FOR a long time it was assumed that Scotland did not participate in the Renaissance, but in the last twenty years this myth has been challenged. Specialists have focused on rediscovering specific aspects of Scotland’s Renaissance heritage: major studies are listed in the Further Reading. Yet to be fully explored are the connections and interactions between the various strands of cultural activity, and the broader overview of the Renaissance in Scotland. The precise definitions, characteristics, and boundaries are also still open to some debate, with scholars offering different versions of what constitutes the Scottish Renaissance from one discipline to another. This essay attempts to explore some of these issues.
The term ‘renaissance’ simply means ‘rebirth’ and the concept has been applied to many creative periods. However, the original Renaissance was the pre-eminent intellectual and cultural movement of late-medieval and early-modern western Europe, straddling the notional boundaries between these two historical eras, and traditionally seen as laying the foundations of the modern age. The Renaissance is so called because it involved a revival and reapplication of the cultural achievements of classical Greece and Rome, which were regarded as the pinnacle of civilization. The essential characteristics were identified in the mid-nineteenth century by the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt, who focused on the Italian peninsula as its birthplace.1
Burckhardt developed a notion of historical self-awareness as a form of new individualism, which he applied to an examination of the prominent writers, scholars, artists, and architects of Renaissance Italy, who were the foremost practitioners of the revival of the antique and a humanist agenda of active engagement with public life and the rational, scientific investigation of the natural world. His analysis was magisterial and seminal and, like many such works, it came under attack in the twentieth century. Medievalists in particular challenged the view that the Middle Ages were culturally or intellectually ‘dark’, in contrast with the enlightened, ‘modern’ Renaissance.2 An interest in classical literature and philosophy and a thriving intellectual culture have been detected at many points in medieval Europe, so that the Renaissance now looks more like a distinct evolution of late-medieval culture rather than a sharp reaction against it.
Yet, despite the caveats, the essence of Burckhardt’s thesis still has value, not least because the ideas of a conscious break with the past and a revival of the antique were current in Italy at the time. In the mid-fourteenth century, Petrarch first described the centuries that separated his own time from the glories of ancient Rome as a ‘dark age’. He promoted a revival of Latin literature in an attempt to resuscitate Italian culture. By the 1490s, the philosopher Marsilio Ficino could describe the humanist resurgence of Latin, and increasingly Greek, scholarship as the restoration of a golden age. In the 1550s and 1560s, Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists used the Italian term for rebirth, rinascita, to describe the achievements of the Italian painters, sculptors, and architects of his period.3 However simplistic their views might have been, for Petrarch, Ficino, Vasari, and others, Italy was progressing from a medieval past into a modern future by emulating the culture of the ancients.
Again, the received view of the chronological and geographical spread of the Renaissance has been criticized in recent years. Traditionally, it is deemed to have started in Italy in the late fourteenth century and spread north and west during the fifteenth century, so that by the mid-sixteenth century it had influenced all of Europe. By the early seventeenth century, artistic and cultural styles in most places were mutating into the complex embellishment of the Baroque. This model is not entirely unsound but it also needs refining. The Renaissance spirit arrived in northern states at different times and with varying degrees of Italian influence. Likewise, at the end of the period, where Vasari detected the waning of the Italian Renaissance in the 1560s, the northern Renaissance is usually deemed to have ended around 1600–20, as the Renaissance gradually faded into the Baroque. The association of the Baroque with the militant Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation has also made the use of this term problematic in Protestant states. Whilst the northern Baroque style did develop in Scotland in the seventeenth century, it is often not identified as such, but instead termed ‘the late Renaissance’. Thus it is common for the Scottish Baroque to be completely overlooked and ‘the Renaissance’ unjustifiably extended through the seventeenth century to meet the Enlightenment.4
The Italians were in many respects at the forefront of the Renaissance but not invariably the pioneers of every innovation. Cultural influences in some disciplines flowed instead from north to south and there was considerable cross-fertilization. Furthermore, the traditional view tends to evaluate the northern Renaissance according to the extent to which it imitated Italian models, which underestimates the importance of the varied local interpretations of the Renaissance in the north. The diversity of styles is now more commonly seen as a strength rather than a weakness. Thus the scarcity of direct Italian influences and the hybrid nature of the Scottish Renaissance are no longer deemed to signify an experience necessarily inferior to continental developments.
