Roger A. Mason, University of St Andrews
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[1] The term common weal – Older Scots commoun wele / weil – is so ubiquitous in sixteenth-century Scottish political and literary discourse that it is easy to take it for granted without giving much thought to its range of meanings and the broader semantic fields in which it occurs. Indeed, its ubiquity and apparent banality may explain why it has never attracted critical attention and never been subject to sustained analysis. Such an exercise, however, brings into focus the critical role it played in articulating Scottish self-understanding in an era marked by acute religious tensions as well as political upheaval. The primary meaning of the term is, of course, the ‘common good’ or ‘public welfare’, but it developed a secondary meaning, which according to older editions of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was ‘more esp. Scotch’, of ‘the whole body of the people, a body politic; a state, community’. The latest version of the OED, updated in June 2021, reverses this order, so its primary meaning is now said to be ‘the people of a nation, state, etc, as a whole; a state, nation, or independent community, esp. viewed as an entity in which the whole population has a voice or interest’; while its secondary meaning is ‘Common well-being; esp. the general good, welfare, or prosperity of a community or country as a whole’. No explanation is given for this reversal, or for the editing out of the suggestion that in its now first sense it was a term of particular significance in sixteenth-century Scotland. In fact, as will become clear, the earlier OED entry is more sensitive to its usage as it developed over time and, while its earliest occurrences are in fifteenth-century English sources, the highly distinctive role it came to play in the political vocabulary of sixteenth-century Scots is well worth more detailed investigation (OED: commonweal, n.; commonwealth, n.; DOST: commoune wele; commoun welth).
[2] Common weal, and more especially its cognate commonwealth has, of course, a third meaning of ‘a republic or democratic state’, now obsolete according to the OED, but long associated with the English republican regime established by Oliver Cromwell following the execution of Charles I in 1649 (OED: commonwealth, 3a-b). This overtly anti-monarchical gloss on the term must not be allowed to colour our understanding of its earlier usages, where kingship and the common weal(th), far from being at odds or incompatible, were rather two sides of the same coin. Medieval ideas of the ‘common good’ were profoundly shaped by Aristotle, whose definition of kingship and tyranny turned on a ruler’s dedication (or otherwise) to the bonum commune. Among Christian humanists of the early sixteenth century, however, notably Erasmus and his many acolytes, this received view was given a powerful patriotic and reforming spin that owed much to the sense of civic duty extolled by Roman republican writers such as Livy and particularly Cicero. This was as true in Scotland as it was elsewhere. John Watts has drawn attention to these early developments in England (Watts: 2011), while a group of historians led by Mark Knights has identified commonwealth as a ‘keyword’ in the political lexicon of early modern Anglophones more generally (Knights: 2010 and 2011). What follows complements these studies by offering a comparative Scottish perspective on the development of the idea across the sixteenth century. More specifically, it begins by examining the political and literary contexts in which the term common weal first appeared in Scottish discourse and the range of meanings it acquired in texts such as John Bellenden’s vernacular Scots translation of Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia (1527). It then goes on to examine the ways in which it was deployed in the 1540s in defence of Scottish independence both in contemporary correspondence and in more extended and reflective form in The Complaynt of Scotland (1550). Next, it explores what is a uniquely Scottish personification of the idea – the figure of John the Common Weal – as it was developed primarily in the writings of the poet and courtier Sir David Lindsay of the Mount. Finally, it turns to discuss how, in the context of the Reformation and its aftermath, writers like George Buchanan argued that the welfare of the people (salus populi) must take precedence over loyalty to a wicked king (or queen); and how the Ciceronian idea of duty to the common weal – an idea Buchanan shared with his most celebrated pupil, James VI – began to be subverted by a more sceptical Tacitean understanding of realpolitik.
