Post on 04-Apr-2023
[Edited Version]
From Bourgeois Wife to Renaissance Monarch: the
Royal Entertainments and Imperial Ambition of
Mary Stuart (1561-1566)
Lesley Mickel
In recent history the seventeenth century Stuart court masque
has been seized on by scholars as a totemic event
encapsulating the religio-political ideologies of the period.
Initially, commentators such as Orgel and Strong hailed the
Stuart masque as a theatrical expression of absolute royal
power, although more recently the masque has been recognised
as rooted in its historical moment, a site for the
articulation of dissent. It is strongly related to its locus,
thus as views on the ideologies, and structures of the Stuart
court shift, so does analysis of the masque. A further major
current in recent interpretation of the Stuart masque has
examined its intellectual and theatrical connections with
European court entertainments: in particular, Strong and
Peacock have shown how Inigo Jones’s Italian experiences
shaped his philosophy and design of masque. A major aspect of
the Stuart masque’s evolution has been overlooked, however,
and that is its indebtedness to Scottish court entertainments
prior to James VI/I’s accession to the English throne in 1603.
1
While it is the case that valuable work has been done on
sixteenth century Stuart court entertainments staged in
Scotland and their connections with European practice, it
remains for scholars to consider how they informed later
Stuart masque practice.1
This article seeks to shed new light on sixteenth
century court entertainments staged on both sides of the
border, paying particular attention to the entertainments of
Mary Stuart. For a short period from 1561 to 1566, Mary used
entertainments and pageantry to reinforce her position at
home, and to stake ambitious claims for a nascent Scottish
empire, exhibiting a sophisticated understanding of how royal
entertainments could be exploited for political purposes.
Nevertheless, many of these entertainments were improvised and
drew on popular pastimes and performers, and may be viewed as
the precursor to the Whitehall antimasque, arguably Jonson’s
most significant contribution to the form. This view is
reinforced when we remember that it was Queen Anne, with her
experience of Scottish court entertainments as patron and
performer who requested the antimasque as a foil to the masque
proper. Similar to many of the earlier Scottish royal
entertainments, the antimasque drew on professional actors,
and provided more popular comic or horror fare as a precursor
to the masque’s heavy diet of philosophy and religion.2
Masquing at Mary Stuart’s Court
It is tempting to read the history of Mary Stuart’s short
reign in Scotland backwards, and to impose a romantic view of
2
her as the doomed and beautiful young Queen, who fell foul of
the wily Reformer Knox, treacherous nobles and a paranoid
Elizabeth Tudor. However, current historians agree that
“Mary’s initial success was stunning. She rallied her
nobility, crushed a rebellion in 1562 . . . Steered a moderate
course with the Protestant church, established a glittering
court, made popular and effective progresses around her
kingdom and pursued clever diplomacy designed to persuade
Elizabeth I to recognise her as her heir”.3 Mary understood
clearly how her personal presentation in court performances
and progresses was essential to maintaining her status and
popularity in the face of competition for authority. Her
performances at court and in public, assert her dual status as
inviolate monarch and as a woman of the people, and the
spectacular festival staged to celebrate Prince James’s
christening, articulated her aspirations for a Scottish
empire. Her fall was not a foregone conclusion, and she
exploited court festivals for their political capital, just as
other European monarchs did, demonstrating ambitious
aspirations for herself and her country.
The politically charged and hybrid nature of Scottish
courtly entertainment was displayed in 1566 when as part of
celebrations for the investiture of Darnley with the Order of
St Michel, Mary and her ladies danced for the French
ambassador Rambouillet and his entourage: “the quenis grace,
and all hir Maries and ladies wer all cled in mens aperrell;
and everie ane of thame presentit ane quhingar [sword],
bravelie and maist artificiallie made and embroiderit with
3
gold, to the said ambassatour and his gentilmen”.4 The Queen
made a double impact by choosing to cross dress in male
costume, and by the dramatic presentation of ornamental swords
to the French contingent. The cross-dressing that was a
distinctive component of popular guising was particularly
repugnant to town and church authorities alike, and Mary must
have worn this costume full knowing its potential to irritate
her critics. Carpenter points out that Mary’s costume may not
have been so shocking in terms of gender transgression, as
male masquing garments of the period were typically long and
broad, disguising the wearer’s shape.5. The fact that Mary was
five months pregnant at the time of performance supports the
supposition that the dancers wore such long gowns rather than
doublet and hose, thus accommodating Mary’s changing shape;
nevertheless her decision to perform in front of the court
when pregnant, the adoption of masculine attire, and the
presentation of weapons assert a female royal persona informed
by traditionally masculine royal attributes. The swords gifted
to the French introduced the elements of threat and danger
that were integral to popular guising, albeit in a more
sophisticated context, and allude to the practice of masculine
sword dancing.6
The Hybrid Scottish Court Entertainment
While Carpenter is right to remind us that “the performances
at the royal court of Scotland during the 1560s need to be
understood in the wider arena of the European community of
court spectacle”, it is perhaps the habit of engaging in
4
hybrid forms of entertainment that crossed social as well as
generic boundaries that distinguishes the Scottish court from
courts elsewhere in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth
century, its festive practice having more in common with the
Tudor court of Henry VIII in terms of spontaneity and variety.7
In fact, up until the reign of Elizabeth the late medieval and
early modern English courts witnessed a fusion of
entertainment styles, resonant with what was happening in
Scotland at the same period: James IV of Scotland promoted
pageantry and tournaments on a grand scale, most famously The
Tournament of the Black Lady in 1508, as well as enjoying all kinds
of mummery and masking within the court. Henry VIII ascended
the English throne in 1509 and royal festivities North of the
border, as well as elsewhere in Europe, must have informed the
development of Tudor pageantry. As Carpenter and Twycross
remark, “courtly entertainment at this period is characterised
by fluidity of form, the apparent irrelevance of generic
boundaries”.8. This involved the intermingling of genres,
formats, and language, with mummery often difficult to
separate from early masking, for example, and a lack of clear
cut generic boundaries.