Notwithstanding this reappraisal of the nature of the Scottish Renaissance, it is possible to demonstrate Scottish connections with Italy and other European states, which were more extensive than has often been imagined.5 Although geographically at the margins of Europe, Scotland in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries engaged vigorously with the ecclesiastical, academic, diplomatic, dynastic, military, and mercantile networks of the period. The Renaissance in Scotland was thus an amalgamation of influences, both foreign and domestic, some of which originated in Italy whilst others were rooted in northern Europe. Italian impulses that found resonance in Scotland included the notion of historical self-awareness and self-fashioning in pursuit of individual fame and glory. In northern Europe this was adopted enthusiastically by monarchs of the young nation-states, including the Stewarts, who used Roman imperial models to validate their authority, sought to present kingship as a unifying national force, and promoted the magnificence of courtly spectacles as evidence of their virtue and greatness. This was blended with an obsession with chivalry and heraldry that provided continuity with the medieval past.
Another important influence was the impact of humanism. This also had Italian roots, although the greatest humanist of the age was Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Humanism in this period meant the academic disciplines of the studia humanitatis: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric, in Latin or Greek. Humanists believed that their studies could uncover universal truths of great moral force, so they promoted active engagement in public life by intellectuals, who could thus benefit wider society: the res publica or commonweal. The humanists also stressed the dignity and rationality of mankind, the value of studying the wisdom and eloquence of the ancients (preferably in the original languages or accurate translations), the importance of promoting literacy and education (utilizing printed texts and vernacular languages), and the scientific method of exploring the natural world by observation, deduction, and experimentation. The humanist programme was adopted enthusiastically in Scotland and adapted to local needs by public intellectuals such as William Elphinstone, Hector Boece, and George Buchanan.
The art and architecture of Renaissance Italy prioritized the imitation of Greek and Roman forms. The rules of harmony and proportion established by the architect and engineer Vitruvius influenced the construction of many buildings, whilst painters and sculptors focused on realism and naturalism, and developed new genres such as portraiture and landscape. Italian artists pioneered the use of artificial perspective, classical proportion, the manipulation of light and shade to create the illusion of solidity, and anatomical precision in representing the human form. Many of these ideas were adopted by the northern Renaissance, but there was also a persistent attachment to the magnificent decoration of the High Gothic style, so classical motifs were often incorporated as one element amongst others in an architectural, sculptural, or painted scheme. This was certainly true of Scotland where, in the fifteenth century, classical motifs were introduced alongside a revival of the native Romanesque, and in the sixteenth century, classicism was often projected through the lens of the French court style.
Many Scottish developments were focused on the royal court, which had the most prestigious continental connections, but cultural patronage was also exerted by the Church, the universities, the nobility, and the burgh communities. However, it is probably fair to say that the most influential prelates, academics, lords, and burgesses of the period also had strong ties to the royal court. From the reign of James III, Edinburgh was acknowledged as the nation’s capital, and was therefore also the main centre where the court interacted with the wider community. The loss of artistic patronage by the Church after 1560 and by the court after 1603 were thus significant obstacles to the later development of the Scottish Renaissance, which, by the early seventeenth century, was concentrated in the country house, university, and professional classes. By this time, civic humanism, which stressed public service, was also giving way to an emphasis on private contemplation and retreat from the world advocated by stoicism.
It is difficult to identify precisely when the first stirrings of the Renaissance were felt in Scotland, but if notions of historical self-awareness and individualistic self-fashioning are significant, then arguably the roots may be traced to the personal rule of James I (r.1406–37). James returned to Scotland after eighteen years in English captivity, where he had absorbed the culture of the English, French, and Burgundian courts. He had a steely determination to restore and extend royal authority, and he has famously been termed ‘a king unleashed’.6 He seems to have intended to make the Stewart monarchy the source of all justice and the guarantor of peace and prosperity for the whole nation. His political programme included removing magnatial threats to his power, developing the role of the nobles as servants of the Crown, and increasing the regularity and stability of royal income. He also sought to promote the prestige and dignity of his dynasty in Europe. Thus he set the agenda for the adult reigns of his successors.7 The rising European profile stemmed from the marriage of James’s eldest daughter, Margaret, to the dauphin in 1436. Through her connections, three of her sisters also married into grand continental houses, whilst her brother, James II, married a niece of the Duke of Burgundy, Mary of Gueldres, in 1449.8 Both James III and James IV subsequently made significant foreign marriages and, through such prestigious alliances, the Stewarts were clearly asserting their parity with other princes.