I Common profit and common weal
[3] Online searches make finding usages of a term like common weal a great deal easier than in the pre-digital age. Nevertheless, it is still made complicated by a range of spellings – the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue lists sixteen variants of common and no less than twenty-four of weal – and the fact that one is dealing with a compound or phrase rather than a single word. That said, one can assert with confidence that it occurs only once in the writings of William Dunbar, once again in those of Gavin Douglas, and not at all in the poems of Robert Henryson (Dunbar 1998: 1.72; Douglas 2020: 2.155). Its major literary debut is in the 1520s where, as we will see, it features largely and in remarkably well-developed form in the poetry of Lindsay. A search of the online Records of the Parliaments of Scotland (RPS) confirms the impression that it is from the 1520s onwards that common weal emerges as a significant addition to the Scottish political vocabulary in formulations such as the ‘commoun weill of the realm’, ‘the commoune wele of our soverane lord and his realme’, ‘prejudice to the common wele of the realme’, and ‘offence aganis the commoune wele’ (RPS: A1516/11/1; 1524/11/11; 1525/2/6; 1525/7/52). In all, it is used some twenty-four times in the parliamentary records of James V’s reign compared to at most three times in those of James IV. The earliest occurrence, however, is in the parliamentary record of December 1482, in the context of James III attempting to recover his authority following the debacle at Lauder Bridge, and sending commissioners to Edward IV to persuade him to uphold the prior agreement that Prince James – the future James IV – be married to Edward’s daughter Cecily ‘for the plesure of God and commone wele of baith the realmes’ (1482/12/75). Given the greater currency of the term in late fifteenth-century England, its usage here may reflect English influence on the language of diplomatic negotiations between the two countries.[i] Certainly, this is something of an outlier. While there is a reference to ‘the commoun wele and profit of his [the king’s] lieges’ in 1489, the only other occurrence in James IV’s reign is in a statute of 1504 about the slaughter of red fish (salmon) out of season ‘to the grete heirschip of the cuntre and distructioune of the commoune wele’ (1489/7/9; A1504/3/117).
[4] These usages are straightforward enough in expressing concern for the welfare of the whole community, though one can already see how the term might come to denote the community per se. In its literal sense, however, common weal joined, though it did not supplant, other formulae such as, most notably, ‘common profit’, but also ‘common good’ and ‘common use / utility’, all of them vernacular variations of the Latin bonum commune or, as earlier statutes sometimes have it, ‘ad utilitatem communem’ or even ‘utilitatem reipublice’ (RPS: 1385/4/3; 1398/1). The equivalence of res publica with common weal is something to which we must return. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that the temporal trajectory evident in the parliamentary records, where it is not until the 1520s that common weal is used with any frequency, is borne out by the Aberdeen burgh records (ARO). Given the potential economic resonances of common weal, and more obviously its cognate commonwealth, one might expect it to feature more prominently in the vocabulary of merchants and burgesses. But this is not reflected in the Aberdeen records where, as with RPS, common good, common profit and common utility abound in the fifteenth century, but it is not until 1495 that one finds the first usage of common weal and then in a letter from James IV demanding money from the burgh ‘for expedicion of gret materis concerning ws the commone weile of our Realme’ (ARO: 7-0623-01). Further references to the ‘common weile of his [the king’s] realme’ occur in 1498, though the same year also witnessed the first references to the ‘commone weile of the toun’ and the ‘common wele of the haill burghe’ (ARO: 7-0709-02; 7-0893-02). However, this novel formulation did not immediately displace earlier usages such as common profit but is found rather in complex compounds like the 1507 ‘commone weile and profit of the tone’ and the even more convoluted 1508 ‘commone profit weill and gud reull of this burgh’ (ARO: 8-0059-01; 1502-01-01).[ii]
[5] In none of these record sources is the common weal set in opposition to individual self-interest, though invariably this may be assumed to be implicit in its use. Literary sources are much more forthcoming on this score. Dunbar, for example, in his poem, Quhy will ȝe, merchants of renoun, tells the merchants of Edinburgh that: ‘Singular proffeit so dois ȝow blind, / The common proffeit gois behind’ (Dunbar 1998: 1.176). This juxtaposition, with all its didactic implications, is characteristic of the moralizing kingship literature that flourished in late medieval Scotland. Sir Gilbert Haye, writing in the 1450s, opened his Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis with the argument that the worst form of kingship is when a prince enriches himself at the expense of his subjects, ‘for than gais singulere prouffit before the common prouffit’ (Haye 1901-14: 2.80). Likewise, and even more forcefully, in his Buke of the Order of Knychthede, he argued that it was ‘for the commoun profit [that] knychthede was foundyn, stablyst, and ordanit’: ‘for gude resound gevis, that all princis, lordis, and knychtis specialy, suld be mare curious of the commoun prouffit, na of their awin proper gudis’ (2.65). Pursuing and upholding the bonum commune was a fundamental aspect of the contemporary language of kingship, traceable to Aristotle’s Politics (Book V.10), and Aristotle’s contrast between a public-spirited king and a self-interested tyrant was deeply embedded in later medieval political thought (Dunbabin 1988; Kempshall 1999). The bonum commune was thus at the heart of a semantic field populated by a range of kingly attributes – notably the cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude – and dominated by issues of good counsel. The vernacular verse De Regimine Principum (also known as The Harp), a lengthy reflection on royal justice and the need for wise counsel that dates from the 1470s, exhorts the king to ‘exclud al affeccioune singular, / And to the common profit ever tak heid’ (LP 1877-80: 2.395).[iii] Likewise, the final book of the scholastic theologian John Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome, completed in 1490, includes an extended commentary on precisely the same virtues and similarly describes a tyrant as one who ‘lufis his self and nocht the commoune proffit’ (Ireland 1990: 129).