Although the medieval English and Scottish courts enjoyed
similar entertainments, with performers often travelling from
one to the other, and featured a general osmosis between the
festive modes employed, after the accession of Elizabeth,
English court culture became more professionalised, with the
development of clear generic boundaries between masks,
pageants, entertainments and dramatic plays. Similarly,
5
entertainment at the French court was moulded by Catherine de
Medici into the extravagant, highly polished ballet de cour which
typically imaged the restoration of national harmony with the
court as its focus, after the turmoil of dissent.9 As a child
growing up in the French court Mary Stuart benefitted from
Catherine de Medici’s importation of Italian dancing masters
and musicians, and participated in masques herself. This means
that while Mary was not exposed to the fully evolved French
ballet de cour, she certainly learnt the skills to participate in
court entertainments, talents that Knox later disparaged as
her “joyosity”, and from an early age she understood the
political uses they could be made to serve.
Both sixteenth century English and Scottish courts mixed
festive practices, yet the Scottish court relied more heavily
on local popular entertainers, possibly the result of limited
economic resources. Nevertheless, Scottish monarchs as well as
civic councils mounted impressive displays of pageantry and
music to mark state occasions, such as The Black Lady Tournament
(1508), the entertainments hosted by Edinburgh for the entries
of Mary Stuart and Anne of Denmark, as well as the magnificent
royal christenings staged at Stirling castle in 1566 and 1594.
Differences in the development of court entertainment in the
courts of Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor are tied in with the
development in England of companies of professional actors who
benefitted from aristocratic protection and patronage, as well
as the evolution of professional writers such as Gascoigne who
were commissioned to devise masques and entertainments for the
court. This development is profoundly linked with Queen
6
Elizabeth’s withdrawal from direct participation in
entertainments and her status as symbolic centre and
spectator.10 By contrast, the development of drama in sixteenth
century Scotland was curtailed by the removal of the court and
royal patronage with King James’s accession to the English
crown. The attempt to understand why and how Scottish and
English court entertainment developed significant differences
in the sixteenth century is aided by looking at Chambers’
compilation of chambers and revels accounts for the
Elizabethan court. Here we see that the majority of payments
are made out to professional or semi-professional acting
companies such as £6 13s 4d to the “M. of the children of
Poles” (Master of St Paul’s Children) for a performance in
Christmas 1562/3, and the same sum paid out to “playores of
the Lorde Robte Duddeley”. While there is a payment in 1577/8
“for a mattres hoopes and boards with tressells for the
Italian tumblers” this is an untypical entry, and most of the
payments go to companies of players operating with
aristocratic patronage. The fact that drama of this type or on
this scale did not develop in Scotland during this period must
partly account for the fact that Scottish court entertainment
remained a fluid mix of styles, and regularly co-opted folk
entertainments for its own purposes, such as bards and
tumblers. The fact that a professional literary cadre was not
present in Scotland gave Mary Stuart more scope for
improvising and performing in her own masques, and to inform
directly these festivities with her own political agenda, as
compared with the sometimes oblique representations of
7
Elizabeth projected by professional artists south of the
border.11 These circumstances necessarily added social overlap
to the generic mix in Scottish court entertainment, as local
entertainers were pulled into the court to provide
entertainment. This is quite different from the later practice
of the Stuart court at Whitehall where entertainments were
specially composed by court artists and performed by
aristocratic courtiers to their peers in a closed aesthetic
circle, a development that began in the Elizabethan period.
Such theorising about the development of court festivity,
crossing the lines of nation and time, necessarily involves
some generalising, as it may be argued that the introduction
of the antimasque brought non-aristocratic elements to the
later Stuart (Jacobean) masque in the form of professional
actors playing comic roles, yet it should be remembered that
these antimasques were scripted by the court artist and not
devised by the performers themselves, and therefore their
expression of popular culture is necessarily mediated by court
prejudice and taste as well as that of the writer. Moreover,
the structure of the antimasque followed by the masque proper
ensured social segregation between the professional
entertainers appearing in the former and the aristocratic
amateurs dancing in the latter. In Scotland, by contrast,
morris dancers and spelers brought their entertainment for the
court’s consumption, they were not ‘produced’ by the court
itself, and so may be said to represent a more complete or
direct expression of popular culture in a courtly context.
Frustratingly, it is impossible to know just how far social
8
and aesthetic diversity extended in Scottish court
entertainments, as the records indicating that James IV and
James V both participated in guising or masking activities,
fail to specify whether these monarchs played with their peers
only, or joined in with groups of guisers brought in from
outside the court; however, the description of Mary Stuart’s
enthusiastic hocking, cited below, where she mixed with
ordinary people on the street, indicates that social Scottish
court festivities could be socially diverse.
Hocking
Mary Stuart’s gallic “joyosity”, her delight in performance,
together with the Scottish court’s practice of co-opting local
entertainment and performers, led to her enthusiastic
participation in festivities that deliberately crossed social
and cultural boundaries, as aptly demonstrated by her part in
a playful public hocking on Easter Monday 1564:
On Monday she and divers of her womenapparelled themselves like ‘bourgois’wives, and went upon their feet up anddown the town, of every man they met theytook some pledge for a piece of money tothe banquet; and in the same lodging whereI was accustomed to lodge, there was thedinner prepared and great cheer was made,at she was herself, to the great wonderand ‘gasing’ of man woman and child!12
As a folk custom the hock play was an expression of
popular, national culture. Hock games or plays traditionally
incorporated an expression of female assertiveness, with women
9
capturing men before freeing them for a fee, and often a kiss.
Parish authorities allowed this transgressive game because a
large portion of the money raised went to the Church and the
remainder spent to provide a feast for the female
participants. This festive practice “fell victim to social and
religious changes at the Reformation”, and was descried as
being cruel and abusive: unsurprising given that hocking
embodied a carnivalesque combination of gender reversal,
violence and sex. Modern accounts of hocking record it as an
English practice and scholars of Scottish civic and court
festivities of the period do not mention it, apart from this
record of Mary Stuart’s hocking.13 This means that the Scottish
Queen deliberately imported this transgressive form of English
festivity and grafted it onto Scottish popular culture,
possibly in an attempt to undermine the reformed Kirk’s hold
on the people, and to show that she was one with them, no
different from any other bourgeois wife, and also because it
was diverting. The use of costume in this instance both
stresses her difference from the common folk, as she is after
all a Queen in disguise, but also tries to indicate her
essential human similarity with them. When Mary and her ladies
demanded money from men they met, there is no suggestion that
they chased or used extreme physical force, as was often the
case elsewhere, but they do use the money obtained to provide
a banquet. Tellingly, we do not hear of the Kirk benefitting
from any of these funds. Whether Mary demanded or begged
payment on this occasion is unclear, (the difference between
the two approaches being merely nominal, as a disguised Queen
10
‘begging’ funds from an ordinary male burgher is not to be
refused), but what is very clear is the observer’s delight and
surprise that the Queen should engage with the populace in
this way and expose herself to the view of “every man woman
and child”, outside the privileged and enclosed court, and at
a common lodging. This exposure of the female self to the view
of men at close quarters, and the physical contact involved
led to early criticism of the festivity as encouraging lewd
and adulterous behaviour, as in 1450 when the Bishop of
Worcester proclaimed that hocking made “many scandals arise,
and adulteries, and other gross misdemeanours”.14 All this took
place some three years before her apparently scandalous
relationship with Bothwell, but it would have certainly
contributed to later widespread satire and criticism of Mary
as a woman with uncontrolled sexual appetite, and an appetite
for life, also reflected in her presence at the banquet where
“great cheer was made”.
