section he describes the accession of the king, his policies in both domestic and foreign affairs, some non-political events of interest and the death of the king, with, finally, an assessment of his character. In essence the work is a consecutive series of biographies, as the title implies, and much of the emphasis is on the kings themselves. This form of historical arrangement had its origin in Polydore Vergil's plan for his Anglicae Historiae; and it was common enough among the English Tudor historians, for Edward Halle and Richard Grafton used the same method of organisation.⁷ Among Scots writers it was not so common. Their general plan was entirely different, for although they did occasionally allocate a single chapter to a single king, Major, Boece and Buchanan did not use a basically biographical approach, nor did they emphasise royal personalities as Tudor historians did.

This conception of a succession of lives seems to be inherent in Drummond's work from its very beginning. We are extremely fortunate in possessing a series of manuscript drafts as well as a fair copy of the History, which enables the process of writing to be examined in some detail.⁸ The conjectured arrangement of the series of drafts is detailed in Appendix I, although it is clear that the series is incomplete. They show that each life was written as a separate unit. There are rough notes, one or more drafts for each king, and the fair copy. The only dated notes are those for James IV, in the year 1623; these notes, written (unusually for Drummond) on both sides of the paper, are paralleled in notes for all the other kings except James I, and all seem to have been made at the same time. Examination of the contents of the notes shows that they consist of a description of the events of Scottish history very much in the same order and with the same emphasis as they are given in Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie's Chronicle. This suggests that Drummond had access to a Pitscottie manuscript and made these notes in 1623 long before he seriously began the work of writing his own history. The earliest actual draft is for part of the James I section, dated March 1633; but the bulk of the revision and rewriting, so far as it can be determined from these drafts, was done between 1639 and 1644—an active period of Drummond's literary life when he was also writing many of his political pamphlets.⁹ The three drafts of the James II section are undated, and their place in the sequence of writing cannot be ascertained. The second of the three drafts of the James IV section was written in August 1639; the three drafts of the James III section were written in June and December 1642 and in May 1643 respectively, while the first three of (at least) six drafts of the James V section were written rapidly in May, June and July 1644. All these drafts are written on one side of the paper only, leaving the verso of the previous page available for additions and corrections. The earlier notes and drafts may have been mere dabbling in history, but at some time between 1638 and 1642 Drummond formulated a clear impression of the work as a whole. It was fairly speedily executed, and at some stage in its development must have become known outside his immediate circle, for he was summoned to defend it before the ‘Circular Tables’ of the Covenanters.¹⁰ A copy may have been among the papers he proposed to send for publication as royalist propaganda to the marquis of Montrose during his brief ascendancy in the south of Scotland in 1645.¹¹

Drummond wrote quickly once he got going, and always fairly decisively; the opening words of the 1633 draft of the James I biography are virtually identical with the printed version. By the time he began his drafts he must have had most of the facts he wished to use at his finger-tips, for comparatively few of the alterations he made on successive revisions concerned factual points, and these were generally of a very minor character. The majority of the corrections are of a literary nature. There is sound evidence of anglicization of the language (e.g. MS 2053, ff. 100, 103), for he was deliberately writing in English, not in Scots; but mainly he was concerned with style, the choice of appropriate words. A single leaf in the early draft of the James IV section shows him playing with words, working out phrases (MS 2055, f. 14v.); ‘by their continued purchasses boldnesse and machinations’ is transformed via ‘by their skill boldnesse and continued purchasses’, ‘by the boldnesse of their attempts’, ‘by their boldnesse of enterprizing’, to the typically flowing Drummond phraseology of ‘by their boldnesse of enterprizing, skill of managing all affairs, and continued purchasses’, virtually the form in which the phrase appears in the printed version. This is typical of the correction with which he involved himself throughout the drafts.

Certain passages he found more difficult to write than others, judging from the heaviness of the corrections and the number of different versions. He had more trouble with the biography of James III than with any other (MS 2054); difficulties plagued him with the ‘character’ section of James I (MS 2053, ff. 46-49), and he was continuously revising the speeches and set pieces he invented for his characters—Douglas's speech on rebellion (MS 2053, ff. 177, 192) and the passage on clemency which follows it (ff. 184, 200A), and, perhaps most significantly, the speech on toleration given to a counsellor of James V, of which there are at least six versions (MS 2055, ff. 333-84). It is perhaps sufficient to note these difficulties for the present—the reasons for them will be considered later.

Another feature of Drummond's corrections remains to be examined. Many alterations throughout the final drafts, often in ink of slightly different colour from that used in the main body of the text, are not embodied in the fair manuscript copy (which is not in Drummond's hand although corrected by him) used by Ruddiman in 1711 to check against the earlier editions. This fair copy has always been regarded as the author's final version. In the series of successive drafts, Drummond almost invariably incorporated his corrections of an earlier version in the later version: did he, then, at the time the fair copy was being made, go to the trouble of eliminating many of the corrections he had so painstakingly made?

Oddly enough, unlike the alterations at an earlier stage, many of these changes are factual. Dates which had been taken out are reinstated or corrected, and new dates inserted; for example, on the authority of Leslie (as noted on the verso of the previous page) Drummond alters the date of the foundation of Trinity College from 1466 to 1463, yet it remains unchanged in the printed version (MS 2054, f. 260). Genealogical information, the precise identification of people, had always interested Drummond and in one alteration (MS 2053, f. 120) he identifies the name of a daughter of an earl of Crawford which does not appear in print or fair copy; again, the name Robert Kirkenpatrick which is in both fair and printed versions is altered to ‘Alexander Kilpatrick’ and the man identified as ‘a Brother of the Lard of Closeburnes’ (MS 2054, f. 315). Many other similar instances can be traced, and it is surprising to find him not using information of this nature which he had acquired. It is significant that many of these alterations which are not used are attributed in the manuscript to the authority of John Leslie and Giovanni Ferrerius. As we shall see, Drummond's printed version gives none of his sources and the manuscript only a few; yet the majority of these few instances, especially when they occur in the latest dated drafts, give authority for passages which are not used in the printed version.

Other corrections and insertions, not so strictly factual as those already cited, are also not used in the printed version. There are some additions to the personalities of members of the Douglas family (e.g. MS 2053, f. 180; MS 2054, f. 334), the site of the town of Lauder is indicated more specifically (MS 2054, f. 295), political points about monarchy and the church are amplified (MS 2053, f. 177; MS 2054, f. 275v.). In the speech by Douglas justifying his rebellion he is made to contravert his own argument by admitting ‘oathes bind the Subject not the Monarche’, thus ‘apprehending the iniquitie of his cause’; the squabbles over the erection for Patrick Graham of St Andrews into an archiepiscopal see are ‘the first and fatall mischeife for the overtourning of the churches and churchmen of this kingdom’.

Taken overall, the omission of these changes makes little difference to the finished work; here and there a degree of factual precision is added or a political point put forward or emphasised. But their existence shows that Drummond's work as printed was not his final version. He may have intended the fair copy to be the final version when it was made, and clearly this version circulated in manuscript copies, from one of which the first printed edition of 1655 was set up. But after the fair copy had been made he went back to his latest draft and made further corrections and additions to it, many of them occasioned by a re-reading of Leslie, Ferrerius and Buchanan; the unused additions relating to the Douglases suggest he may also have read David Hume of Godscroft's History of the House of Douglas at this time, bringing the date of this revision to some time after 1644.¹² The fact that what appears to be the final draft of the James V section does not have unused corrections may imply that he included information from these sources at the time of writing. Drummond could not desist from continually revising his History, although he knew that, once Montrose had been defeated, he could not hope to publish it.

In his text as printed Drummond seldom refers openly to the sources he used, unlike the majority of the English Tudor writers and many earlier Scottish writers. On a few occasions he mentions authorities in vague and very general terms: ‘after the English writers …’; ‘the Histories say …’; ‘according to the Records of some Authors …’; ‘some Scottish writers … without grounds have recorded …’; ‘the English and French Writers affirm …, the Scottish …’.¹³ This no more than implies a fairly wide use of Scottish, English and French sources and it seems clear that the writers are literary authorities (in spite of the use of the word ‘Records’ in one phrase) rather than contemporary manuscript records or archival documents.

Although Drummond knew the value of original documents, having ransacked the earl of Perth's charter chest for genealogical information,¹⁴ at only one point does he imply that he is using record source material; this is when he describes the delivery to James V on 22 February 1535 (as he dates it) of a letter from Pope Paul III, and, writing of the contents, uses the phrase ‘saith the Original’.¹⁵ This passage appears to refer to the presentation by the papal legate Campeggio in 1537 of the sword and cap blessed on the night of the Nativity. The original letter, apparently dated 19 January 1536/7, is not now extant, and its text is known only from copies in letterbooks of an official origin.¹⁶ It is possible that Drummond had access to the original letterbooks. At the time he was writing, the original (if it still existed) would probably have been kept in Edinburgh Castle with other public records of importance, but there is little evidence to suggest that these records could have been consulted by a scholarly antiquary unless he also happened to be a royal official like Sir James Balfour of Denmilne. If the letterbook now among the royal manuscripts formed part of that collection in Drummond's time (and this is possible), he could have learned of its contents through correspondence with the keeper of the Royal Library, who was also a Scot, Patrick Young, son of the tutor of James VI. But it seems most unlikely that Drummond had seen the original letter or one of the contemporary letterbook copies, for the discrepancy between the text of the original letter and Drummond's account of it is too great. It is much more conceivable that he acquired his information from a literary source; but the incident is not mentioned by Buchanan, Leslie, Pitscottie or Knox, and we must be prepared to consider the possibility that Drummond might have invented the contents of his ‘original’ document in much the same way as he composed speeches for his historical characters.

