Robert McLellan (1907–85) was born in Lanarkshire and spent his childhood on a farm on the Clyde valley. His writing was to be marked by the strong sense of dialect speech that he acquired there. He refused, however, to follow the ‘synthetic Scots’, i.e. a Scots from any dialect and any historical period, largely derived from dicitionaries, that had been the basis of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetic experiments during the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s. McLellan’s Scots is grounded in a living vernacular, though it was often at its most effective, as in Jamie the Saxt, when it was transposed to a historical period where Scots would have been the natural speech of the whole community.
Jamie the Saxt was first produced in 1937 by the Curtain Theatre, an amateur drawing-room theatre established by Grace Ballantyne in Glasgow. Duncan Macrae, then a school-teacher but about to become one of the outstanding actors of the twentieth century, played Jamie, a role which he was to make his own in successive productions.
The play takes place in the period between 1591 and 1593 when the young James VI of Scotland (1566–1625, and later to become James I of England, after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603) was struggling to establish himself against the power of the competing factions and religious groups which had caused much turmoil in Scotland since the Reformation of 1560, and had sought control in Scotland during the period, up to 1585, when James, who was crowned when only one year old, was a minor. McLellan follows closely the accounts of David Moysie’s Memoirs of the Affairs of Scotland (quotations from which provide the scene locations in each Act) and P. F. Tytler’s History of Scotland (1882).
Michael Lynch, in Scotland: A New History (1992) describes the events surrounding the play’s action as follows:
The first crisis of the personal reign came only in 1592, after seven years of almost universal harmony between King, nobles and ministers. It took the form of the celebrated murder in February 1592 of the ‘bonnie Earl of Moray’. The only relationship which the well-known ballad bears to reality is that the Earl was indeed bonnie. The feud between him and the Earl of Huntly was, like most feuds, largely a matter of local dispute which had been allowed to get seriously out of hand. When Moray’s kinsman, the quixotic figure of Francis Stewart, 5th Earl of Bothwell, became involved the feud spilled over into court politics. Bothwell’s sensational arrest on a charge of witchcraft along with a coven of North Berwick ‘witches’ gives the affair an air of supernatural intrigue which it hardly deserves; his escape, the repeated failures of James’s government to catch him and his increasingly ostentatious raids on royal palaces, including one on the Palace of Holyroodhouse in July 1593 when the King was trapped in… the privy of his own presence chamber, lend it a strong whiff of farce. The persistent demands of Moray’s mother for justice, she commissioned a portrait of the corpse, which lay unburied for six years, add an element of the macabre.
Despite its eccentricities, this was a prolonged and major crisis for James’s authority, for the Kirk by 1592 had sprung to the defence of the unlikely figures of both Moray and Bothwell, victims, as they saw it, of a papist conspiracy. The fragile understanding between James and the Kirk had broken down… The affair was resolved only through the stupidity of Huntly and Bothwell, who had decided, ironically, to join forces in 1594. A major feud which had threatened to pull apart the carefully constructed coalition of loyalties painstakingly erected by Maitland [James’s chancellor] since 1585 became a rebellion, which was (as always) much easier for the crown to deal with. By early 1595 a chastened Huntly was contained and Bothwell was exiled, never to return. It was the last concerted protest by magnates in James’s reign.
McLellan said that he he was more interested in character than in theme and Jamie the Saxt derives its power from its presentation of James, once described as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.