Not only did James I have a novel approach to the dignity and power of the Crown, but he also initiated new cultural developments. He is believed to have been a significant poet in his own right, but only one work survives: The Kingis Quair (c.1424). This is usually categorized as a medieval rather than a Renaissance poem, since its main stylistic influences are Boethius, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but it is also the first surviving example of a long line of courtly love poems and dream-visions, which stretches well into the sixteenth century.9 Furthermore, in its autobiographical nature, it has certainly caught an aspect of the Renaissance spirit. James was also aware that a resurgent monarchy needed an impressive architectural setting. His building work at Linlithgow was a significant new departure: the first royal residence described as a palace, and clearly built for comfort and display rather than defence. The east range was largely built for him, and it is also likely that the quadrangular plan of the palace dates from this period. Certainly, it had taken on this shape by the reign of James III and stylistically it has been regarded as innovative: combining a revival of the Scottish Romanesque (with classical overtones) within the form of an Italian seigneurial palatium ad modum castri.10 By the end of the fifteenth century, similar quadrangular palaces for elegant, courtly living were also being developed at Holyrood, Falkland, Edinburgh, and Stirling. All were imposing structures embellished with assertive heraldic imagery. The ambitious Stewart monarchs thus provided the theatrical backdrop for the dramatic display of the Renaissance court.
This rather heterogeneous approach is characteristic of the architecture of the Renaissance in Scotland, which continued to use traditional medieval features such as crenellations, parapets, conical turrets, and machicolations as decorative, rather than defensive, elements throughout the period and beyond, alongside the revival of the Scottish Romanesque (in the fifteenth century) and the introduction of more Italianate, classical motifs (in the sixteenth century). The attachment to the castellated style reflected an enthusiasm for chivalry, whilst the Romanesque revival has been linked to a growing sense of national identity, in opposition to the English Perpendicular Gothic. This hybrid national style has much in common with the Renaissance in the Netherlands, the Baltic, Scandinavia, and northern France, and shows that Scotland was well integrated into European culture.11 It can be seen not only in the development of the royal palaces but also in the foundation of collegiate churches.
FIGURE 8.1 Renaissance piety: Hugo van der Goes, the Trinity College Altarpiece, c.1478–9, now in the National Galleries of Scotland. Reproduced by permission of The Royal Collection © 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
About forty collegiate churches were established in Scotland in the period and several combined elements of the international Gothic and Renaissance styles. For example, Trinity College, Edinburgh, founded by Mary of Gueldres in about 1460, had Flemish influences on its architecture but, more importantly, was graced with a magnificent altarpiece of the late 1470s in the most fashionable Netherlandish style. Commissioned by Edward Bonkil, the provost, from Hugo van der Goes, it was probably originally a triptych but only the two ‘wings’ have survived (Fig. 8.1). When open, they depict James III and his queen kneeling at prayer and presented by saints to the subject of the missing central panel, presumably the Virgin. When they are closed, Bonkil is shown kneeling before the Holy Trinity in a striking portrait, which was probably taken from life. This is a piece of northern Renaissance art of the highest quality and, although it was painted for a royal site, there is no reason to imagine that it was unique or even particularly unusual. Indeed, further chance survivals suggest that other churches were also fashionably furnished.12
The origins of Scottish Renaissance humanism may also be found in the fifteenth century. For example, in 1484 the royal secretary, Archibald Whitelaw, who had taught at St Andrews and Cologne, was sufficiently well versed in the classics to give an elegant Latin oration, incorporating references to Cicero, Vergil, Seneca, and Livy, before Richard III of England. Whitelaw also had a fine library, which included works by Lucan, Horace, and Sallust, and he was a tutor to the young James III.13 The records of the fifteenth-century university libraries have survived only in fragments, but St Andrews (founded 1411), Glasgow (1451), and King’s College, Aberdeen (1495) would surely have had considerable collections of humanist works, not least because Scottish students and teachers shuttled regularly to and from the continental universities. In 1496 the founder of King’s College, Bishop Elphinstone, steered through Parliament an Education Act requiring all property holders to ensure that their heirs were schooled in Latin, the arts, and law: the humanist agenda had reached the public sphere.14
Between the marriage of ‘the thistle and the rose’ in 1503 and the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1567, the Renaissance in Scotland reached its apogee. The culture fostered at the royal courts of James IV, James V, and Mary promoted the chivalric, imperial, and humanist themes that had originated in the fifteenth century. However, there were also two long royal minorities when the cultural influence of the Crown was weak. Nevertheless, there is evidence of courtly culture spreading beyond the royal centres into the universities, burghs, and country houses, especially during the 1540s and 1550s, and so the Renaissance gathered momentum during this period.