Drummond may have been referring to a manuscript literary source in discussing the death of the young earl of Mar during his imprisonment in Craigmillar Castle in 1479. He admits that his authorities disagree as to what exactly happened, some indicating that Mar was killed by orders of James III. ‘But’, he continues, ‘no such Faith should be given unto them, as to William Elphinston Bishop of Aberdeen, who was living in that Time, and whose Records we have followed, who for his Place could not but know and for his Profession would not but deliver the very truth.’¹⁷ Drummond is claiming as an authority superior to the works of Buchanan, Leslie and Pitscottie (who all assert that Mar's death was deliberate royal policy) a historical or autobiographical work allegedly written by Bishop Elphinstone which states that Mar died accidentally while in charge of the king's physician. He refers again to this work in two passages in his manuscript drafts¹⁸ as ‘the Relationes of B. William Elphinstown’. Clearly Drummond firmly believed he was using a work of Elphinstone as a source for the reign of James III. The problem is to identify the work.

Bishop William Nicolson in his Scottish Historical Library writes: ‘The only Scotch Historian of the Fifteenth Century, that I know of, was W. Elphinston, Bishop of Aberdene; who spent all the time he could spare from the publick Service, in writing the History of his Nation, and gather'd in one Volume all the Antiquities that could be found thereof’. He goes on to comment that Elphinstone ‘is almost an exact Copier of Fordon, in his three first Books’, and concludes: ‘The best, if not only entire, Copy of this History is among Sir Tho. Fairfax's Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library’.¹⁹ Robert Wodrow also refers to this work in a letter to a fellow antiquary, David Randy, on 2 November 1726: ‘Generall Fairfax, when In Scotland, got the only copy I hear of In the wordle [sic] of our B. Elphingstoun's MS. History of Scotland, from Drummond of Hauthornden, and when he returned to England he lodged It in the Bodleyan Library’.²⁰ Drummond, then, possessed a manuscript history of Scotland which he and others, long after his death, believed to have been written by the Bishop of Aberdeen;²¹ and no doubt was cast on this attribution of authorship until well into the nineteenth century, when William Skene, in 1871 and 1872, delivered a series of papers to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on the manuscripts of Fordun's chronicle.²² He proved the Fairfax manuscript to be a copy of the Liber Pluscardensis continuation of the Fordun-Bower Scotichronicon, a work known both to Nicolson and Wodrow but not by them identified with this manuscript, which was written for Elphinstone in 1489. Skene, in his final paper, identified the compiler of the chronicle from internal evidence as Maurice Buchanan, who wrote it in 1461.

It is not unreasonable to expect that a copy of this work written for Elphinstone in 1489, possessed by Drummond and apparently used by him as a source for his history of the reign of James III, would contain a continuation to that date—possibly composed by the bishop himself. Unfortunately this is not the case. The text of the Fairfax manuscript ends in 1438, and the make-up of the volume does not permit the suggestion that there might have been a later section now missing. Accordingly, while Drummond would have used this manuscript as a source for the James I section of his History, he could not possibly have used it for those passages in the reign of James III where he cites Elphinstone as his authority in such glowing colours. What his authority actually was remains at present unknown: all clues seem to lead back to the Fairfax manuscript. But although Drummond was, as we have seen, probably quite capable of fabricating the text of an ‘original’ document, it is not easy to believe that he invented the information he attributed to one ‘who … would not but deliver the very truth’.

In addition to the Liber Pluscardensis text, Drummond possessed several other manuscript volumes, but those which are extant or have been identified would have been of little use to him in the composition of his History.²³ He probably had access to other works in manuscript through his friendly relations with their owners. John Adamson, principal of Edinburgh University, for example, possessed a manuscript copy of the Diurnal of Occurrents, and would undoubtedly have lent it to Drummond had it been relevant to his work.²⁴ Of the relevant works remaining in manuscript the most valuable for Drummond would have been the Historie of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie. Completed about 1579, Lindsay's work was extremely popular and, although it was not printed until 1728, it circulated widely in manuscript copies throughout the seventeenth century. Of the twenty extant seventeenth-century Pitscottie manuscripts, no fewer than ten could possibly have been lent to and used by Drummond, though none seem to have belonged to him personally. Thomas Ruddiman and John Sage, in their introduction to the 1711 edition of Drummond's Works, state confidently that he could not have known of Pitscottie's history on the grounds that he had omitted to record a particular tale about the rebellion against James III mentioned by Robert Lindsay.²⁵ This is false reasoning: what Drummond omitted from his History cannot prove anything, for he picked out from his sources only what he wished to use; the only valid criterion is whether or not he used facts or comments taken from Pitscottie not found in any other source. To discover this is not easy, for George Buchanan, Raphael Holinshed and others had used Pitscottie manuscripts as a source for their own histories, and Drummond's use of any particular facts from Pitscottie could have been at second hand through these other authors. But, as already indicated, some of his notes read suspiciously as if taken from Pitscottie; and there is, moreover, sufficient evidence to suggest that Drummond derived some of his material direct from Pitscottie—in other words that he did have access to a Pitscottie manuscript.

In a passage concerning the detention of James III for a short period in 1482 after the episode of Lauder Bridge,²⁶ Drummond distinguishes between ‘the Records of some Authors’ which assert that during the imprisonment the government was carried on openly by a group of regents, and ‘the honest Records’ which state that James was under open arrest only and retained the appearance if not the substance of power. An examination of various possible sources shows that Buchanan does not mention the incident at all and that Giovanni Ferrerius, John Leslie and Raphael Holinshed all state definitely that an aristocratic regency was in control, giving as its personnel the names mentioned by Drummond in his citation of ‘some Authors’.²⁷ Only Pitscottie differs in his treatment of this episode, telling it in the form described by ‘the honest Records’.²⁸ There are other similar, apparently unique, passages from Pitscottie used by Drummond. Only Pitscottie mentions the following facts: that James III boarded a ship ostensibly for Flanders, but landed in Fife; that his advisers, knowing of his predilection for sorcery, persuaded ‘an aged Woman’ to warn him of the dangers of revolt from his kinsmen; or that Lady Foord had a daughter to assist her in her dalliance with James IV before Flodden.²⁹

Thus the sources in manuscript which we can be sure Drummond used were not very extensive—his own copy of Liber Pluscardensis for the reign of James I, a borrowed Pitscottie, and an unidentified ‘Elphinstone’ history. The possible printed sources, only one of which is mentioned by name in the printed text (and that perhaps the most unimportant),³⁰ are, however, much more numerous. He possessed a large library at Hawthornden,³¹ but among the approximately 1400 volumes it comprised, comparatively few were historical in nature, despite the fact that he wrote to the marquis of Douglas that he preferred to carry out his historical studies at home, for ‘being nearer manye historyes in diuerse languages in myne own studye, I can more conveniently peruse them …’.³² Most of the historical works in his library were texts of Greek or Roman historians such as Thucydides, Caesar and Tacitus, and were clearly irrelevant to his Scottish writing; equally irrelevant were works of Matthieu and others on the French wars of religion, a subject which seems to have interested Drummond intensely. Only sixteen of the books he possessed can really be considered at all relevant,³³ and of these only three can be shown to have been actual sources—Boece, Buchanan and Jean de Serres; to which should be added Sidney's Arcadia and Machiavelli's History of Florence, which he used for literary allusions. These five authors are specifically mentioned in annotations to his manuscript drafts. In addition eight other authorities are cited in these annotations,³⁴ books not known by Macdonald to have been definitely owned by Drummond; the chances are he did possess such works as Ferrerius' continuation of Boece, Leslie, Holinshed's Chronicles, John Stow's Annals and Edward Halle's Chronicle. He certainly had access to them from somewhere.

Close comparative examination of the text of Drummond's History with these other works shows that he did use them as sources throughout his work, not only at the points indicated in the manuscript drafts. Occasionally he transcribed almost directly from a source, as the following comparison of his text with that of Holinshed shows.³⁵ The authors are setting out the terms of the 1484 treaty between Scotland and England:

DRUMMOND

‘It was agreed, That no Traitor of either Realm should be received by any of the Princes of the other Realms: and if any Traitor or Rebel chance to arrive in either Realm, the Prince thereof should deliver him upon demand made. Scots abiding within the Realm of England and sworn there to the King may remain still, so their names be made known to the King of Scotland within fourty days. If any Warden of either Realm shall Invade the others Subjects, he to whom such a Warden is subject shall within six days, Proclaim him Traitor, and certifie the other Prince thereof within twelve days.’

HOLINSHED

‘It was further agreed, that no traitor of either realme should be received by the prince of either realme; and if anie traitor or rebell chanced to arriue in either realme, the prince thereof to deliuer him upon demand made. Scots alreadie abiding in England and sworne to the king there, may remaine still, so their names be certified to the Scottish king within fortie daies. If anie warden of either realme should inuade the others subiects, he to whom such warden is subiect, shall within six daies proclame him traitor, and certifie the other prince thereof within 12 daies.’

The points made are a reasonably accurate précis of four of the twenty-seven clauses of the original treaty,³⁶ but it is almost certain that neither author had seen the text of the original. Holinshed undoubtedly got his information from Halle's Chronicle, where the same clauses are given in a much more extended form as part of a fifteen-clause précis of the treaty, closely akin to the original text.³⁷ Although we know Drummond had access to Halle and used him as a source, it is unlikely that he and Holinshed, writing sixty years apart, should independently make such a similar précis of the same parts of that source, and the obvious must be accepted—Drummond simply copied from Holinshed.