[6] Comparable exhortations on the theme of princely and noble virtue are a feature of the chronicle tradition. Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon, as Sally Mapstone has shown, is a particularly rich source of moralizing on the essential attributes of kingship (Mapstone 1998; Mapstone 1986). Composed in the 1440s, and heavily influenced by Bower’s own experience as a counsellor to James I, it devotes several chapters to enumerating the virtues required of a king and the perils of evil counsel. Of counsellors Bower warned that those who ‘are zealous only for their own personal and private gain and not for the common good (pro bono communi) … become the worst of enemies to the king and to the state as a whole (eciam toti rei publice pessimi inimici)’ (Bower, 1987-98: 5.305). Not surprisingly, these same themes also feature in the reworking of Bower, dating from c.1460, known as the Liber Pluscardensis. If anything, its author places still greater emphasis than does Bower on bonum commune. Felix Skene’s nineteenth-century translation often renders this as common weal, though common profit would be more appropriate to the mid-fifteenth century, while the author’s frequent use of res publica is likewise somewhat anachronistically translated as ‘state’. But this does not really capture what is intended when the author, for example, reflects on William Wallace being betrayed by treacherous Scottish nobles and characterizes his death as ‘the shipwreck of the clergy, the ruin of the people (populi), the downfall of the kingdom (regni) and destruction of the state (rei publicae)’ (LP 1877-80: 1.157 Latin; 2.121 English).[iv] Here res publica surely has a meaning much closer to the common good / profit / weal rather than the very modern sounding ‘state’. A few lines earlier the author refers to Wallace’s great deeds ‘pro re publica et libertate regni’, rendered by Skene as ‘the interests of the state and the independence of the crown’, but more appropriately translated as ‘the common good and liberty of the realm’, a formulation which, as we will see in a moment, achieved wide currency in the sixteenth century.
[7] Before leaving these fifteenth-century chronicles, it is worth bringing into focus another critical juxtaposition that, closely linked to the trope of common versus singular profit, similarly reverberates throughout these texts: that is, libertas versus subiectio, liberty versus subjection, ‘freedom’ versus ‘thirldom’. The narrative of Scotland’s past found in Bower and drawing on John of Fordun and earlier less easily identified sources was constructed in terms of the need to demonstrate the kingdom’s freedom from English lordship (Broun 2007; Terrell 2021). This in turn spilled over into vernacular literature, famously in John Barbour’s Bruce, but equally in a host of other fifteenth-century texts such as Andrew Wyntoun’s verse chronicle, Hary’s Wallace and even many of the Arthurian romances (Goldstein 1993; Purdie and Royan 2005). This opens up a second semantic field, one that valorizes martial virtues such as ‘manheid’, ‘prowess’ and ‘worschip’ and where the ethos of the chivalric code is put to work in the cause of freedom (Stevenson 2006: ch. 6). However, while to some extent distinct from the semantic field discussed above in relation to the political or ‘civic’ virtues prized in kings and their counsellors, there is nevertheless considerable overlap. Such qualities as loyalty, faithfulness and steadfastness – perhaps even prudence or wisdom – are common to both, while both might also be said to have at their heart the common good – the welfare and security – of an independent Scottish kingdom.
[8] These semantic fields, the chivalric and the civic, become all but indistinguishable in Hector Boece’s Scotorum Historia of 1527 and, still more pertinently for present purposes, in the vernacular Scots translation done by John Bellenden in the 1530s. Boece’s narrative, as much a rhetorical exercise as a work of historical inquiry, is in essence a celebration of the antiquity and continuity of an independent Scottish kingdom that has never been subject to foreign conquest (Royan 1996). In Boece’s view, the key to this, and to the on-going freedom (libertas) of the realm, was a combination of the martial virtue of the chivalric code and a commitment to a classical ideal of the public good: ‘pro communi patrie & libertate’ as he put it on one occasion (Boece 1527: f. lxiiv). As a phrase bonum commune does not feature with any prominence in the Historia, but one does quite frequently find respublica being used in phraseology such as ‘ad Scotorum reipublicae utilitatem’, ‘pro patria & reipublicae quiete’ and ‘reipublicae salus’ (ff. cv; xxviiiv; xviir). Much more frequent, however, are variations on salus publica – literally either public welfare or public security, but equally the common good – and phrases such as ‘pro publica salute’, ‘ad publicam salutem’ and ‘in publicam Scotorum salutem’ are commonplace (ff. clxxiiiv; cxliv; ccviiiv).