James IV’s marriage to Margaret Tudor in 1503 was considered to be a national and personal triumph, and the culture of the court became more confident and innovative as a result. The preparations for the marriage included an exchange of portraits with the English court, the commissioning of an exquisite Book of Hours from a Flemish workshop, and the completion of a magnificent great hall and forework at Stirling Castle. The palace at Holyrood was also extensively rebuilt. James IV’s later works included another great hall at Edinburgh Castle, which had elegant, Italianate roof corbels, provided by an Italian mason.15 After a pause in the minority of James V, the adult king resumed a construction programme in a similarly chivalric style at Holyrood, Linlithgow, and Falkland. These buildings were all festooned with heraldic sculpture, weather vanes, and stained glass extolling the pedigree and prestige of the dynasty. It is notable that the first Scottish register of arms, David Lindsay’s Armorial of c.1542, was compiled at this time, and the interest in chivalric display was also spreading out from the royal court. It can be seen, for example, in the heraldic ceiling of St Machar’s Cathedral, Aberdeen (c.1520).16
By this time, the cult of chivalry was transforming from the practical, military purposes of medieval knighthood into the more ornamental and honorific interests of the Renaissance courtier. Moreover, there was a widespread belief in the classical origins of chivalry, and Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar were often portrayed as prototype chivalric knights. The enthusiasm for jousting displayed by James IV and James V, along with many of their nobles, acted as a cohesive force. The most celebrated tournaments were those of the Wild Knight and the Black Lady of 1507 and 1508, but James V also staged jousts and tournaments more frequently than is usually recognized, and was proud of his membership of the most prestigious European chivalric orders. Their insignia were displayed on his Linlithgow gateway alongside a Scottish chivalric collar. However, despite popular tradition, and rather surprisingly, it seems that there was no formally established Scottish order of knighthood at this time.17
As a woman, Mary, Queen of Scots could not fully participate in a revival of the cult of chivalry during her brief adult reign, but as dowager Queen of France she was wealthy enough to afford grand court entertainments, spectacles, and rituals to promote a message of national reconciliation and royal revival. Her court is famous for its balls, masques, and celebrations, and these often had a purpose more political than frivolous. For instance, in February 1566 Mary’s consort Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, was admitted to the order of St Michael in an elaborate ceremony at Holyrood that was deliberately, but unsuccessfully, calculated to entice Scottish nobles back to the Mass.
However, the most spectacular Renaissance festival of the period was staged for the baptism of Mary’s heir, Prince Charles James (later James VI), at Stirling Castle. There was already a long tradition of Scottish royal pageantry focused on coronations, entries, weddings, christenings, and funerals, but the baptism of 1566 was extraordinary. Mary was promoting the message that her dynasty would bring the return of a golden age and was the only guarantor of peace and unity. The service in the Chapel Royal was followed by a lavish banquet, which stressed the unity of the nation in front of foreign ambassadors. Then there were hunts, feasts, poetry, dance, and theatre, with many French and Italian influences, culminating in a mock siege involving costumed combatants and fireworks. This was modelled on the Valois triumphs at Bayonne of 1565, which had celebrated peace and reconciliation after civil war, and it was the high point of Mary’s reign.18 The fact that her regime collapsed so spectacularly only months later has obscured the significance of this remarkable example of a Scottish Renaissance festival.
Amongst the many-layered imagery of the baptism at Stirling Castle were references to the Arthurian Round Table, the goddess Astraea, and the return of the classical golden age. All these motifs were conventionally associated with the theme of imperial monarchy, which was another significant feature of the Scottish Renaissance. By the sixteenth century this was a widespread feature of European political discourse, based on the Roman law doctrine that ‘the king is emperor in his own kingdom’. This notion was embodied in the symbol of the ‘closed’, arched crown, which was worn by emperors, as opposed to the ‘open’ circlet worn by medieval kings. As early as 1469 Parliament had declared that James III possessed ‘full jurisdiction and free empire within his realm’, and in the 1480s the king’s image on his silver groats wore an arched crown in ‘probably the earliest Renaissance coin portrait outside Italy’.19 Soon the symbol of the arched crown appeared on a wide range of images: seals, heraldic devices, manuscripts, and sculptures, even the steeples of churches with royal connections such as St Giles, Edinburgh. The first Scottish monarch to wear an arched crown was James V, whose diadem was reworked to include arches in the spring of 1532, at a point when he was consolidating his authority. It was adjusted again in 1540, with the arches of 1532 reattached, and this crown forms part of the modern Honours of Scotland.20
For James IV and James V the notion of imperial monarchy meant portraying Scottish kingship as a unifying national force, promoting independence from English claims to suzerainty, defending territorial integrity, pursuing a monopoly of the administration of justice, and encouraging the creation of a distinctive national Church within the Catholic communion. For Mary and her son James VI the imperial theme mutated to promoting their claims to the English succession, whilst still presenting themselves as the embodiment of national unity with sovereign jurisdiction. James IV and James V invested heavily in modern military technology to defend the realm: James IV is noted for creating a royal navy that included the great warship The Michael; whilst James V rebuilt the navy in the 1530s, commissioned the first navigational guide to the Scottish coast, and undertook two voyages around Scotland, ‘beating the bounds’ of his kingdom.21 Both kings also employed foreign armourers to manufacture modern artillery in Edinburgh.22 The importance of the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament was stressed by James IV in his plan to have parliamentary statutes printed by the newly established Edinburgh press of Chepman and Myllar in 1508. The proposed publication never appeared but the king’s printer, Thomas Davidson, produced an edition of James V’s laws in 1541. The first printed edition of all the Scottish Acts of Parliament was commissioned for Mary in 1566. James V had also enhanced his status as the fount of all justice by the foundation of the College of Justice under his patronage, and partly on an Italian model, in 1532.23 Only after his death, and particularly after the removal of the clergy from the court, did the College of Justice start to assert more independence from royal control.