Drummond, however, is seldom so obvious in his use of his sources; although one other example of direct copying will shortly be indicated,³⁸ he did not compile his work as some of the English Tudor historians did, by uncritically transcribing or translating the work of earlier writers. It is only by close comparative reading of the texts, seeking the similarities and discrepancies in minute factual matters such as lists of proper names, numbers of men killed in battles and sums of money, that it can be shown that Drummond was following one source rather than another. In one instance it is possible to identify the edition of the source he used. When he cited Stow in his manuscript draft he was referring to one of the several editions of his work published at different times between 1565 and 1631 under various titles such as A Summarie of the Chronicles of England and The Annales or Generall Chronicle of England. Drummond listed the names of the hostages sent to England as pledges for the payment of the ransom of James I ‘according to the English Writers’,³⁹ presumably because Scottish authors referring to this incident did not mention any names—Buchanan only refers to ‘the nobility who had given their children as hostages’.⁴⁰ These names are not given by Halle or Holinshed, nor by Stow in the 1592 edition of his work; but they are listed, with only one variation from those later named by Drummond, by Stow in his 1605 edition.⁴¹ Thus Drummond was using this 1605, or a later, edition of Stow's Annals.

Using this detailed (and tedious) method of textual comparison it has been possible to prove not only that Drummond used the main sources referred to in the annotations of his manuscript drafts at places other than those where the annotations occur, but also that he consulted several other printed works which he did not indicate in these drafts.⁴² He used John Major's Historia Maioris Britanniae, John Bellenden's translation and augmentation of Boece's Historiae, and also, in addition to the second volume of Holinshed's Chronicles, which is devoted to Scottish history, the third volume, which deals with English history after the Norman conquest and which, where it impinges on Scottish matters, differs considerably both in factual detail and comment from the Scottish volume. Drummond probably acquired information also from Polydore Vergil's Anglicae Historiae and John Speed's History of Great Britaine. Undoubtedly he also used other works available to him which have not been revealed by the samples of text on which particular textual comparisons have been made.

One other Scottish work remains to be discussed: Drummond's use of David Hume of Godscroft's History of the Houses of Douglas and Angus, published in 1644 when he was engaged in completing his own History at white heat, hopeful that his writing would be of propaganda value to the royalist cause. Hume's work was written more than twenty years earlier at the request of the Douglas family (he had been the trusted private secretary of Archibald, 8th Earl of Angus). A licence for printing it was issued by Archbishop Spottiswoode in September 1631, a few months before Hume's death, and, probably in 1633 or 1634, the first part, that dealing only with the house of Douglas, was printed by the heirs of Andro Hart from a manuscript provided by Sir George Douglas of Mordington.⁴³ It appears that only one copy of this edition has survived, and probably only a small number were printed. The first complete edition is that of 1644, printed from the original manuscript in the possession of Anna Hume, Godscroft's daughter. But this edition did not circulate at this time, for the marquis of Douglas immediately had an interdict placed on its sale, ostensibly because of ‘careless editing’, and this remained in force until July 1646.

It is not known whether or not Drummond possessed or had access to a copy of the incomplete early edition; but he did see and use the 1644 edition, despite the ban, as soon as it came from the press. It was sent to him, probably in March 1644, by the marquis of Douglas, who wished his opinion on its historical accuracy, probably to justify the interdict. Drummond was not over-impressed. He felt there were some errors of interpretation which required correction, and he found passages which were ‘extreame puritanicall’, including ‘discourses which authorize Rebellion, and the forcing of consciences, and putting the sword in the peoples hand’, views which in his own work he was attempting to contravert.⁴⁴ It is clear that the interdict had as much a political as a historical motive, and that Drummond's attitude may have helped to ban the work for a few years. Nevertheless Drummond was sufficiently impressed with some of the factual information provided by Godscroft to make alterations to his own work. These corrections are of the ‘unused’ variety—they do not appear in the printed version of the history. The previously-mentioned Kirkenpatrick/Kilpatrick correction is due to Hume (p. 205); and one of the larger unused additions (MS 2053, f. 180) is a verbatim transcript from his writing (p. 200). Thus, although the printed text of Drummond's History owes nothing to Hume of Godscroft (except possibly in the James V section), Drummond did make extensive use of it in his later revisions.

The source-works so far identified precisely are all either by English or Scottish historians. But it will be recollected that Drummond indicated ‘French Writers’ to be among the authorities he so vaguely mentions, and that he possessed in his library several relevant works by French historians. It has, however, proved even more difficult to indicate with any decisiveness which French authors he used, except for Jean de Serres' Inuentaire Général de l'Histoire de France, which he possessed and referred to twice in his manuscript drafts. We know Drummond read with care and interest Etienne Pasquier's Memoires et Récherches de la France, for he took copious notes from it in one of his commonplace books;⁴⁵ but at the time he made his notes, probably while he was still a young man, he may have been more interested in what Pasquier had to say about French literature, and the historical notes refer only to subjects such as the feudal origins of French administration, orders of chivalry and the church, none of which were really relevant to his own historical writing. Nor did he absorb any methodological lessons from Pasquier, an important figure in the development of French historiography who based his work on documentary sources and the analytical methods of legal philology.⁴⁶ Jean du Tillet's Chronicon de Regibus Francorum was basically a chronological list of French kings, and did not provide Drummond with any relevant material. It has not been possible to examine copies of all the French works owned by Drummond, but none of those consulted appear to make the point which he specifically indicated he owed to French authorities—that James II attacked Roxburgh to aid Henry VI, not the Yorkist claimant as suggested by Scottish sources such as Buchanan and Pitscottie. The only work in French so far traced which makes this point was written by David Chambre, in fact a self-exiled Scot, David Chalmers, Lord Ormond,⁴⁷ who asserted in his Histoire Abbregée de Tous les Roys de France, Angleterre et Escosse that James II ‘pour establir Henry 6 d'Angleterre en son estat … entra dans l'Angleterre, faisant la guerre contre les ennemis d'iceluy Henry …’.⁴⁸ It seems, then, that this is the only item we can at present definitely add to the Inuentaire of Jean de Serres as examples of Drummond's French sources.

Drummond, then, drew the information for his History from a wide variety of sources. None of them were of the primary documentary type, and his references to ‘records’ and ‘originals’ must be viewed with suspicion. He almost certainly used some manuscript literary histories; but here again his use of ‘the Relationes of B. William Elphinstown’ must be regarded with doubt until the exact text on which he was basing his statements can be traced. His main sources were the printed literary histories of Scottish, English and French writers, many but probably not all of which have been identified. Other authors such as Claude Gruget and Sir Philip Sidney provided him with literary parallels and allusions. Drummond's reading was extensive, and he seems to have had all the facts he wished to use at his fingertips when he came to write. But beyond a general desire to get them reasonably accurate, he was less concerned with the facts than with the interpretation he put on them. The modes of thought underlying this interpretation will now be our major concern.

Most historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not write because they were primarily interested in the past as such; rather, even when writing of ancient eras, they were concerned with their own time. Their purpose was to extend the realms of personal experience by observing the actions of men in the past, to draw lessons from former days which could be relevant to their contemporary society. The lessons could be moral, the simple difference between good and evil deeds, or, more often, political. Major, Boece and Buchanan all emphasised strongly this didactic motive in the dedications of their works to their royal masters, while John Spottiswoode, writing some time after Drummond, stresses the benefits of history as experience: ‘the short life of man sufficeth not … to purchase the experience of many things, whereas, in a few hours reading of an history wisely digested, we may gain more instruction than twenty men living successively, one after another, can acquire by their own observation’.⁴⁹

Drummond himself gives little clue to his motives in his dedicatory epistle to John Drummond, Earl of Perth. He denies that ‘the Writing of this History proceeded from Ambition or the Desire of Fame’ or that his ‘Design was to Compliment the High and Mighty Prince Charles’ for some material reward. The compliment, he asserts, is only to the house of Drummond, as James I and his four successors were descended from Annabella Drummond, queen to Robert III.⁵⁰ This is clearly the flattery of a dedicatory epistle. True, in his writing he frequently brings in references to members of the Drummond family; but he as frequently refers to the Douglases, sometimes in a favourable and exculpatory light without, apparently, intending his book to be a compliment to the house of Douglas. Nevertheless, such references to kings and noble families, to kingship and aristocracy, suggest that one of his motives for writing was political. Later, Drummond mentions that he has turned from verse ‘to write about so many great and weighty Affairs in Prose’.⁵¹ This statement, taken in conjunction with the eulogistic comments about his prose from Lauder and Ruddiman already quoted, suggests that another motive for him was to write a great literary work, and in English rather than Scots.

In the political affairs of his time Drummond was not an active man, yet he had very decided political opinions which he expressed in the pamphlets he was writing at the same time that he was engaged on his History.⁵² These opinions derived from his acceptance of the view of an ordered and hierarchical universe, the ‘world picture’ of the nature of things accepted by Shakespeare, Spenser and other Tudor poets, pre-echoes of which may be traced in the writings of Scottish poets such as Dunbar and Lindsay. Within this scheme human society is a hierarchy; the monarch is the natural head of a state, assisted in government by his nobility, one whom the common people must obey. The king should earn this obedience by ruling for the benefit of his people; but even if he should rule tyrannically in a self-interested manner, the people are morally bound to obey him, for only God may judge a king. The king should rule by counsel of his nobility, but he need not do so; if he does not, neither nobility nor common people have any means of redress, for he cannot be removed from his office, and rebellion against him is a sin which would disrupt God's natural scheme of a hierarchic universe. The qualities of kingship which Drummond admires are Aristotelian, and, although he undoubtedly had his opinions reinforced by his reading of continental books, this attitude is part of a Scottish tradition to be seen in David Lindsay's political poems and even in some passages of George Buchanan. Drummond, however, adds a point of his own: where there is a violent difference of opinion between monarch and people, an attitude of tolerance must be cultivated to prevent the situation degenerating into the chaos of rebellion. This on the surface seems a far-sighted and liberal principle; but Drummond's belief in toleration was subordinated to his belief in the necessity for obedience, and accordingly was one-sided—the people must tolerate the activities of the king. In politics, then, Drummond held attitudes which were not only being questioned but were already somewhat out-of-date in the context of the realities of the time in which he lived. Yet his fear of revolution was real. In his political pamphlets he argued for its rejection, partly on moral and theoretical grounds; in his History he argues to the same end on the grounds of experience from the past. His work is an answer to George Buchanan, probably the most widely-read historian in Scotland at that time, whose history is primarily a justification from the past of his theories of an elective monarchy and the right of rebellion, doctrines which Drummond abhorred.