The importation of English hocking into Scotland may be
seen as an extension of the Scottish court’s practice of
drawing on local performers and festivities from outside for
its royal entertainment, and also suggests that Mary Stuart
was interested in moulding popular Scottish culture into an
expression of collective, national identity that was not based
on religion, at a time when factional religious differences
were an incendiary presence in her realm. Instigating and
participating in the hocking and following banquet was a
powerful means of expressing her connection with ordinary
11
Scots people, a strategic attempt to win them over despite the
Kirk’s campaign to undermine her authority at home.
Knox and Court Festivity
In his History of the Reformation In Scotland the Protestant reformer
John Knox fulminates against the apparent corruptions of
Mary’s reign, and ringingly declares, “There began the
Masking, which from yeer to yeer hath continued since”. The
work of Dibdin, Mill and Carpenter reveals Knox’s repeated
critique of Mary as the dancing Queen who brought corrupting
festivities from France, ultimately leading to Scotland’s and
her own undoing to be prejudicial nonsense; Mary’s enthusiasm
for dancing and other court festivities, sourly termed by Knox
as her “joyosity”, was informed by longstanding native
Scottish traditions, as well as by her experience at the
French court. Knox’s oppositional stance towards the Queen was
not only rooted in religious difference, but also derived from
a strident hatred of the French, whom he suspected of
stripping Scotland’s wealth, as well as corrupting the private
religion and public morals of the populace; so that in 1561
when the town of Edinburgh celebrated the Queen’s accession
with a series of pageants, Knox declaimed, “In farces, in
Masking, and other Prodigalities: fain would our fools have
counterfeited France”. It is not clear what was meant by a
“farce”, and whether it has here the potentially pejorative
resonance that it does in modern usage, nevertheless, Mill
notes it as a Scottish festive practice, citing several
references to it in the records she examines. Knox, however,
12
was determined to impose a French provenance for these
“prodigalities”, a view persistently reinforced in The History as
he associates masking with moral corruption and social
oppression, accounting for its presence in Scotland to French
influence. The Scots, by contrast are sober, moral folk, and
the Francophile Mary was required to play the part of an
upright Scottish Queen to her council:
In presence of her councell she keptherself grave; for under the mourning weedand apparel she could dissemble in fullperfection: but how soon that ever theFrench people had her alone, they toldher, That since she came to Scotland, shesaw there nothing but gravity, whichrepugned altogether to her breeding, forshe was brought up in joviality, so termedshe her Dancing, and other things theretobelonging.15
Knox insists on the Queen’s split personality, and his
narrative repeatedly shows her volatile, inner French core
puncturing her sober Scottish exterior at times of crisis,
whether it be tears provoked by the Minister’s admonition, or
the murderous anger erupting when the French courtier
Chattelet hid under her bed presumably in the hope of an
amorous adventure. Knox is in no doubt that the responsibility
for this outrageous act lies at her door for encouraging
Chattelet and dancing a particularly obnoxious dance with him,
known as the ‘the purpose’, and unacceptable to Knox because
during it “man and woman talketh secretly, wise men would
judge such fashions not agreeable to the gravity of honest
women . . .”..16 Mary demanded Chattelet’s immediate death for13
his temerity, a demand resisted by the reformed Moray, in
Knox’s narrative. Nevertheless Mary’s thirst for vengeance
resulted in Chattelet’s execution, and “So received Chattelet
the reward of his dancing”, Knox remarks with apparent
sympathy and not a little satisfaction. The point of this
story is to underscore the inevitable clash between French
emotional volatility and lack of moral restraint, encapsulated
by the metonymy of dancing, and Scottish rational sobriety and
inner control rooted in the reformed religion, as figured by
Moray.
The social dangers represented by Mary’s French mores
were literally and physically enacted in the infamous Alison
Craig (or Craik) incident, when the Earl of Bothwell, the
Marquis d’Elboeuf (Mary’s cousin) and Lord John of Coldingham
(Mary’s half-brother) ‘committed ryot in Edinburgh and
disordered the whole town’ when they demanded access to
Alison’s home under the pretext of a guising visit. Doors and
gates were broken down so that the party could meet Alison,
converse and dance with her as the custom of guising or
domestic masking allowed. Knox acknowledged that the political
context of this act of social and domestic violence, remarking
that “This was done in despight of the Earl of Arrane, who was
suspected to have been in love with the said Alison.”.17 The
incident provoked an outcry and the burghers of Edinburgh
(including Knox) presented the Queen with a petition demanding
redress. In his assessment of the Queen’s response Knox is
silent on the culpability of the Scots nobles Bothwell and
Lord John for these ‘horrors’ but chose instead to focus on
14
the Queen’s attempt to excuse her French cousin on grounds of
his youth and the company he was in, clearly laying most of
the responsibility on the shoulders of the Scots involved.