The systematic dissemination and application of the king’s laws was complemented by the creation of a national Church under royal authority. Both James IV and James V made full use of the papal indult of 1487, which brought the major Scottish benefices under royal patronage. Also important was the publication of William Elphinstone’s Aberdeen Breviary in 1509–10 by Chepman and Myllar. This was an attempt to supplant the English Sarum Use with a Scottish national liturgy. Because the first Scottish press was so short-lived, the Elphinstone plan was not fully realized, but the intention was clear. As a matter of prestige, James IV also founded the Chapel Royal in Stirling Castle as a collegiate establishment in 1501. The personnel were to be skilled in music, and elaborate Renaissance polyphony of the highest quality would have accompanied the royal devotions. The Reformation iconoclasts particularly targeted liturgical books, so almost all Scottish sacred music of this period has been lost, but the surviving works of Robert Carver, a canon of Scone with links to the Chapel Royal, indicate the presence of at least one master, and we have fragments of the works of others. The Carver Choirbook (1503–46) contains copies of pieces by English and Flemish composers as well as Carver’s remarkable oeuvre, demonstrating the influences that inspired him.24 By the 1530s, the Chapel Royal was at its height, and Crown control over the Scottish Church was such that the latter can be seen as ‘not so much a department of state as a sub-department of the royal household’.25 Ironically, considering the patriotic intentions of James IV and James V, royal control and exploitation of the Church reached a point where spiritual authority was undermined, which hugely inflamed the Reformers.
FIGURE 8.2 Renaissance flamboyance: the sculptural decoration of James V’s palace at Stirling Castle, c.1540 (east facade). Reproduced by permission of Professor Richard Fawcett.
In 1536 James V sailed to France for his brief first marriage, to Madeleine of Valois, and he and his entourage enjoyed an extended stay at the court of Francis I. This visit, along with the arrival in Scotland of Mary of Guise in 1538 as James’s second wife, provided a direct injection of the French courtly version of Italian Renaissance style into Scotland. This is most clearly displayed in the royal works at Falkland and Stirling. The Falkland courtyard facades, designed and built by French masons, represent the earliest wholly Renaissance architectural scheme in the British Isles, where classical motifs such as pilasters, consoles, pediments, and roundels are an integral part of the design rather than decorative details applied to a traditional form. The Stirling palace block is a more hybrid creation, with crenellations and crow-stepped gables placed above a vivid Renaissance sculptural scheme, which has strong French and Burgundian influences (Fig. 8.2). The most remarkable relic of James V’s palace at Stirling is a collection of carved oak roundels from the ceiling of his presence chamber, known as the Stirling Heads. Derived ultimately from Italian models via French sources, the carvings are a vigorous and mature example of Renaissance design in Scotland. French influence was also exerted on the portraits of the period: Corneille de Lyon painted James V and his two wives, and set a standard of lifelike realism for later artists to follow. In the 1540s and 1550s French Renaissance influence spread from the court into the architecture of noble residences, many of which adapted aspects of the designs of the Loire chateaux into a hybrid style that Charles McKean calls ‘Marian’.26
The humanism of the Scottish Renaissance was also developing apace at this period and spreading out into wider society. An erudite Italian humanist, Giovanni Ferrerio, taught at the Abbey of Kinloss for several years in the 1530s and 1540s, established an impressive library there, and wrote several works of Scottish history and biography. Translations of the classics became more common: Gavin Douglas produced a fine and faithful rendition of Virgil’s Aeneid in 1513, and John Bellenden made a freer translation of the first five books of Livy’s History of Rome in 1533. There were also some very accomplished neo-Latin writers at this time: James Foulis, Hector Boece, and George Buchanan, among others, had all studied and taught abroad and were able to write highly polished Latin prose or poetry modelled on the classical authors. John Mair and Hector Boece published rival accounts of the history of Scotland in 1521 and 1527 respectively. Mair is often described as a scholastic rather than a humanist, although his work has some humanist overtones. Boece, who was the first principal of the new humanist university at Aberdeen, wrote elegant rhetoric, praising the determination of the Scots to preserve their independence under their hero kings. Thus Boece’s Scotorum Historia struck a chord with James V, and the king commissioned Bellenden to translate it into Scots and Davidson to print it, so that it would be more widely known.27