The hierarchic nature of Drummond's view of society is made clear in the very first sentence of his History, in which he contrasts the various motives of the ranks of the Scottish people in seeking to negotiate the return of James I. The nobility are ‘wearied with the Form of their present Government’; the churchmen and gentry are ‘Loyal and Well-affected to the Lawful Heir of the Crown’; the common people are ‘Men delighting in Novations, and ordinarily preferring Uncertainties, and Things unseen and to come, to what for the Time they did hold and enjoy’.⁵³ At once a picture is formed showing the aristocracy with concern for government, responsible people as dutifully loyal and obedient, and the ordinary man in the street or fields as fickle and, in serious matters, unimportant. For Drummond, this view of the common people is standard. They were ‘lighter than the Wind, and more variable than the Rainbow’ and had a ‘depraved Disposition and Envy against their Betters’, although in one sympathetic flash he reveals his awareness that they were ‘ever suffering and paying for the Faults and Errors of the great ones’.⁵⁴

Drummond emphasises that nobility is an attitude of mind as well as a social grade, a feature again based on the idea of responsible obedience. James I is made to advise his lords to

think Virtue and Civility true Nobility; that to be accounted Noblest which is Best, and that a Man's own Worth begets true Glory. By these, and the Obedience to their Princes your Ancestors acquired what ye now enjoy; There is no stronger means to keep the Goods acquired from a Prince, than the same by which they were first purchased, which is still Obeying.⁵⁵

This, Drummond's true feeling, must be contrasted with the cynical words put into the mouth of Atholl in justifying his revolt against James I: ‘fair Glosses of Valour for the most part have been cast on the foulest Deeds, and the mightiest Families have from them derived their Honours, Shame seldom or never following Victory, however it be achieved and purchased’.⁵⁶ But, however they have acquired their noble status, it is in Drummond's view the natural function of the aristocracy to advise the king and to act as his viceroys throughout the kingdom. The ‘episode’ at Lauder Brig could not be justified, but it was understandable when ‘the King suffereth himself to be goverened by mean Persons, and Men of no Account, to the Contempt of the Nobility …’; and Drummond allows his strictures against James V almost to justify the statement of one of his characters that ‘the Churchmen had set him on Work to extirpate his ancient Nobility, as if it were an easy Matter to create as many new out of the Gentry, in whom (being his own Creatures) he might have greater Confidence than any made by his Predecessors’.⁵⁷ In Drummond's view, kings who rejected or attacked the aristocracy were as guilty of disturbing the divinely-ordained natural society as those who rebelled against the crown.

Drummond's conception of aristocratic counsel for the king gives him a jaundiced attitude towards the Scottish parliament. Admittedly he did not think much of parliamentarians in his own time, but his view grows naturally out of his overall philosophy. Parliament, presumably because it included non-noble elements among its personnel, was not the best means of guiding royal government. In his History he shows that it could not only be used by the crown for its own ends, but also corrupted and controlled by unworthy cliques and cabals: ‘but that this might not appear to be an Act of Faction, but the universal Consent of the kingdom, a Parliament was summoned …’; ‘to give the fairer Lustre to her [Margaret Tudor's] Actions, a Parliament is called at Edinburgh, that what she did, might consist with Law’.⁵⁸ Drummond, like David Lindsay, had no great belief in the efficacy of the three estates, and the Scottish parliament is infrequently mentioned in his History and then generally in pejorative tones.

In the divinely-ordained social hierarchy the monarch himself owes his position and is answerable only to God; kings are ‘they to whom God hath given the Government of States and Kingdoms’ and they must act ‘according to that Authority in which God had placed [them]’.⁵⁹ This is not the absolutist Divine Right theory of James VI, which Drummond by no means accepted; for, as he makes James I announce in his speech to his people, ‘Royalty consisteth not so much in a Chair of State, as in such Actions which do well become a Prince. … I will behave my self in my Proceedings, as I must answer to God; and for you, my Subjects, do so as ye shall answer to God first, and after to your Prince whom God hath set over you’.⁶⁰ A king's subjects are God's people as well as his, and in his dealings with them he must remember this for it forms the responsibility of government. Admittedly ‘the Greatness of a Subject consisteth in due Obedience to his Prince’,⁶¹ but a good monarch must earn this obedience. The advice which Drummond puts into the mouth of the Queen Mother for the young James III is exactly the advice he himself gave to Charles I in the political pamphlets he addressed to him.

Endeavour to make your Subjects obey you more out of Love than Fear. … Remember ye Govern not the soft effeminate People of the South, but a fierce Warlike Nation of the North, which oftner use to be intreated than commanded by their Princes. Be sparing to lay Subsidies on them, which maketh many Male-contents; and live upon your own, suffering others to enjoy what is theirs. Beware of Flatterers, and exalting undeserving Persons above your ancient Nobility. Suffer not your Prerogative to come in Question; but foreseeing the Danger, rather give way to all that with Reason is demanded of you. Moderate your Passions; He shall never govern a Kingdom, who cannot govern himself. …⁶²

This puts Drummond's conception of the good king in a nutshell. Love between king and subject is better than fear, persuasion better than force; government should be economic and taxation low—‘gently strain Milk, and not wring Blood from the Breast of the Country’. Strict rule, with aristocratic advice, is necessary at times, but clemency must be a feature of all government: ‘Yet was not his [i.e. James II's] clemency a soft Weakness, it being no less cruelty to Forgive all than to spare none, but an Order and Discretion in Justice, temper'd with Severity towards some more than others, according to their Demerits.’ The most important qualities of a king, in this assessment, are judiciousness and discrimination, ‘Necessity in Affairs of Princes, constraining them to yield to many Things in Government against their First Conclusions, and resolve to grant that which they could not well hinder’.⁶³

Clemency in a good king appears to lead to a form of toleration: ‘here’, says Bishop Kennedy to James II in Drummond's words, ‘the Prudence of a Prince manifesteth it self, when he cannot suppress and stop all the Evils in his State, to suffer and tolerate the least …’.⁶⁴ This is not the toleration of principle but the toleration of policy, and is particularly the case in religious matters. Drummond makes one of James V's privy counsellors address him in a long speech on tolerating religious dissension in his kingdom. It is not what ‘should be, but what Necessity driveth us unto, and what is most convenient for the present Time to be’; nor is it expedient to banish or persecute heretics for this will only encourage troublesome martyrdoms. Admittedly ‘it is a false and erroneous Opinion, that a Kingdom cannot subsist which tolerateth Two Religions … State and Religion having nothing common’; but the adviser asserts that toleration should last only ‘till by some sweet and easy Means, they [i.e. the two religions] may be reduced to a right Government’.⁶⁵

Drummond's conception of toleration, and this comes out also in his political pamphleteering, is not toleration proper but irenicism—a temporary political device to create peace between two opposing factions as a preliminary to restoring order. He does, in the speech already quoted, give arguments which suggest a more principled form of toleration, and no doubt he felt it was proper as a protestant to do so, for the particular historical situation he was describing and attempting to explain; but his real attitude, emphasised above, is very clear in his other writings dealing with his own contemporary situation. Toleration is a feature of the obedience of a subject to his king, rather than a development of the king's clemency.

Toleration as a form of political expediency fits into Drummond's political thinking as a means of avoiding rebellion; more than anything Drummond feared revolution, for (recollecting his belief in a divinely-ordained universe) it could disrupt the social hierarchy and reduce God's order into chaos. Accordingly he emphasises, throughout his writing, the obedience a subject owes his monarch; obedience is the key to stable government, and must be given even to a king who does not carry out his responsibilities to his people. Rebellion is never justified, even to correct a tyrannical monarch, for only God can judge how effectively a monarch has acted. Drummond's historical knowledge, however, shows him that rebellions have taken place in Scotland, sometimes in circumstances which he can understand and appreciate even if he refuses to justify them. But, in those cases where a reasonably good king, having prudently ruled with clemency and exercised a degree of diplomatic toleration, is nevertheless faced with rebellion, it is his duty to God to maintain his status (and thus God's social order) by crushing revolt. ‘Rebellion is like Fire in a City, which should be quenched, tho' with the pulling down of the Neighbouring Houses.’⁶⁶

Drummond would have liked to have believed that ‘fearful Attempts against Soveregnity, … for the most part end with the Ruine of their Authors’.⁶⁷ He is appalled not only by the fact that rebellion against James III took place but that it was successful and the perpetrators went unpunished. This colours his whole assessment of the character of that king. The standard accusation is brought against him that he accepted advice from evil (and non-aristocratic) counsellors; but Drummond penetrates more deeply and criticises his lack of prudence, foresight and military ability, which leads to the condemnation that ‘he sought to be feared, believing it to be the only way to Obedience’, a direct contraversion of Drummond's philosophy of rule by love. Even more appalling to Drummond was the unnatural association of the king's son with the rebels, ‘the most hainous Crime that could be committed’, and one which required divine intervention to absolve—‘God out of his Justice executed the Revenge of this Cruelty upon the Nobles, Commons, and the Prince himself at the Field of Flowden; where some of the chief Actors of this Parricide were in their own Persons, others in the Persons of their Successors, sacrificed to the Ghost of this King’.⁶⁸

The action of Providence is not a normally-emphasised feature in Drummond's historical writing, although undoubtedly he believed in ‘heavenly Influences’ and the effectiveness of God's retribution on wrong-doers, and saw in the sequence of human affairs an overriding divine control. His political prejudices bring it to the fore here, to resolve the difficulties he encountered in assessing the complexities of the reign of James III. This section he wrote and rewrote, corrected and amended, several times, in the course of which the character of the king changes from being outright evil to showing an almost excusable weakness. In the earliest draft, for example, James is seen ‘giveing himself over to unlawfull pleasures and onlie carefull to gather by the fines of his weaker Subjects’, while in the final version he becomes superstitious (a much less vicious fault) and attains a measure of popularity and good rule; early phrases such as ‘the King now turneth more sullen and retired’ are later omitted altogether. Parallel to this, the opposition is subtly blackened in a very specific way: descriptions such as ‘rebelles’, ‘Lords of the insurrection’ are altered to ‘Confederates’ and ‘Lords of the Association’.⁶⁹ Drummond is building up a picture of a league against a basically good but misguided king, which for him has obvious parallels with the covenanters and Charles I.