Knox’s outrage at this attribution of guilt quivers off the
page:
For how shall she punish in Scotland thatvice, which in France she did see so freewithout punishment, and which Kings andCardinalls commonly use, as the Mask andDancing of Orleans can witnesse; whereinvirgins and mens wives were made common toKing Harry, Charles the Cardinall, and totheir courtiers and pages, as common womenin Bordells are unto their companions.18
The metonymic proximity between dancing, sex and France
underpinning Knox’s critique of Mary Stuart is amplified when
he describes the growing immorality of the Scottish court
where a French servant and her Scottish lover, Mary’s
apothecary, contrived the murder of their unwanted child. Knox
places Mary at the centre of this vortex of immorality by
emphasising the offenders’ national and personal connections
with her. For Knox Mary’s position as a magnet for immorality
at the court is over-determined by her apparently incongruous
role as a female French monarch on the Scottish throne, who
enjoyed dancing in public and private. The dangers inherent in
moral corruption derived from France, lie in its apparently
rapid contagion of the sober Scots character, so we hear of
the marriage between “John Sempill called the Dancer, and Mary
Levingston sirnamed the Lusty”, hasted on through necessity,
presumably that of an impending baby. What follows in Knox’s
15
account of the court’s slippage into iniquity is an
uncomfortable, and grammatically tortured analysis of what
godly folk might have wished for their children’s education if
the court were to continue in its current mode:
That if they thought that such a courtshould long continue, and if they lookedfor no better life to come, they wouldhave wished their Sonnes and Daughtersrather to have been brought up withFidlers and Dancers, and to have beenexercised in flinging upon a Floore, andin the rest that thereof follows, than tohave been exercised in the company of thegodly, and exercised in virtue, which inthat court was hated.19
The heavily conditional syntax, linguistic and syllabic
repetition, metaphor, and pointed insinuation make this some
of Knox’s most powerful, if awkward rhetoric. The awkwardness
comes from the fact that Knox’s thesis of the court’s
overwhelming corruption, due to its French’s influence, as
well as the character and pastimes of the Queen, necessarily
acknowledges that even “godly and wise men” and their
children, that is Scots belonging to the reformed Kirk, were
liable to be sucked in by this hedonistic culture of dance and
consequent sexual misdemeanour, which in the most depraved
instances, culminated in murder. The subtextual implication
here is that given an extended change in political and
cultural circumstances the reformed Kirk was in danger of
losing many of its supporters who might choose to follow the
path of realpolitik rather than religion, a change which would
16
necessarily entail a diminution of Knox’s own position and
status.
Knox’s religious prejudice made him dismiss Mary’s
fondness for dancing and other entertainments as indicative of
her moral and religious corruption, and he failed or refused
to see that these involved accomplishments necessary for the
Renaissance monarch to display. Mary is often described as
impulsive compared with her cousin Elizabeth Tudor when it
came to dancing and royal festivities, yet during her short
reign Mary demonstrated strikingly that she was very aware of
the political freight that apparently frivolous pastimes might
be made to bear: thus the mask she danced with her ladies, all
brandishing daggers and wearing male attire referred to above
may be read as an act of personal and political assertion. The
apparently impromptu hocking was also a calculated
demonstration of her bond with ordinary Scots, calculated to
offset the Kirk’s undermining of her authority. So it is in
terms of Mary’s political strategy that we must view the
paramount festivity of her reign, the magnificent christening
of her son James at Stirling castle in 1566, a tremendous
triumph of personal and national significance, at which “the
monarch was a spectator rather than a participant”, showing
that Mary well understood when and how to play the monarch.20
The triumph took place over three days, from 17 December
1566, initially involving the formal entry of the Queen and
foreign ambassadors, the christening itself and banquet. On
the next day the ambassadors presented their commissions and
17
there was a hunt in which Mary participated, although
significantly, she took the role of royal spectator during
what was to follow, as a triumph of this magnitude was not the
occasion for the spontaneous, ebullient participatory style
she customarily demonstrated in more low key court
entertainments. On the final day, the festivities reached a
magnificent climax with a banquet, mask and musical
entertainment, and finally a breath-taking firework display
structured around an attack on a fort, staged on the castle
esplanade. In recent years cultural historians have pieced
together the events of what is now regarded as Scotland’s most
magnificent royal triumph from account books and contemporary
reports. It is frustrating that we do not possess a continuous
narrative of this festival such as those provided by Langham
and Gascoigne for The Kenilworth Entertainment, and Fowler’s
detailed record of the celebrations staged for Prince Henry’s
baptism in 1594, but nevertheless, the extant documentary and
textual evidence testify to Mary’s intent to establish her
status as a great Renaissance monarch, and Scotland’s identity
as a distinct nation within Europe.
The Treaty of Edinburgh (1560) provides a vital context for
understanding Mary’s aspirations for her Scottish monarchy,
aspirations powerfully expressed in the rhetoric and spectacle
at Stirling six years later. It negotiated the withdrawal of
French and English troops from Scotland, replacing the Auld
Alliance with a new Anglo-Scottish agreement, containing the
significant conditions that Mary and her husband Francis II
were not to display any English heraldry or insignia in their
18
arms, and that Mary should give up her claim to the English
throne. For Elizabeth, the treaty was vital to English
stability, securing the northern borders by “confirming
Scotland’s position as a satellite state”. The treaty was
never ratified as Mary was not prepared to abandon her claim
to the English throne, for she viewed such a concession as
detracting from her status as Queen. The pressure put on
Mary’s authority by the Reformed Kirk represented further
potential erosion of her position, and she refused to cede any
of her authority to the Kirk or to the English Queen; her
intransigence shows a monarch determined to preserve her own
status and the status of Scotland, which were one and the
same, in terms of Renaissance notions of royal power. A letter
composed by Mary to Elizabeth in January 1562 leaves off the
customary, elaborate rhetoric of friendship and plainly
declares:
We know how near we ar discendit of theblude of Ingland, and quhat devisis hesbene attemptit to make us as it werstrangear from it. We traist, being sonear your cousine, ye wald be laith[loath] we suld resave so manifest anyinjurie, as aunterlie to be debarrit fromthat title, quhilk in possibilitie mayfall to us.21
Knox’s account of the baptism celebrations, which he
recognises as a ‘triumph’ is laden with disapproval at the
expense involved, which the Queen could not afford, leading to
the unprecedented measure of a forced loan from the people of
Edinburgh. As Lynch points out, this was a dangerous strategy,
19
potentially alienating her from the people, and was “the only
occasion on which she risked raising direct taxation from her
realm”, indicating that the baptism and triumph were viewed by
her as so important as to warrant extraordinary fiscal
measures.22 The French and English ambassadors arrived with
impressive trains and gifts, but for Knox this did not
counterweigh what he regarded as excessive expenditure, which,
he points out, was not the usual practice of Scotland - a
further insinuated jibe at Mary’s Gallic extravagance: “The
excessive expences and superfluous apparel, which was prepared
at that time, exceeded farre all preparation that ever had
been devised or set forth afore that time in this Countrey.”23
As Lynch shows, Mary looked to French precedent in her
planning of the Stirling triumph, particularly regarding the
spectacular trope of the besieged fort, which he links
specifically to an entertainment staged at Bayonne by Charles
IX in 1565. While this is certainly an immediate context for
the fort at Stirling, such fort sieges were a common component
of European triumphs, but significantly, this was the first in
Scotland. Attention to these contexts shows that Mary was
determined to mould her reign into that of the great European
Renaissance monarch, and was keen to import French
magnificence into Scottish festivities. Another recent
historian of the staged fort siege, Peter Davison, has
suggested that while the contexts for Mary’s triumph are
beyond doubt, it should not be regarded as a duplicate of
Valois triumphalism, but rather as a fantastical, polyvalent
representation of Renaissance ‘others’ and that the three days
20
of festivities were designed to heal the religious and
political divisions at the Scottish court. As is often the
case, these academic differences are a matter of emphasis and
Lynch himself points out that “The Earl of Argyll, Protestant
patron of the West, and Seton, the most resolutely Catholic of
the South-eastern lords, both carried a white staff in their
hands, the traditional emblem of reconciliation of a feud”.24
The white staff was the symbol of the Lord Chamberlain, or
master of ceremonies, and Mary delegated this role to both
Argyll and Seton because she did not want to alienate either
side in the course of the celebrations, rather than the staff
itself necessarily symbolising reconciliation. The Lord
Chamberlain at Whitehall traditionally carried a white staff,
indicating that Mary modelled her court on the Tudor court in
England, as well as looking to the Valois court in France.
