[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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.