Drummond has very specific political conceptions of kingship and society and the relationships between them, but he recognises that these are ideals rather than reality. No king is totally the good monarch; no subject, in practice, is completely obedient; even the nobility does not always give good advice; and a policy of prudent clemency can backfire. But the ideal remains and is the unifying link between the disparate sections of his work. All five kings, as Drummond sees them, are walking a tightrope, balancing against the ideal of a good monarch (which Drummond, probably rightly, believed they accepted) the pressures of practical government and of personal passions. The people, too, especially the nobility, are faced with a conflict between the ideal of unswerving obedience and the business of everyday life where material possessions and personal ambition loomed high. Problems, troubles, rebellion even, develop from situations in which the ideal is, perhaps momentarily, lost. James I, a model king who generally exercised clemency, was in Drummond's view over-rigorous on occasions, while James II, by slaying the Douglas, allowed his passions to take charge; James IV never succeeded, despite kinglike qualities marred only by a rash and stubborn disposition, in expiating his crime against his father, while James V was blemished by the ‘Humour of Revenge’. Each king exhibits different failings, lapses from the ideal, which account for their difficulties; only James III, however, found himself in the situation, leading to disaster, in which his own weaknesses came up against a major lapse from the ideal on the part of his people. While the good points of the kings are highly commended, all are criticised within the framework of Drummond's political and social beliefs and all are found wanting.

The didactic purpose of Drummond's history is now clear, for it fits in with the situations and difficulties of his own time; he has a message for all ranks of society—common people, the aristocracy and even the king himself. A king must be criticised for his political and moral lapses by his nobility who owe him the service of good counsel, and the people must suffer when these lapses affect them without allowing their (sometimes understandable) grievances to affect their primary duty of obedience. All must work together, avoiding unreasonable actions and keeping a guard on their passions, in order to develop a stable and peaceful society. The unspoken corollary of this is that democratic ideas, especially incitements to rebellion, are immoral and irreligious inasmuch as they disrupt God's will for the universe. Drummond, without mentioning him, was thus also attacking the views of George Buchanan, whose history, though banned, was available in several editions and was reputed to be the most widely read book in the covenanting armies.

George Lauder pointed out in his laudatory poem that at the time Drummond wrote there was need of a new historical work for the Scots. The Englishman had available a large number of histories of England, good and bad, in his own vernacular; some were dull and scholarly works, others more popular and readable.⁷⁰ The ordinary Scotsman, on the other hand, could scarcely obtain a general history of his own country in his own tongue. The main Scottish writers—Major, Boece, Buchanan and Leslie—had all written in Latin. Admittedly Boece had been translated into Scots by John Bellenden, but the book, published about 1536, must have been rare even in Drummond's day although he himself possibly owned a copy [Mac. 710]; translations of both Buchanan and Leslie existed in manuscript, but neither was available in print.⁷¹ Of the ecclesiastical histories, the works of Calderwood and Spottiswoode had not yet been published while that of Knox, covering a brief span only, again could only be classified as a rare book. This lack of a Scots history in itself could well be a motive for Drummond undertaking this literary work, but it does not necessarily explain the care with which he composed it, the attention to expression and language, the detailed structure of the work. His literary motive goes beyond the simple provision of a Scottish need.

Men of the late sixteenth century were convinced that there was more to the pleasure of reading poetry and literature than pure delight in words and verbal form. Like philosophy and (as we have seen) history, literature had a didactic purpose, the guiding of its readers to instruction and an understanding of the real nature of the universe and the God who created it, of the world and the people who inhabited it. It was all part of a search for wisdom and truth, and the scepticism which denied the possibility of the discovery of that truth had only begun to influence men's thoughts. Sixteenth-century educationists and literary critics debated which discipline led to the greatest wisdom, the abstract conceptions of the philosopher, the record of factual experience given by the historian or the imaginative genius of the poet. Of these debates the most significant in its influence on Drummond was that of Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apologie for Poetrie, published in 1595 [Mac. 914-15].⁷² Sidney, the heir to a humanist tradition, tended to discount the philosopher because of his obscurantist scholastic image—‘he teacheth obscurely so as the learned only can understand him’. His real debate is with history, and here he argues against those who hold that the fact of the historian is superior to the imagination of the poet: ‘if the question were whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen. … But if the question’, he continues (and clearly declares that this is the real question), ‘be for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was’, the answer is not so simple.⁷³ For Sidney, the historian is limited in his didactic duty by being tied down to fact, for ‘being captived to the truth of a foolish world, is many times a terror from well-doing, and an encouragement to unbridled wickedness’. Experience gives wrong examples as well as right ones, and the good do not always prosper. The poet, using imagined situations, can guide men to proper actions, for only he can ensure that ‘a man should see virtue exalted and vice punished … indeed Poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours …’.⁷⁴ Knowledge is not enough; a man must be actively encouraged to that which deserveth to be called and accounted good … [for] moving is of a higher degree than teaching …’. Sidney concludes that the poet is superior to the historian; but he also states that the greatest historians (among whom he placed George Buchanan) ‘borrow both fashion and perchance weight of poets’, and the implication is that the historian who is also a poet may in fact be best of all.⁷⁵

Certainly this is how Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, two younger members of Sidney's circle of friends, viewed their task. Both wrote verse histories of the Wars of the Roses, The Civil Wars and The Barons Warres respectively; but while Drayton went on to versify Camden's Britannia in his Poly-Olbion Daniel turned to prose for his Historie of England, perhaps because Sidney's definition of ‘poesy’ was a broad one—‘verse being but an ornament and no cause to poetry, [and] there have been many most excellent poets that never versified’.⁷⁶ Daniel's own work of literary criticism, A Defence of Ryme published in 1603, in reacting against the renaissance veneration of the writers of ancient Greece and Rome, emphasised the culture of the middle ages—the learning of Petrarch, the philosophy of Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the law of Bracton and Bartolus, the histories of Bede and Walter Mappe—encouraging that interest in the medieval period which was then beginning to absorb English antiquaries.

Drummond had studied Sidney's works with diligence. He possessed early works of both Daniel [Mac. 738] and Drayton [Mac. 756-62], had corresponded at intervals with Drayton (at least between 1618 and 1631) and had read his Poly-Olbion.⁷⁷ He was a poet; so had been George Buchanan, the man whose historical writings he wished above all for political reasons to confute. There is no mystery why Drummond turned from lyric poetry to historical prose; as a member of that aristocracy which had the natural obligation to advise kings and lead the lower orders, he had wisdom to give his fellow men to guide them in their current difficulties, a message based on experience derived from a survey of the medieval past which only he, as a poet, could put in its most persuasive form. George Buchanan, the most outstanding Latin humanist of his day, undoubtedly had similar motives, but with a very different political message to impart. Each used all the literary skills he possessed to give his readers the benefit of experience drawn from the past: Drummond, with the support of a specific theory of literature, was more concerned to persuade to action (Sidney's ‘moving’); Buchanan, who had already acted, was concerned rather to justify what had been done.

In his attempt to persuade, Drummond evolved no new methods of historical writing though he extended and developed some of the old to almost unhistorical extremes. The attention he paid to the actual language he used, the continuous revision of his drafts as to style rather than content, has already been pointed out; clearly he believed that the improvements he was incorporating could increase his persuasive power. He affected a highly polished style of conscious conceits, allusion and metaphor, and extravagant wordplay, especially in those passages where he felt he was expressing his highest thoughts—a style which today seems pompous, faintly ludicrous and totally unpersuasive. Probably some of those whom it was intended to persuade would have felt the same, having already been persuaded by the more straightforward homely style of their covenanting preachers and leaders.⁷⁸ Those who would appreciate Drummond's style were likely already to be within his own political camp, although it must not be forgotten that part of his message was directed to king and nobility. The effect of his careful attention to style, if measured by its persuasiveness, was probably minimal; yet it was this style which George Lauder praised with allusion to Cicero, the arch-persuader of classical times.⁷⁹

Lauder probably had in mind the formal set-pieces in Drummond's work, the orations in council, the death-bed speeches which he inserts at appropriate places and which, as has already been noted, carry much of the weight of his political thinking. Such setpieces were not new; in fact they had been one of the commonplaces of historical writing for centuries. But, again, these were the portions of his work on which Drummond had expended great care; most were heavily revised in draft and the speech allegedly addressed to James V on toleration (which is in a sense the climax of Drummond's history taken as an expression of political thought) was rewritten time after time. A knowledge of oratory and the formal rules of rhetoric was an essential part of the education of a gentleman of the times. Drummond learnt this technique when at university in Edinburgh, where the method of Peter Ramus was taught, and he had in his library most of the basic textbooks on the subject, including Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria [Mac. 578] which regarded Cicero as the model orator; also Cicero's own Partitiones oratoriae [Mac. 453] and the works of Omer Talon [Mac. 190] on Ramist rhetoric. He doubtless had absorbed the lessons of these works while still a young man and did not need to be reminded of their value by Ben Jonson, who during his visit to Scotland ‘recommended to my reading Quintilian (who [he said] would tell me the faults of my Verses as if he had Lived with me) …’.⁸⁰ Undoubtedly he used his knowledge of the art of rhetorical persuasion in the composition of his fictitious speeches.