The absence of reconciliation among the Scottish nobles
is evidenced by the religious grandstanding surrounding the
baptism. The Diurnall of Remarkable Occurents, tells us rather baldly
that “At this time my lordis Huntlie, Murray, Bothwill, nor
the Inglish ambassatour, come noght within the said chappell,
because it was done against the points of their religion”.
Knox pads out the details of this episode with relish, telling
us that no noblemen could be persuaded to assist at the
baptism, “to bear the Salt, Grease and Candle, and such other
things” deemed necessary, until eventually “the Earls of
Eglinton, Athole, and the Lord Seaton . . . brought in the
said Trash”.25. Knox seizes on the tensions between Mary and
the English Crown, and repeats the English Ambassador’s
21
amusement at this religious debacle, jesting which Mary found
prudent to take in good humour.26 The seating arrangements, and
serving of the following banquet also indicate political
manoeuvrings, with the French ambassador on Mary’s right and
the English ambassador on her left, and the Savoy ambassador
at the end of the table: their placing can be read as a
physical manifestation of Scotland’s geo-political positioning
at the time, and the choice of Huntly, Murray and Bothwell as
aristocratic servers seen as a ritualised performance of the
Queen’s command of even her mightiest, Protestant subjects.
Notably Mary was served by Protestant nobles (Huntly, Murray
and Bothwell) while the other guests were served by Catholic
nobles, again indicating Mary’s determination to cement the
loyalty of her leading Protestant supporters, despite their
differences in religion. The evidence is scanty regarding the
entertainment provided, but “efter dancing and playing in
haboundance, the said lordis that nycht depairtit to their
lugeingis”.27
The national and religious tensions breaking the surface
of the christening celebrations, became even more apparent on
the final day of this ‘climactic triumph’ when they coalesced
to provoke a major diplomatic incident. The banquet was
accompanied by music and a short entertainment or mask by
Buchanan, Pompae Deorum Rusticorum. The mask featured satyrs,
naiads, nereids, fauns and oreads or Northern mountain nymphs.
Sarah Carpenter shows how Buchanan translated these classical
figures into a specifically Scottish topography, so that the
satyrs and fauns celebrate the pleasures of lowland forests
22
and the hunting they afforded, the naiads and nereids figured
Scotland’s fast flowing rivers and springs, and the oreads
hailed from Scotland’s most remote and wild region, Orkney.
There were political reasons for bringing Orkney to the fore
in this way, which have nothing to do with geographical
accuracy. In 1468 Orkney had been ceded to Scotland in lieu of
a dowry payment due to James III on his marriage to the
Princess Margaret of Denmark. In the following century there
was a series of struggles between the feudal lords of Orkney
and the Scottish Crown, centred on taxation levied on the
islanders, culminating in a rebellion suppressed by James V in
1540.28
Thus, the international company gathered at Stirling in
1566, were presented by Buchanan with a view of the extreme
limit of Scotland’s realm, constituting a recent and
profitable expansion of Crown lands. Continuing rule over
Orkney showed the efficacy of Scotland’s military intervention
and the secure grip that central government held over its
furthest dominions. Far from being the bland entertainment
that the Pompae Deorum has sometimes been assumed to be, it was
an expression of Mary’s imperial claims; as David Armitage
remarks in his analysis of Scotland’s development as a nation
state, “the language of empire provided the means to define
the state both as one sovereign body among many in Europe and
as an impersonal source of authority within its increasingly
rigid boundaries”.29
Despite Buchanan’s scepticism about imperialism expressed
elsewhere, he colluded in Mary’s manipulation of the Stirling
23
triumph into an expression of Scottish nation building.
Correspondence between Mary and Elizabeth Tudor shows that
Mary had the prescience to imagine a joint Stuart and Tudor
dynasty, although Elizabeth resisted such national
developments until the very end of her reign. Relations and
negotiations between Scotland and England throughout the
sixteenth century informed the language and ideology
underpinning the future imperial expansion of Great Britain.
The Stuart Crown had absorbed Orkney and Shetland through
familial connections, just as Mary hoped to position herself
as next in line to the English Crown in the event of
Elizabeth’s death without an heir.