The vernacular literature of the period also displays humanist influences and Franco-Italian inspiration, mixed with an attachment to the traditions of various genres: advice to princes, petitions, and dream visions. The most famous vernacular poets of the period were William Dunbar and Sir David Lindsay. They wrote poetry commemorating the spectacles of the courts of James IV and James V respectively, but after 1543 Lindsay retreated to his Fifeshire estates, where his verses took on a more humanistic and moral tone, focused on the theme of the commonweal: what has been termed ‘vernacular humanism’. Here he took his courtly interlude of 1540 and developed it into one of the first surviving Scottish plays: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estatis. This combines the traditional form of a morality play with influences from the English court poet, John Skelton, the French sotie genre, and the humanist moral agenda. It was first performed in the burgh of Cupar in 1552 and was revived for Mary of Guise in Edinburgh in 1554, demonstrating a clear connection between the court and the wider community. By the 1550s lay literacy and education had developed sufficiently to provide an audience for vernacular literature beyond the court in the urban professional and merchant classes, especially in Edinburgh. Elégies and chansons had been written for James V in France and were immediately imitated and popularized by Scots poets, who developed a versatile tradition of lyrical poetry. By the mid-1560s George Bannatyne was able to collect dozens of examples, many from the pen of Alexander Scot, in his eponymous manuscript.28
The establishment of a Scottish printing press in Edinburgh was very important to reinforce the growing lay literacy of Renaissance Scotland. The Chepman and Myllar press was short-lived, but Davidson’s was active between 1528 and 1541, and the number of rival presses grew from the 1560s, yet many books were still imported as late as 1600. Significantly, the ‘vernacular’ Bibles of the Scottish Reformation were in English and, before 1579, all were printed abroad. This contributed to a creeping anglicization of Scottish culture, which accelerated after 1603. Wider access to education was also important for the growing laicization of Scottish culture, since university graduates increasingly took up professions such as the law or government administration. Wider educational opportunities were provided by new colleges at St Andrews, but most significant for lay education was the establishment at Edinburgh in the 1550s of town lectureships in law, Greek, Latin, and philosophy under the patronage of Mary of Guise. The idea probably came from Francis I’s lecteurs royaux of 1530, and the initiative was driven by Robert Reid, Bishop of Orkney, who, as Abbot of Kinloss, had brought Ferrerio to Scotland. This project also formed the kernel of the ‘Tounis College’ of Edinburgh, opened in 1583 and partly funded by Reid’s legacy, which became the university.29
The Reformation of 1560 and the deposition of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1567 brought great changes to the culture of Scotland. The Protestant Kirk took the Second Commandment against graven images very seriously, thus widespread, systematic destruction of liturgical books, stained glass, sculpture, and religious paintings took place, which erased almost all of the nation’s Catholic heritage. Furthermore, native artists and craftsmen faced a crisis of patronage. For many painters, the solution was to decorate the walls, and especially the ceilings, of the houses of lords, lairds, and burgesses, which were increasingly provided with the comforts of refined living. Over a hundred examples of vibrant, robust, and inventive decorative schemes survive from the period. The most impressive include the ceiling at Prestongrange, painted in 1581 for Mark Kerr, commendator of Newbattle, and the long gallery at Pinkie House, painted for Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline, in about 1613. These schemes give some indication of how the interiors of pre-Reformation churches might have looked. Although the paintings were executed by unnamed Scottish artists, the patrons were increasingly educated and cultivated men, who commissioned decoration derived from continental emblem and pattern books, encapsulating humanist moral and philosophical symbolism. Thus the schemes contain images of genealogy, heraldry, piety, classical myths, allegory, and moral fables. The styles range from the grotesque and arabesque decoration of the High Renaissance, through the more Mannerist designs of c.1600, into early Baroque forms dominated by the complex embellishment of cartouches, strapwork, putti, and trompe l’oeil. The inspiration was clearly continental, but the results were distinctively Scottish.30