The renaissance rhetorician was not so much concerned with the arguments he was putting forward (although these would be carefully and logically constructed) as with the shape and form of the speech, and the figures and tropes he used to ornament, to emphasise, or at times to camouflage, his meaning. In classifying Drummond's toleration speech we must place it in the second of the three types of classical oration, that of political oratory which ‘was addressed … to questions of expediency or inexpediency’⁸¹; the emphasis on expediency in the speech has already been noted. In its arrangement it exemplifies one of the traditional forms associated by the commentators of the time with Cicero. It begins with an introduction intended to make the listener receptive, in which a traditional element of flattery occurs; and continues with the narratio, the exposition of the problem, in this case the existence of a diversity of religious opinion among the Scots people. Then follows the division, the unambiguous statement of the orator's proposition. Drummond's mouthpiece does this—‘I hold it more expedient to give Place to the Exercise of both Religions’; he then is made to expand it into a dichotomy by stating the alternative, a technique acceptable in the time of James V, for John Major had asserted that ‘every good division should be two-membered’.⁸² The subsequent proof of the proposition is based on an examination of the alternatives posited, the one being refuted and the other upheld; and the speech is rounded off by a brief conclusion.

Within this formal framework the construction is further formalised into periods, consisting of cola and comma in the manner recommended by the sixteenth-century rhetoricians.⁸³ There is, even in the relatively short span of the speech, the use of exempla and digression as illustrative material and ample evidence of the figures of speech intended to cajole the listener into acceptance of the argument. Even a superficial reading shows instances not only of metaphor, simile and alliteration, commonplace rhetorical devices even today, but also of apostrophe and anastrophy, anaphora and asyndeton. Most of these tropes and figures along with others were discussed and their use encouraged by Quintilian,⁸⁴ whose work was a primary textbook of the time and was, as we have seen, well-known to Drummond. Equally well-known to him were the writings of Henry Peacham [Mac. 882] and George Puttenham [Mac. 888] in which the emotional and persuasive forces underlying particular figures of speech were examined.⁸⁵ Apart from their appearance in this and other fictitious speeches, Drummond indulges himself throughout his History with the use of these figures; in common with other writers of his own and earlier times, he felt them necessary not only as ornaments to his style but also as elements in his persuasive powers.

But the art of persuasion is not solely a matter of organisation, presentation and style; it involves also the avoidance of dullness. In the minds of many people the dullness in history has always been associated with dates, and this thought may have been in Drummond's mind when he refrained from providing clear and precise dates for most of the incidents he was describing. In his final text as printed he seldom gave dates, except for events of the magnitude of the deaths of kings, the births of princes, marriages and eclipses—and sometimes he got these wrong. The avoidance of dates was a deliberate action on his part, for the sources from which he gained his information, especially the English Tudor writers, were very precise about the dates of many events. This does not mean that Drummond was not concerned with a specific chronological framework. He knew the dates of the historical facts he was writing about; indeed he used them quite liberally in his early drafts, clearly in order to establish a time-scale and a correct pattern of events. Successive drafts show that once he had established the pattern he gradually diluted his precise time-references or eliminated them altogether. A period of ‘fourtie days’ is altered in draft to ‘60 days’ and is ultimately printed as ‘some days’;⁸⁶ ‘the third of May’ and ‘the twelfth of November’ become simply ‘in May’ and ‘in November’;⁸⁷ ‘upon the eleventh of June 1488’ is deleted entirely, and the date of Sauchieburn does not appear in print;⁸⁸ the date of the murder of the warden of the east march, Anthony de Labastie, waves from 12 December 1517 to 12 October and to 12 September (none of them being correct) and is finally omitted.⁸⁹ Drummond, attempting to write a readable literary history, was forcing himself as far as he possibly could from the dull date-bound concept of the annalists and antiquaries.

But Drummond was concerned with more than readability and avoidance of dullness; he seems genuinely to have believed that precision in chronology was a deterrent to the readers' understanding of the type of history he was writing. He may again have been following Samuel Daniel who, in the preface to the 1621 edition of his Historie of England, asserted: ‘The Computation of Time is not of so great moment, figures are easily mistaken; the 10 of July and the 6 of August, with a yeare ouer or vnder, makes not a man the wiser in the businesse then done, which is onely that he desires’.⁹⁰ It is the understanding of affairs, the appreciation of their moral or political lessons, which is of importance, not their dates. Nevertheless Daniel did give year-dates in the margins of his work; but Drummond, with a political message to make clear at a time of crisis, rejected even this compromise. For him the conviction that the comprehension of events, the perception of the motives for political decisions and the analysis of the outcome would lead to a truer understanding not only of the past but also of the present, far outweighed the undesirability of a charge of factual inaccuracy being brought against him. He is following Sir Philip Sidney's dictum that the truth need not necessarily be factual.

This, however, involved more than the disregarding of dates. Occasionally Drummond subtly distorted the chronological sequence of events in order to assist the reader to understand; he brought together in his narrative incidents which were separate or separated those which were linked. A revealing case of this technique occurs in the James I section when Drummond described the king receiving ambassadors from England and France, each seeking an alliance with Scotland.⁹¹ Each ambassador makes a lengthy speech putting forward the grounds on which his country sought friendship and a royal marriage alliance, and Drummond compiled these speeches in such a way as to suggest that the French ambassador was answering the English envoy, Lord Scrope, in his presence. Here there is the appearance of direct confrontation. In fact these embassies took place some considerable time apart. John le Scrope was appointed ambassador to Scotland on 23 July 1433, but, in spite of the fact that Bower, apparently an eyewitness, asserted ‘venit quidam miles de Anglia dominus de Scrope’, it was Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset and Earl of Mortain, who arrived in Perth in October of that year. Regnault Girard, the French ambassador, met the king at Edinburgh and Perth in February 1435.⁹²

Most of the sources Drummond used, particularly Major, Holinshed and Leslie, clearly indicated that these were separate events; Bellenden implied merely the presence of an English herald at the time of the French embassy. Only George Buchanan brought the two events together in the same way as Drummond; and Buchanan and Drummond, the poet-historians, might have been attempting to make a dramatic contrast by doing this, by ignoring the strict chronology of events of which both must have been aware.⁹³ Drummond, however, by giving extended speeches to the two protagonists, not only intensifies the drama but uses the imagined situation to elucidate Scottish foreign policy at the time. He tries to show clearly the dilemma facing James I, whether to follow the traditional alliance with France or to ally his country with England, his alma mater. The advantages of peace with England, the possibility and benefits of a united state, the losses suffered by the Scots in their continued support of France, are balanced against an emotional appeal to traditional friendship, the fear that both France and Scotland, if separated, would become subject to English power and dominance. It is a reasonable interpretation of the situation facing the king, and the implication that the rejection of the English was primarily on emotional grounds is equally reasonable. Undoubtedly Drummond could be justified in his view that, by using this literary device, he was giving his reader a clearer and more immediate impression of the actual historical situation than if he had retained a strict chronology. By using his historical imagination he projects a better understanding of events; and in this respect for understanding he may be regarded as a more ‘advanced’ type of historian than some of his contemporaries and predecessors. Faced with the dilemma of all historians, the conflicting claims of historical narrative and intelligent analysis, he resorts at times to this dubious method of distorting chronology in order to achieve clarity.

Drummond used devices in his historical writing which are no longer acceptable. Fictitious speeches and spurious documents were part of the apparatus used by the writers of his day, and he used them to full advantage, expending great care on their construction, not only to increase the literary merit of his work and thus to persuade the reader of the rightness of his political ideology, but also, in one sense, to improve it historiographically. It is noticeable that, as the work progresses, there is less use of such devices, and Drummond managed to evolve a technique of composition which enabled him to interpose his comments and interpretations with much less resort to them. Nevertheless, however he expressed it, his historical imagination and interpretative ability, biased though he was, were at times of a high quality. They took into account the actualities of the times he was depicting and penetrated deeply and with some understanding into events.

Drummond had a clear purpose in mind when writing his History. He expected to be able to draw from the past to inform the present, to find the political lesson from former days which was applicable to his own time. Undoubtedly, his political attitudes already being formed, he knew what he was looking for and was therefore bound to find it, and the writing of the history was primarily a matter of putting his ‘findings’ in their most favourable light. We have seen the techniques he employed in doing this, and their effect on the history he wrote—the emphasis on certain aspects of the period he was covering, the almost dramatic psychological insight into the characters of the principal people portrayed, the subtle distortion of chronology and the elimination of dates to create a sense of timelessness. Yet his historical work was not only a demonstration of the use of literary devices to serve a political end. Drummond did have a sense of the nature of the past even if this was partially derived from his own outmoded way of thinking; he did have some rudimentary conception of historical criticism, although critical method for the historian was yet in the future; and he did have an overall philosophy of history which justified at least to himself and his contemporaries what he was doing.

Sensitivity about the past implies a sense of anachronism, a recognition of the existence of change and of the details of change. In Drummond's conception of the nature of things, change was an essential part of man's effect on his surroundings. He accepted this as a necessary evil and feared it only when he thought it threatened what were to him the basic features of social organisation. Unlike those who, not so long before him, found nothing unusual in allocating feudal heraldic devices to Biblical personages or painting classical figures in contemporary dress, Drummond was aware of change both in material objects and abstract thought. It has already been suggested that he was sufficiently perceptive to compose the toleration speech in a contemporary manner, by a method which would have been acceptable to John Major, and not in the Ramist style in which he himself had been trained (although it must be admitted that the concept of irenicism which he was advocating, though known in Germany, perhaps did not exist in the Scotland of the 1530s). In general, Drummond in the course of his work makes few anachronistic howlers either in fact or in the ideas he makes his characters express, and to this extent at least he must be credited with some historical sense. To this must be added his appreciation of the difficulties facing his ancestors, and his understanding interpretation of the motives which caused their actions; he could ‘think himself’ into a historical situation.