Buchanan’s entertainment celebrates the topography of
Scotland, and in such a various landscape the Nereids, or sea
nymphs favour the use of a compass. One translation of the
Latin verses has them addressing the Queen thus: “the strong
power of this magnetic iron . . . turns the sharp needle
towards the freezing Great Bear . . . This secret power has
brought us here from the Indian shore”.30 Scotland was
recognised as a source of magnetic iron, and its effect on the
compass understood - this conflation of images and physical
effects presents the monarchical state as an irresistible
force. “The Great Bear” is, of course, Ursa Major, the
constellation most clearly seen in the northern hemisphere,
and the Nereids journey so far from the New World to Scotland
indicates the powerful attraction exerted by Mary’s “virtue”
and they demonstrate their loyalty through offering “small
native gifts”. The Nereids’ inability to resist the attraction
24
of the North is richly significant on a number of levels, not
least because the Indies were also a source of “magnetic
iron”, the first of a series of similarities between the North
and the New World deliberately evoked by Buchanan. Both
regions were regarded as extremes of the known world; and the
barbarity of the North was a longstanding geographical and
racial slur originating from classical writers, informing much
early modern political rhetoric. Scottish scholars as far back
as Boece struggled to come to terms with this potentially
self-cancelling view of Scotland. The influential academic
John Mair resolved this tricky problem by distinguishing
between the wild Scots of the Highlands and Islands, and the
civilised Lowland Scots. Furthermore, Mair established the
connection between the wild people of the North and the
“barbaric” Indians of the New World, whose nature, he argued,
inclined them to slavery. Mair’s political thought sought to
protect mainland Scotland from potentially destructive
prejudice by securely anchoring it to “Wild Scots”, who
already had a reputation for barbarity and primitivism.31
Michael Lynch points out the connection between the
Highlanders involved in the staged fort siege at Stirling and
the Scots featured in the French entertainment at Bayonne in
the preceding year, but it must also be noted that in the
French triumph these Scots were linked with Turks, demons and
nymphs, that is to say, the exotic, the natural (as opposed to
the civilised), and the devilish realms of existence. Mair
was, of course, Buchanan’s teacher, and Buchanan’s various
writings show a determination to revise Mair’s political and
25
ethnographic views: Buchanan posited the Highlands and Islands
as a source of “rustic simplicity, [and] stoic ethics” that
could be synthesised with the Lowland virtues of civic polity
to produce a “classical aristocratic republic”.32. The presence
of gentle Indians bearing gifts to the monarch in the mask and
the prominent role played by the Highlanders in the subsequent
firework display is an attempt to represent verbally and
visually a cohesive nation state, not the troubled, divided
land described by Mair.
The satyrs of the mask were also employed as heralds of
the banquet, “with lang tailes and whippis in ther hands,
running befoir the meit, quhilk wes brocht throw the gret hall
upon ane trym engyn, marching as apperit it alain, with
musiciens clothed lyk maidins”. The “trym engine”, possibly a
kind of pageant car, was clearly planned as part of the
sumptuous magnificence of the triumph as a whole, but what
followed, as recounted by Melville, seems to be a more
impulsive, improvising performance. Carpenter is quite right
to insist that “the spectacle offers the culmination of a
domestic tradition” and that the “engine” while a novelty, was
certainly preceded by something similar at James IV’s
Tournament of the Black Lady in 1507; what follows, may also be seen
as equally consistent with the ebullient and often irreverent
tone of Scottish court entertainment. Melville says, “the
sattiers wer not content only to red rown, bot pat ther handis
behind them to ther tailes, quhilkis they waggit with ther
handis, in sic sort as the Englismen supponit it had bene
deuysed and done in derision of them”. The Englishmen were
26
roundly castigated by Melville for their extreme reaction to
the satyrs’ gesture, which included turning their backs and
sitting on the floor: the English “daftly apprehending that
quhilk they suld not seam to haue understand … the Englis
gentill men committed a gret errour to seam till understand it
as done against them”. Melville was well placed to understand
the political ramifications of this incident, as he had been
Mary’s special emissary to Elizabeth I at the time of the
Scottish Queen’s marriage to Darnley and was well aware of
English hostility to the marriage and its implications for the
question of English succession, issues that were hotly topical
at the christening of Mary’s son. In his remarks on this
strange episode he is perhaps a little disingenuous regarding
the slight, yet nevertheless implicitly recognises that it was
politically expedient for the English party to take offence in
this way. Michael Bath has recently recuperated the historical
context behind the fable of Englishmen with tails, linking it
to twelfth century English chroniclers who all told the story
of when Saint Augustine arrived in England to convert the
inhabitants to Christianity they, “ridiculed him by hanging
fishes’ tails on his clothing, in return for which . . . God
almighty avenged the saint by causing all their descendants to
be born with tails”.33 Bath goes on to suggest that the
slanderous myth of Englishmen with tails acquired new
relevance as the French promulgated the view that this
punishment from God was caused by English rejection of the
true faith, an accusation particularly piquant at this time of
reformation and rejection of the Catholic Church by the Tudor
27
crown. This analysis of the religious and national contentions
underpinning the tail wagging incident is given further weight
when we remember that it was Mary’s French favourite, Bastian
Pagez, who was credited with devising at least part of the
entertainment, and Melville tells how the English party
believed that the Frenchman’s malice was provoked by Mary’s
favour to the English on this occasion. Regardless of Mary’s
views towards her English and French allies, or her current
preferences, it is unlikely that she would have condoned such
a crass national insult, particularly given her aspiration to
the English throne. Her distribution of honours and seating of
guests during the triumph shows an intention to be even handed
in her favour, nevertheless, the toxic national and religious
differences running through the Scottish court needed little
opportunity to bubble up to the surface.
In addition to Buchanan and Pagez, the third individual
associated with creating the Stirling triumph is John
Chisholm, “comptrollar of the artailyerye”; there are no
records extant indicating a common plan shared by the co-
inventors, yet it is likely that Mary herself provided a
central point of reference drawing the parts of the
entertainment into a cohesive whole. There has been some
debate as to the ideological significance of the mock siege,
either as a reproduction of Valois triumphalism culminating in
an overwhelming statement of Stuart royal power, or as a
deliberately equivocal spectacle intended to reconcile the
political and religious factions troubling Mary’s reign. The
scanty evidence of the firework display makes this event open
28
to different readings, but we can say that the involvement of
Chisholm, the military personnel and equipment involved and
the efforts made to transport them secretly by night to
Stirling, all suggest that this was to be a major statement of
royal intent and an awe inspiring close to the triumph. Mill’s
reproduction of the available records gives us a strong
indication of the type of event planned, with Chisholm paid
for forty days hard work in advance of the final display. The
fort itself was constructed of wood, a material allowing for
speedy construction and suitably flammable. The court records
show that the participants’ costumes were crucial to the
entertainment, incurring significant cost and care in their
construction. The soldiers drafted in to perform the siege
were in groups of four, and the account lists “twenty aucht
gait skynnis quhairof was maid four hieland wild mens
cleithingis from heid to fute”. Quantities of buckram in red,
blue, black and white were required to costume the remaining
four landsknechts, four moors, and three devils. The account
describes the “fyftein soldiouris of the companies quha
combattit within & without the forth togidder with the
forsaidis hieland men having the executioun of the fyre workis
in their handis”.34. Attention to this entry clears up a great
deal of confusion about the role of the “wild scots” at this
event; Davidson and Williams suggest that the Scots are
present as one of a group of stereotypical Renaissance
‘others’ often drawn on in triumphs of this type, the
primitive highlanders demonised by Mair. Yet at Stirling these
‘others’ operate in a significantly different manner from the
29
more usual mode of European triumphs. At Bayonne, for example,
the Scots, Turks, demons and nymphs were vanquished in a fort
siege by members of the French royal family and court. At
Stirling, by contrast, it is not clear who defended or
attacked the fort, or who the demonised or celebrated
characters were, as they all fought “within & without the
forth togidder”. Mary’s gender dictated her role as spectator
rather than participant and thus the monarch could not be
physically integrated into the entertainment as military
victor, as had been the case at Bayonne with the involvement
of Charles IX and the future Henry III. The fact that Mary did
not nominate any of her courtiers to take on this role,
suggests that she was careful not to be seen to show
favouritism to one group at the expense of another. The “wild”
Highlanders, however, had a specific function not shared by
the other performers, for they had “the executioun of the fyre
workis in their handis”.35This comment is a vital clue in
unravelling the cultural and national freight invested in the
firing of the mock fort. This event is neither an expression
of royal triumphalism, nor is it an equivocal, or bland
recitation of the typical motifs of early modern triumphs, but
it is a proud assertion of national culture and military
prowess, evoking the longstanding Highland tradition of
burning settlements when they were no longer required.