The other aspect of painting that flourished after the Reformation was portraiture. Since Protestantism emphasizes the importance of an individual’s direct relationship with God, great significance was attached to the strength of character and personality of each person, which artists attempted to capture. Again, the impetus owed much to foreign influences, mainly from the Netherlands. For instance, James VI employed two Flemings in succession as court portraitists: Arnold Bronckhorst in the early 1580s and Adrian Vanson, c.1584–1602. Collections of portraits could also have propaganda value: images of the first five kings James, omitting Mary, were displayed at James VI’s Edinburgh entry in 1579, urging him to emulate his male forebears rather than his mother; whilst Theodore Beza published Icones in Geneva in 1580, to memorialize the heroes of the European Reformation. The book was dedicated to James VI and included his portrait, taken from a coin. The first significant native portraitist was George Jameson of Aberdeen, who flourished in the 1630s and painted in the Dutch Baroque style of Daniel Mytens and Frans Hals.31
The art of music suffered more severely than painting from the censure of the Kirk. Thomas Wode thought that ‘musike sall pereische in this land alutterlye’ but he managed to preserve one piece of Renaissance polyphony, David Peebles’s Si quis diligit me (c.1530), amongst the psalm settings he collected in the 1560s (Fig. 8.3). The pre-Reformation cathedrals, collegiate churches, and abbeys had supported song-schools to train choristers in the art of sacred polyphony but they were all closed down. James VI started a revival of burgh song-schools in 1579, and managed to retain part-singing at the Chapel Royal. At the same time, an anonymous manuscript, The Art of Music, was prepared for one of the new song-schools and seems to have set high standards. Yet Church composers were largely restricted to simple, homophonic settings of metrical psalms, which Peebles, for one, found irksome. However, there was an outlet for musical creativity in the dance and chamber music performed at court and in the homes of the increasingly urbane and cultured laity. James VI’s court musician, William Hudson, took ‘extraordiner panis’ teaching the king to dance, which was now an accomplishment essential for a gentleman, and collections of lively Scottish dance tunes, alongside foreign pieces, were made for Robert Gordon of Straloch (c.1620) and Sir John Skene (c.1625).32
FIGURE 8.3 Renaissance harmony: a page from Thomas Wode’s Psalter, 1562–6. Reproduced by permission of Edinburgh University Library.
The religious and political changes of the 1560s also impacted on civic and royal ceremonial. James VI’s ‘joyous entry’ into Edinburgh in 1579 combined many traditional elements with strident Protestant didactics and highly intellectual humanist symbolism. The king cultivated his image as a philosopher king, ushering in a new golden age, acting as a new David, Solomon, and Constantine combined. He recast the earlier Stewart claims to imperial monarchy into an assertion of divine monarchy, stressing his God-given destiny to rule over a Great Britain of multiple realms. This was most fully expressed in the grandest set-piece ceremony of the period: the 1594 baptism of the heir, Prince Henry Frederick. This three-day festival centred on the Chapel Royal at Stirling, newly rebuilt to the proportions of Solomon’s temple, and involved a theatrical tournament mimicking the Elizabethan Accession Day tilts. It climaxed with an English-style banquet and masque featuring a ‘ship of state’ crewed by classical deities and virtues. The extravagant spectacle was masterminded by William Fowler, whose pageant book was published in both Edinburgh and London. This was ‘government by photo-opportunity’.33
In a rapidly changing cultural climate there were nevertheless elements of continuity. The pre-Reformation Scottish interest in lay education was adopted and expanded by the Kirk as part of the drive to create a godly people, which subsumed the earlier humanist goal of nurturing virtuous citizens. The First Book of Discipline envisaged a school in every parish, which was difficult to achieve for financial reasons, but some of the burgh grammar schools cultivated very high standards of Latin, and occasionally Greek, scholarship. Expansion of university provision included the foundation of Edinburgh in 1583 and Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1593, and many Scots still finished their education abroad. By 1600, Scotland was one of the most literate societies in Europe.34 In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that James VI was given a rigorously classical and godly education by his tutors, George Buchanan and Peter Young. The king remarked wryly that he was forced to speak Latin before he could speak Scots.