Every historical writer employs some form of critical method even if this amounts to no more than making a choice between different versions of an event in the sources he is following. Drummond probably did little more than this, by the selection of material relevant to his purpose and the avoidance (not always total) of cluttering irrelevancies. But this ability to select is an element of criticism, even if it is no longer possible to discover the criteria on which the selection was based. His major choices were undoubtedly conditioned by political bias, although he frequently expressed views at variance with his own—especially when he could explain them away or contravert them. It is the minor choices which are more interesting: why did he prefer to take a particular number of men killed in battle, or a list of names of ambassadors or commissioners, from one of his sources rather than from another? Even more intriguing, why did he amalgamate in such lists the names from two or more of his sources, accepting some and rejecting others? We can probably never know the exact answers to such questions. For Drummond much of the process could very well have been instinctive, but there are a few factors which can be isolated which undoubtedly went to form that instinct. One of these was his aristocratic outlook, his sense of the importance and responsibility of the nobility, which led him to emphasise for illustrative purposes the part played by certain families either for ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Another was his sense that all ‘authorities’ were not of identical value. He tended to prefer an authority as nearly contemporary with the event as possible, or one which he believed to have some other special claim to reliability; hence his emphasis on the ‘work’ of William Elphinstone ‘who was living in that Time’ and ‘could not but know, and for his Profession would not but deliver the very truth’. He was making what he believed to be informed judgments about the nature of his sources. Thirdly, he used his knowledge and commonsense to supplement his authorities. For example, he inserted the name of Malise Graham in his list of hostages sent to England in exchange for the return of James I although none of his literary sources records the name in this context, because he knew that Graham had certainly been a hostage at a later point; what he did not know was that his sources were correct, for Graham was not one of the original hostages but an ‘exchange’ made at a later date. Unsuccessful though at times his analyses were, Drummond cannot be accused of being a historian without some semblance of historical judgment.

In his History Drummond made no statements about the philosophy underlying his work; yet, from other of his writings, it is clear that he had specific thoughts about the nature of time and of history. That the writing of history had a didactic function was a commonplace of the era in which he lived. This can, for example, explain why Drummond's history was reprinted at certain times. Its emphasis on the Stewart monarchy and the duty of obedience to the crown encouraged royalist printers to bring it out again at turbulent periods in the reign of Charles II, and obviously influenced the Jacobite Thomas Ruddiman to reprint it in 1711; and, despite its pro-monarchic propaganda, even its original publication in 1655, so soon after the execution of a monarch, could be justified by that powerful group of parliamentarians who, fearing movements like that of the Levellers, were shortly to offer Cromwell a crown. In general, as has already been indicated, the justification for the drawing of valid inferences from the past was based on a theory of the accumulation of experience. Drummond would not in any way have disputed this, but for him this was not the only factor; he believed that the nature of history itself made such inferences inevitable, that valid assumptions about the future could be made from an examination of the past.

In ‘Considerations to the King,’ written in December 1632, he asserted: ‘We may easily conjecture of things to come, and imagine them by these of the like Nature which have preceded. The Stage of the World is the same still, though in Times the Actors be changed, and come about again’.⁹⁴ There are several points to note about this statement. In the first place it is clear that Drummond saw society, ‘the Stage of the World’, as fundamentally stable, and that, although the individuals within that society changed, their human nature remained unchanged. This is part of his conception of the nature of the universe. With this stability in society and human nature, the build-up of experience is bound to allow the possibility of forecasting the future. But the final phrase forms the key words: ‘and come about again’. This must be taken in conjunction with the opening words of a ‘speech’ probably written in 1644 when he was to appear before the ‘Circular Tables’ of the covenanters:

Time, tho' ever in Motion and Change, is ever and always one and the same, and as Time itself, so the Actions of Mortals in Time are but a Repetition of the Actions of former Times and Ages. … To verify what is now in this time done, and to prove it to have been done before, we need not travel far off and in Foreign Histories, but only to make a retrograde Pace in our own Country and History.⁹⁵

Drummond is postulating a cyclical theory of history in which events are repetitions of former events and, if properly understood, can suggest what the future holds. In another ‘speech’ dated 2 May 1639 he put his belief in action. Encouraging the Scots people to accept an episcopal form of church government, he indicated that the only outcome of resistance would be civil war; this, he asserted, quoting examples from the history of Rome, Hungary and the Low Countries, could lead to the dissolution of the kingdom and the monarchy, and the establishment of ‘one who will name himself PROTECTOR of the liberty of the Kingdom … [and] shall essay to make himself King’.⁹⁶ Drummond saw a recurring pattern developing from revolt—civil war, dissolution of government, licentious libertarianism and the establishment of a new tyranny. ‘This Progress’, he concluded, ‘is no new Divining, being approved by the Histories of all Times’. In Drummond's belief, time and events in time proceed in a circular pattern within a basically unchanging society; there is no sense of progress as it is at present understood in his use of the word.

Observation of recurring features in human affairs has led to the development of cyclical theories of history at many periods of time. In classical Greece this concept formed part of Platonic philosophy, and it was a significant feature of Stoic thought. At the present day it is a feature of the patterns which Toynbee discovers in the rise and fall of civilisations, although he regards a strict cyclical theory as an ‘everlasting cosmic practical joke’; it can also be observed in the work of some science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov, whose imaginings of the future are often based on projections of the present past in cyclical form.⁹⁷ In the sixteenth century, cyclical theory was to be found in the historiography of the French writers, Jean Bodin and Louis Le Roy, and in the writings of those Elizabethans influenced by Stoicism; at that time it performed the function of contraverting renaissance theories of continuous degeneration from a golden age, leading the way to eighteenth-century conceptions of progress. Drummond surely was aware of the classical precedents, but the more direct source for his thinking was undoubtedly the Elizabethans, particularly Samuel Daniel, whose historical thought and method have already shown significant parallels with that of Drummond.

Daniel's cyclical concepts involved the historical growth and decay of cultures and empires: time operates in cycles of recurrence and human conduct (on a social if not an individual scale) is predictable. In the verse dedication to his tragedy Philotas, he wrote:

These ancient representments of times past,
Tell us that men have, doe and always runne
The selfsame line of action, and doe cast
Their course alike, and nothing can be done,
Whilst they, their ends, and nature are the same.(98)

Drummond would have accepted the first three-and-a-half lines of this statement without question, but Daniel's pessimism in the last line-and-a-half was foreign to him. Daniel is saying that the cyclical recurrences in time are inevitable and irresistible, that no human thought or action can alter the unchanging circular pattern of perpetual change; his is a deterministic view of history but one which, unlike those of later exponents of historical determinism, allows nothing to develop. Although Drummond sympathised with much of this form of thought, his conception of the nature of God's universe and man was such that he could not be so pessimistic. Human society was subject to fluctuations within its stable outline, and these fluctuations recurred in cycles; but the cycles were not inevitable, for man had the power of choice between good and evil, and the free choice he made determined the form that the subsequent cycles of events would take. The pattern of history was not imposed by some mysterious fatalistic outside power but by the choice of men themselves; one choice led to a cycle of war, anarchy and chaos, the other was an ‘Entrance to Peace, Concord and Unanimity’. There is inconsistency in Drummond's thinking, for in effect the admission of free will into the process of history makes nonsense of a cyclical theory, unless one postulates certain critical points only at which the choice is available.

Believing himself to be a political historian with a poetic insight, Drummond saw himself as ‘moving’ men towards the correct choice. He was not merely teaching about the past, he was teaching from the past. This was the motive behind the writing of his history and of his political pamphlets in which historical examples have such a prominent place, the motive which affected his method of writing history often in an unhistorical way. For him the lessons to be learned from the past were more important than the past itself, and there were lessons for all. To his royal readers the lesson was: be a good and just king, rule with clemency and love towards your people, do not impose your will on them with rigour, and, in particular, be lenient with taxation; for should you fail in this a cycle of events, vouched for by historical precedent, will be set up which will be disastrous for yourself and for your kingdom. To other readers the lesson was: remember that, although your monarch is God's representative on earth, he is human and subject to human frailties; treat his actions with tolerance even if they appear to go against your own interests; for should you resent his actions and disobey his commands to the point of open rebellion the historical pattern indicates that your final lot will be worse than the present. To members of the aristocracy he recommended loyalty to the monarch and obedience to his desires; to succumb to the temptation of leading a revolt would bring, as the cycles of the past showed, temporary popularity and glory but ultimate humiliation and disaster to their class. Nevertheless, all have a choice, and on this choice the cycle to be followed depended.

Drummond's view of history did not involve any conception of inevitability. The cycles of events could be broken, the direction of man's history was to be determined by his own actions. In his personal life the individual, Drummond asserted elsewhere, can choose either to follow his baser instincts or to seek to emulate the spirituality of the angels and God. Similarly, man in society can choose to increase the momentum of the world's degeneracy towards chaos or to aim towards the calm and eternal social organisation which was God's design for the world. Drummond's historical philosophy is consistent with his general philosophy of the nature of man and the universe, a philosophy which even in his own time was beginning to be eroded by new thoughts, new scientific ideas which, when they came to be applied to history, were to lead to more valid critical methods and the development of concepts of historical progress. Drummond was writing for his own time, and for those who accepted his basic ideas; it was no accident that, after Ruddiman's edition of 1711, no further edition of his History of the Five Jameses was published. Times had changed, and so had men's way of thinking about the past. Today historians who reject his work as derivative and in the modern sense uncritical, with no new unquarried facts, are right to do so. But he should be read for his insights into the interpretation of Scottish history, and by those who wish to understand at least one aspect of the cultural thought of the time in which he lived.