Sally Mapstone recounts a story from the time of James V
that throws a good deal of light on the Stirling fort siege.
In 1529 James V was on a hunting expedition in the Scottish
Highlands, accompanied by his mother, Margaret, and the papal
30
ambassador to Scotland. The royal party were sumptuously
entertained by the Earl of Atholl and lodged in “ane curieous
palice” several stories high, made of timber, featuring a
drawbridge, glass windows, and tapestries. Mapstone, quoting
Stevenson, calls this, “a palace in the wild” and draws on
Pitscottie’s account in describing its impact on the
ambassador: “This ambassador of the paipis seand this great
bancat and triumph being maid in ane wilderness, quhair their
was not toune near be xx myle, thocht it an great merwell that
sic ane thing sould be in Scotland considerand that it was bot
the erse of the warld”.36 The ambassador’s terminology
recognises the aristocratic and royal splendour conveyed
through such a “triumph” and its impact lies in the creation
of such magnificence out of nothing, or even less than
nothing, as Scotland is not represented here as a neutral
space, but rather colourfully as “the erse of the warld”.
Pitscottie goes on to describe how the ambassador’s wonder was
compounded,
quhene the king depairtit and all his mentuike their leif, the heiland men sett allthis fair palice in ane fyre that the kingand his ambassadouris might sie thame.Then the ambassador said to the king, ‘Imerwell that ye sould tholl yone fairpalice to be brunt that your grace hes benso weill ludgit into’. Than the kingansuerit the ambassador and said, ‘it isthe wse of our hielandmen thocht they benewer so weill ludgit, to burne theirludging quhene they depairt.37
31
The Earl of Atholl used this event to display his
aristocratic largesse; however, King James co-opts the
spectacle to make a statement about national values and
geographical reach. As Mapstone hints, the burning of houses
was indeed a practice in the feuding Highlands, yet James’s
explanation glosses over this aspect of the practice,
distancing “our hieland men” from Mair’s primitive and
uncivilised Scots. His use of the possessive pronoun indicates
national inclusion and a pride in what Buchanan later
described as Highland “rustic simplicity [and] stoic ethics”,
the Highlanders’ sense of natural entitlement to the landscape
precluding the need to establish possession through the
erection of permanent dwellings. This ownership of the
Scottish landscape is shared by the monarch and the
highlanders, figuring the type of “republican monarchy” that
Buchanan envisaged for Scotland, and James clearly indicates
his approval of the practice, which as Mapstone points out,
consolidates “the generous splendour involved in the royal
sojourn”.38
Returning to Stirling in 1566, the fact that it is the
Highland men who throw the fireworks, igniting the fort into
pyrotechnical magnificence takes on a much deeper
significance. The Moors and landsknechts do not have this
function and presumably were engaged in more general mock
fighting. Certainly, a fort is not exactly the same as a
Highland encampment, yet the Stuart crown under Mary continued
her father’s disassociation of “our hieland men” from Mair’s
“wild Scots”, and so precisely did not show them in
32
aggressive, attacking mode, but rather chose to present their
deep seated culture and civic values for approval from a
European audience. This policy of national inclusion was
integral to Stuart imperial policy, an expansion of boundaries
that went as far as the Orkney and Shetland islands. The
triumph’s re-enactment of Highland tradition and practice for
an international audience elucidates why there was no clear
delineation of victors and losers, defenders and attackers.
The mock fighting must have provided cover for the Highlanders
as they were preparing to fire the fort, a piece of theatre
business to flesh out the spectacle as a whole. Unfortunately,
we do not possess any record of the spectators’ reaction to
this scene, but clearly the kind of wonder expressed by the
papal ambassador in 1529 was aimed at. The firing of the mock
fort at Stirling did not demonize highlanders to demonstrate
the Stuart Crown’s might, it was rather the presentation of a
cohesive Scottish culture on an international stage,
exhibiting the rustic and stoic values championed by Buchanan.
Scotland might be “the erse of the warld” but its landscape
and climate bred a native hardiness and nobility to be
admired, attributes which readily translated into military
prowess, with men who were physically tough and skilled in the
military arts.
Taken together the component parts of the triumph form a
statement of national status and imperial aspiration.
Throughout her short reign Mary deployed the rhetoric and
ritual of all kinds of royal festive performance and
entertainment to further her policy objectives in the domestic
33
and foreign spheres. She presented herself as a Scottish
bourgeois wife to her subjects in the unprecedented Hocking
entertainment that she initiated, thereby countering Knox’s
characterisation of her as a pernicious foreign influence, and
she staged a Renaissance festival on the grandest scale to
stake a claim for Scotland’s imperial ambition. Mary’s
determination to follow the Roman Catholic rites of baptism
despite strong opposition, and her careful inclusion of
Protestant supporters in prominent serving roles during the
subsequent feast was a ritualised manifestation of her vision
of Scotland as a Roman Catholic nation which nevertheless
included those of the Reformed faith in its government. This
is the same policy of inclusion that dictated the presentation
of Highlanders in the firework display and encompassed
Orcadian Nereids and subservient Indians from the New World in
Buchanan’s mask. Mary’s determination to maintain Scotland’s
expanding boundaries, together with her genealogical
inheritance, was the foundation of her claim to the English
crown, an ambition vigorously resisted by Elizabeth, but
eventually realised by the accession of Mary’s son James in
1603.