Today, George Buchanan is most famous as the chief detractor of Queen Mary and the man who did not spare the rod on his royal pupil. At the time, he was a towering figure of the European Renaissance. He taught at universities in France and Portugal, translated texts from Greek into Latin, and was a prolific Latin author, who employed the full range of neoclassical literary genres. His poetry is considered to be particularly accomplished and many of his poems and plays exerted considerable influence on French Renaissance literature. Buchanan wrote flattering courtly verses and masques for Queen Mary before her liaison with the Earl of Bothwell. After her deposition in 1567, he wrote De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) and Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), justifying the right of resistance to tyrants with passionate eloquence. For Buchanan as much as for John Knox, whose History of the Reformation (1587) was thoroughly self-justificatory, history was a branch of rhetoric. James VI was an apt pupil and owed much of his intellectual development to Buchanan’s influence, but he rejected his teacher’s political philosophy outright.35
James VI was slow to take up the reins of government but swift to provide cultural leadership. As a young man in the 1580s he drew around him a group of inventive and versatile poets, traditionally known as the Castalian Band. James’s Essayes of a Prentise in the Diuine Arte of Poesie (1584) was a manifesto for rejuvenating Scots literature by seeking inspiration in French and Italian rhetorical and metaphorical poetry. The Castalians responded enthusiastically, producing many stylish translations and fine lyric verse. As with decorative painting, it is possible to detect in Castalian poetry, especially that of Alexander Montgomerie, an awareness of the Mannerist aesthetic, which was rapidly developing abroad and would lead Renaissance culture into the Baroque of the seventeenth century.36 In the 1590s James VI began to take more interest in theology and politics than poetry, publishing The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), which expounds a philosophy of divine monarchy and rejects the resistance theories of Knox and Buchanan. He also wrote Basilikon Doron as a handbook on kingship for his eldest son, Henry, which is much more pragmatic about the realities of rule. These, and many other tracts, were the products of a studious, stoical rex pacificus, who in many ways embodied the virtues of Renaissance humanism, yet also exhibited the grandiose ambition of his Stewart forebears in his desire to rule united kingdoms as God’s anointed. James VI also cultivated his European image, since he had ambitions to become a leader of Christendom: many of his prose works were translated for continental consumption with this in mind.37
Cultural continuities are also apparent in the architecture of this period. Although James V’s wholehearted adoption of the French Renaissance style was not pursued systematically after his death, classical motifs still feature in the works of James VI. The 1594 Chapel Royal at Stirling has a strictly classical entrance, based on a design by Sebastiano Serlio, and the Linlithgow north wing of 1618 employs classical pediments in an elegant, balanced scheme. Beyond the royal works, similar themes were apparent in aristocratic architecture too. Mar’s Wark, Stirling (c.1570), is now a shell but its symmetrical fenestration and fine string courses recall something of the classicism at Falkland; whilst Crichton Castle has a thoroughly Italianate diamanté facade with a classical loggia, built for the Earl of Bothwell in the 1580s. The chivalric impulse, which preserved the attachment to traditional castellated architecture, also continued into this period and beyond, with many noble residences becoming increasingly flamboyant, particularly in the north-east. The reasons for the persistence of the castellated style are unclear, but Charles McKean believes that it was a deliberate rejection of classical forms, influenced by the French baronial style. His hypothesis is still open to some debate. Also open to discussion is the classification of the architecture of the 1620s and 1630s. Buildings such as the Parliament House and Moray House in Edinburgh, or the Nithsdale wing at Caerlaverock Castle, are often described as part of the Scottish Renaissance, but many of their features could be interpreted differently. The combination of broken pediments, half-moon pediments, buckle quoins, obelisks, strapwork finials, and similar details in other European countries would indicate the Baroque. Aonghus MacKechnie concedes the term ‘Mannerist’, but ‘Baroque’ is conspicuously underused in the Scottish context and would merit investigation.38
It is now readily apparent that the Scots participated fully in the northern Renaissance and this should become more widely acknowledged as further research continues. Much like the Dutch, French, and Scandinavians, the Scots were cultural magpies, who borrowed ideas and images from classical and continental sources and adapted them to local needs. They created a distinctive national style in some areas, the scholarly interpretation of which is still in its infancy. The cultural vandalism of the Reformers has made it easier to investigate literary and architectural developments than the history of music and painting, but there is still much to learn. In time, scholars will uncover more of the details of specific artists and artefacts, and the influences upon them, which will in turn allow a more nuanced understanding of the Renaissance to be shaped. It is to be hoped that a scholarly exploration of the Scottish Baroque will also emerge in due course.
Bath, Michael, Renaissance Decorative Painting in Scotland (Edinburgh, 2003).
Dunbar, John G., Scottish Royal Palaces: The Architecture of the Royal Residences during the Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Periods (East Linton, 1999).
Durkan, John, numerous articles over many years, especially those in Innes Review.
Edington, Carol, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, 1486–1555 (East Linton, 1995).
MacDonald, A. A., Lynch, Michael, and Cowan, Ian B., eds., The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture Offered to John Durkan (Leiden, 1994).
MacQueen, John, Humanism in Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh, 1990).
Mason, Roger A., Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998).
Oram, Richard D., and Stell, Geoffrey P., eds., Lordship and Architecture in Medieval and Renaissance Scotland (Edinburgh, 2005).
Ross, D. James, Musick Fyne: Robert Carver and the Art of Music in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1993).
Thomas, Andrea, Princelie Majestie: The Court of James V of Scotland, 1528–1542 (Edinburgh, 2005).
Thomas, Andrea, Glory and Honour: The Renaissance in Scotland (Edinburgh, forthcoming).