Notes

1. The Works of William Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1711), p. xvi (hereafter cited as Works).

2. ‘Maxime autem conatus est ea, quae in Historicis nostris desiderantur, supplere’ (Robert Sibbald, Memoria Balfouriana [Edinburgh, 1699], 35).

3. Archaeologia Scotica, iv, 67.

4. Thomas G. Snoddy, Sir John Scot, Lord Scotstarvit (St Andrews, 1968), 29-36.

5. David Masson, Drummond of Hawthornden (London, 1873), 469.

6. A surviving manuscript copy is NLS Adv. MS 35.5.4.

7. Denys Hay, Polydore Vergil (Oxford, 1952), 95-97; F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 57.

8. Hawthornden Manuscripts: NLS, MSS 2053-67. Drummond's manuscripts descended to his son, Sir William Drummond, and remained in possession of the family. Thomas Ruddiman made use of them for his edition of Drummond's Works in 1711. In 1782 they were donated to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland; but they were inadequately preserved and some portions seem to have been mislaid. In 1827 David Laing arranged for Drummond's collection of books in Edinburgh University Library to be rebound [R. H. Macdonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh, 1971), 51], and examined and arranged the manuscripts, in places in rather a haphazard manner; he published a description of them with some excerpts in Archaeologia Scotica, iv, 57-116, 225-70. In 1934 the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland deposited the Hawthornden manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, with other items from the Society's collections. The drafts and fair copy of the History comprise MSS 2053-7.

9. For Drummond's political pamphlets see T. I. Rae, ‘The political attitudes of William Drummond of Hawthornden’, in The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Edinburgh, 1974), 132-45.

10. ‘A speech of the Author's, when he should have been questioned for some Papers before the Circular Tables’, Works, 218.

11. Works, 157; correspondence between Drummond and Montrose.

12. See below, p. 35.

13. Works, 2, 12, 52, 61, 105.

14. Ibid., p. xxii.

15. Ibid., 101.

16. Latin text in J. Robertson (ed.), Concilia Scotiae (Bannatyne Club, 1866), i, 138; translation in R. K. Hannay and D. Hay (eds), Letters of James V (Edinburgh, 1954), 328. For the letterbooks (SRO, Caprington MS, and B[ritish] L[ibrary], Royal MS 18.B.vi) see Letters of James V, p. xii.

17. Works, 48.

18. NLS, MS 2054, ff. 63v, 204v.

19. William Nicolson, Scottish Historical Library (London, 1702), 97-98.

20. NLS, MS Wodrow Letters 8vo, iv, 32.

21. This manuscript, after Elphinstone's death, came into the possession of the abbey of Dunfermline; after Drummond's death it was given in 1650 by his widow and son to Thomas Fairfax. It is now Bodleian MS Fairfax 8. See also Johannis de Fordun, Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W. F. Skene (Edinburgh, 1871-2), i, pp. xi-xiii, and Liber Pluscardensis, ed. F. J. H. Skene (Edinburgh, 1877-80), i, pp. xix-xxiii, for information about the text and this manuscript.

22. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries in Scotland [PSAS], viii, 239-56; ix, 13-24, 447-51.

23. See Macdonald, Library, 224-7, for a list of the items in Drummond's manuscript collection.

24. NLS, MS 3805. This manuscript was also given to Fairfax in 1650.

25. Works, p. xliv.

26. Ibid., 52.

27. Giovanni Ferrerius, Scotorum Historiae … continuatio (Lausanne, 1574), fo. 396; John Leslie, De Origine, moribus et rebus gestis Scotorum (Rome, 1578), 322; Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of Englande, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1587), ii, 283.

28. Robert Lindesay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. Æ. J. G. Mackay (Scot. Text Soc., 1889), i, 176.

29. Ibid., i, 166, 202; Works, 47, 57.

30. Appendix II A, 10.

31. Described by Macdonald, Library. Books known to have been owned by Drummond will be identified by a ‘Mac’. number, referring to the catalogue in that work.

32. Archaeologia Scotica, iv, 96.

33. Appendix II B.

34. Appendix II A.

35. Works, 54; Holinshed, Chronicles, ii, 285.

36. Foedera (O), xii, 236-43.

37. Edward Halle, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke (London, 1548), Ric. III, fo. xviii.

38. See below, p. 35.

39. Works, 2.

40. George Buchanan, History of Scotland, trans. James Aikman (Glasgow, 1827), ii, 87.

41. John Stow, The Annales of England (London, 1605), 597. Drummond's variation was to add the name of Malise Graham; for an explanation of this, see below, p. 54.

42. Appendix II C.

43. NLS, Adv. MS 34.6.21. For the history of the editions of the work, see George P. Johnston, ‘The first edition of Hume of Godscroft's History’, in Papers of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, iv (1901), 149-71.

44. Ibid., 154-8.

45. NLS, MS 2059, ff. 184-207.

46. For Pasquier's importance see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970), 271-300, and George Huppert, The Idea of Perfect History: Historical Erudition and Historical Philosophy in the Renaissance (Urbana, 1970), 28-70.

47. For David Chalmers, Lord Ormond, see George Brunton and David Haig, Senators of the College of Justice (Edinburgh, 1836), 123-5.

48. Histoire Abbregée, 187v.

49. John Major's Greater Britain, 1521, ed. Archibald Constable (Scot. Hist. Soc., 1892), p. cxxxv: Hector Boece, The Chronicles of Scotland, ed. R. W. Chambers and Edith C. Batho (Scot. Text Soc., 1938), i, 16 (Bellenden's translation); Buchanan, History of Scotland (Aikman), i, p. civ: John Spottiswoode, History of the Church of Scotland (London, 1655), Dedication.

50. Works, pp. xxi-xxii.

51. Ibid., p. xxiii.

52. T. I. Rae, ‘Political attitudes of Drummond’.

53. Works, 1.

54. Ibid., 43, 5, 49.

55. Ibid., 4.

56. Ibid., 15.

57. Ibid., 50, 111.

58. Ibid., 44, 92.

59. Ibid., 72, 30.

60. Ibid., 3-4.

61. Ibid., 22.

62. Ibid., 42.

63. Ibid., 3, 37, 31.

64. Ibid., 30-31.

65. Ibid., 106-7.

66. Ibid., 42.

67. Ibid., 36.

68. Ibid., 60-61.

69. NLS, MS 2053, ff. 21, 61-62, 227-8; cf. Works, 47, 59-60.

70. Louis B. Wright, Middle-class Culture in Elizabethan England (London, 1964), 297-338 (‘The utility of history’), discusses popular Tudor histories.

71. For manuscript translations of Buchanan, see W. A. Gatherer, The Tyrannous Reign of Mary Stewart (Edinburgh, 1958), 206: James Dalrymple's translation of Leslie is printed as The Historie of Scotland, ed. E. G. Cody (Scot. Text Soc., 1888, 1895).

72. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or the Defence of Poesy (ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, Edinburgh, 1965).

73. Ibid., 109-10.

74. Ibid, 111.

75. Ibid., 112, 97; cf. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, 243-4. For Sidney's connection with Buchanan, see James E. Phillips, ‘George Buchanan and the Sidney circle’, Huntington Library Quarterly, xii (1948), 23-56.

76. Apology, 103.

77. Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford, 1961), 173-90; Bent Juel-Jenson, ‘Michael Drayton and William Drummond of Hawthornden’, The Library, xxi (1966), 328-30.

78. For stylistic differences in preaching in England, see William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1957), 22-23.

79. See above, p. 21.

80. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson (Oxford, 1925), i, 132. But cf. Works, 225: ‘That Quintilian's 6, 7 and 8 Books were not only to be read, but altogether digested’.

81. Wilbur S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), 70.

82. Quoted in Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), 190.

83. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric, 121.

84. H. E. Butler (ed.), Quintilian (Loeb Classical Library), iii, Bk. VIII, c. vi; Bk. IX, c. ii.

85. For the emotional and psychological function of rhetorical figures, and the importance of Peacham and Puttenham, see Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (London, 1970), ch. 3 (esp. 106-7, 112-15).

86. NLS, MS 2053, f. 153; cf. Works, 27.

87. NLS, MS 2055, ff. 242, 271, 245, 274; cf. Works, 83, 84.

88. NLS, MS 2054, f. 340.

89. NLS, MS 2055, ff. 93, 127, 143.

90. Samuel Daniel, Collection of the History of England (London, 1626), sig. A4. For Daniel as historian, see May McKisack, ‘Samuel Daniel as historian’, Review of English Studies, xxiii (1947), 226-43; Rudolf B. Gottfried, ‘Daniel's method of writing history’, Studies in the Renaissance, iii (1956), 157-74; William L. Godshalk, ‘Daniel's History’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, lxiii (1964), 45-57; Arthur B. Ferguson, ‘Historical thought of Samuel Daniel’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xxxii (1971), 185-202.

91. Works, 10-11.

92. E. W. M. Balfour-Melville, James I, King of Scots (London, 1936), 208-10, 218-19.

93. Buchanan, History (Aikman), ii, 106. For the ‘literariness’ of Buchanan's historical writing, which has many parallels with that of Drummond, see W. A. Gatherer, Tyrannous Reign, 18.

94. Works, 129.

95. Ibid., 218.

96. Ibid., 181.

97. Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1934-61), iv, 30. Isaac Asimov's conception of the nature of history can best be appreciated from his Foundation (London, 1953), in which historico-mathematical formulae are postulated to enable a historian to predict future events; the decline of the Galactic empire and the growth of a new civilisation, with the development of a new religion, trade and science, closely parallels the decline of the Roman empire and the rise of our own modern times.

98. Quoted by Cecil C. Seronsy in ‘The doctrine of cyclical recurrence and some related ideas in the works of Samuel Daniel’, Studies in Philology, liv (1957), 396.