34
1Notes and references
Orgel, S. The Jonsonian Masque, New York & London, 1969; Orgel, S and Strong, R. Inigo Jones and the Theatre of the Stuart Court, Los Angeles: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973; for analysis of factionalism and historical contingency in masque see Butler, M. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 and Bevington, D., and Holbrook, P. The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. The zenith of the masque in Britain is generally regarded as that presided over by James VI/I at the court in Whitehall in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. This early fusion of dance, operaand drama was originated by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. In this format the forces of chaos are quelled by the harmony bestowed by themonarch, although more recently scholars have viewed these staged effects as divided by factionalism and more open ended than was previously thought. The masque grew out of earlier medieval mumming and masking, where a dumb show was performed, with a magnificent entry, usually signifying specific philosophical or political viewpoints. Henry VIII exploited the political subtext in mask in this way, as did the Stuart monarchs Mary Queen of Scots and James VI.2 In his preface to The Masque of Queens, Jonson says ‘her majesty ... had commanded me to think on some dance or show that might precede hers, and have the place of a foil or false masque’, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols, eds Bevington, D, Martin Butler and Donaldson, I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, v, 322.3Brown, Keith M. “Reformation to Union, 1560-1707”, in Houston, R.A.and Knox, W.W.J. eds The New Penguin History of Scotland, from the earliest times to the present day, London: Penguin, 2001, 193.4 Carpenter, S. “Performing Diplomacies: The 1560s Court Entertainments of Mary Queen of Scots”, The Scottish Historical Review, LXXXII, 2, 214 (Oct 2005) 194-225, 217.5 Carpenter, 2005, 218.6 Nearly forty years later Queen Anne chose to perform in The Masque of Blackness (1605) when pregnant, in a costume transgressing colour rather than gender boundaries. In their actions these Queens exploited mask/masque as a vehicle for self-assertion in a courtly setting. On sword dancing as a masculine pastime see Barbara
Ravelhoffer, The Early Stuart Masque. Dance, Costume and Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 221.7 Richardson, G. Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and CharlesV, London and New York: Arnold, 2002.8 Carpenter, S and Twycross, M. Masks and Masking in Mediaeval and Early Tudor England, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 151.9 Ravelhoffer, 2006, 79-82.10 The Pageants, Progresses, and Entertainments of Elizabeth I, eds Archer, Goldring and Knight, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 2-3.11 Chambers, E.K. The Elizabethan Stage, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923, 1, 142, 154. Archer, Goldring and Knight, 2007, “Introduction”.12 Calendar of State Papers Scotland, ii, 148; quoted by Carpenter, 2005, 215.13 The authoritative work by Anna Jean Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, B.Blom, 1927 does not mention hocking in Scotland, neither do more recent scholars such as Sarah Carpenter, 2005 and 2002 and Sally Maclean, 1996, cited above and below. 14 Maclean, S. “The Festivities of Hocktide: A New Look at the Evidence”, in Twycross, M, ed. Festive Drama, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer,1996, 49-62, 235; also see the entry for Hocktide in Hutton, R. Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996.15 Knox, J. The History of the Reformation in Scotland, V vols, Edinburgh, 1644, IV, 237, 316, 318; Mill, 1927, 12, 27.16 Knox, IV, 1644, 351.17 Knox, IV, 1644, 327.18 Knox, IV, 1644, 329.19 Knox, IV, 1644, 374.20 Lynch, M. “Queen Mary’s Triumph: the Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566”, The Scottish Historical Review, 69, 187, 1, (Apr 1990), 1-21, 9.21 Fleming, M. “An Unequal Correspondence: Epistolary and Poetic Exchanges between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth of England”, in Dunnigan, S., Harker, C. Marie and Newlyn, Evelyn, S., eds, Women andthe Feminine in Medieval and Early Modern Scottish Writing, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 106, 109.22 Lynch, 1990, 10.23 Knox, V, 1644, 437.24 Lynch, 1990, 10; Peter Davison, “The Entry of Mary Stewart into Edinburgh, 1561, and other ambiguities”, Renaissance Studies, 9, 4, (Dec 1995), 416-425.25 Knox, V, 1644, 437.
26 Knox tells that the Earl of Bedford, “began to say merrily to her [the Queen], amongst other talking, madame, I rejoice greatly at thistime, seeing your Majestie hath here to serve you so many noblemen, especially twelve Earles, whereof two only assist at the Baptisme to the superstition of Popery. At the which saying the Queen kept good countenance”,Knox, IV, 1644, 383.27 A Diurnall of Remarkarble Occurents that Have passed Within the Country of Scotland Since the Death of King James the Fourth Till the Year MDLXXV, 2 vols, ed. Tomson, T., Edinburgh, 1833, 1, 104.28 The island of Hoy is part of the Orkney archipelago, and is very hilly compared with the mainland which is rather flatter. It is probable that Buchanan was thinking about Hoy when he wrote the mask.29Armitage, D. “Making the Empire British: Scotland in the Atlantic World, 1542-1707”, Past and Present, 155, 1, (1997), 34-63, 37.30 Buchanan, G. The Political Poetry, eds McGinnis, P.J. and Williamson, Arthur, H., Edinburgh: The Scottish History Society, 1995, 62.31 Williamson, Arthur, H. “Scots, Indians and Empire: The Scottish Politics of Civilisation 1519-1609”, Past and Present, 150, 1, (1996), 46-83.32 Williamson, 1996, 69.33 Carpenter, S. 2005, 219-221; Bath, M. “Anglici Caudati: Courtly Celebration and National Insult in the Stirling 1566 Royal Baptism”, Le Livre Demeure: Studies in Book History in Honour of Alison Saunders, Geneva, 2011, 183-194, 185.34 Mill, 1927, 340.35 Mill, 1927, 340.36 Mapstone, S. “Prologue”, in Houwen, J.R., Macdonald, A.A., and Mapstone, S. eds, A Palace in the Wild: Essays of Vernacular Culture and Humanism, Leuwen: Peeters Publishers, 2000, vii, vii.37 Mapstone, 2000, xiii.38 Mapstone, 2000, ix.