[9] As is well known, Boece had studied in Paris in the 1490s at the same college (Montaigu) as Erasmus and, if never at the cutting edge of humanist studies, his approach to the Scottish past was nonetheless imbued with an understanding of public duty that owed much to the Roman republican tradition epitomized by Cicero as well as to Erasmus’s Christian humanist rebooting of conventional Aristotelian notions of kingship and tyranny (Royan 2004). It was wholly appropriate, therefore, that Boece’s translator, John Bellenden, should end his vernacular Scots version, eventually published as The Hystory and Croniklis of Scotland, with a letter to James V which begins by invoking Erasmus’s hugely influential mirror-for-princes manual, the Institutio Principis Christiani (1516) (Bellenden 1821: 2.513-17).[v] Equally, given the extent to which Boece modelled his view of Scotland’s remote prehistory on Livy’s account of republican Rome, it was entirely fitting that Bellenden was translating the early book of Livy at around the same time – the late 1520s and early 1530s – that he was working on Boece’s Historia (Rutledge 2017; Philo 2017; Royan 1998). Given the looseness of his translation, it would prove a thankless task to trace how he rendered Boece’s precise phraseology into Scots, but what is striking about his version is the overwhelming emphasis he places on the common weal. At a minimum count, it occurs some 150 times in the Hystory and Croniklis and was clearly Bellenden’s go-to term for Boece’s salus publica while also doubling for the more ambiguous res publica. As often as not Bellenden uses it in the primary sense of the common weal or common good of the realm, but he also frequently employs it in ways that link it to the defence of the realm and the ‘commoun weill and liberte’ of the kingdom (e.g., Bellenden 1821: 1.237; 2. 363 and 440).[vi] Not surprisingly, moreover, the term can equally denote the community tout court. Thus he writes of a common weal being governed, of a common weal perishing for lack of a head, and of a monarch importing clerics and craftsmen to ornament his common weal (2.224, 150–1, 481 respectively). Usually, common weal, though variously spelled, is two words rather than one, but the distinction between the welfare of the community and the community whose welfare is at issue is often wholly elided. By the 1530s the common weal had emerged as a synonym for realm or kingdom, but one that was redolent of commitment to the welfare and security of all the king’s subjects.
II Common weal and liberty
[10] This is true also of England in the late 1520s and 1530s where, not least in the context of the Henrician break with Rome, the idea of the common weal assumed both patriotic and reforming connotations (Burgess 2009: 1–27; Watts 2011). Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, dating from c. 1530, though not published until the nineteenth century, offers a fascinating point of comparison. An extended disquisition on the nature of ‘a veray & true commyn wele’, Starkey’s understanding of the term encompasses conventional notions of the bonum commune but is informed by his profound knowledge of Italian humanism, the result of over a decade of study in Padua (Starkey 1989; Meyer 1989). His work is thus characterized not just by a strong Ciceronian sense of public duty, but also by unusually detailed discussions of such issues as the best form of monarchy (the benefits of a mixed constitution and how to hold a tyrannical ruler in check), the attributes of a good counsellor, the nature of true nobility, and how to promote the social and economic welfare of all members of the community. In pursuing these themes, Starkey began to set out the kind of reforming agenda that, with a pronounced Protestant inflection, would preoccupy the so-called ‘commonwealth’ writers of the 1540s and early 1550s. While nothing comparable to Starkey’s work was written in contemporary Scotland, Bellenden and (as we will see) both Lindsay and the author of the Complaynt of Scotland (1550) were all profoundly concerned with the reformation of morals and mores, secular as well as religious, and the need to transform and reinvigorate the Scottish common weal.
[11] For Scots, however, especially after the death of James V in 1542, and the ensuing conflict for control of Scotland now known as the Rough Wooing, reform of the common weal became inextricably bound up with its survival (Merriman 2000). Opposition to Henry VIII’s efforts to take control of Scotland through the marriage of his young son, Prince Edward, to the infant Mary Queen of Scots was invariably articulated in terms of the defence of the freedom and liberties of the realm. Both the Treaties of Greenwich of 1543, by which the Scots agreed to such a marriage, and the Treaty of Haddington of 1548, by which they agreed instead to Mary’s betrothal to the French Dauphin, dwell at length on the kingdom’s historic independence and the need to keep it in ‘libertie and freedom’ (Source Book 1952–54: 2.123–4 and 135–6). This terminology clearly resonated in public discourse as high-ranking individuals went out of their way to align themselves with the defence of Scottish autonomy. The Regent Arran, for example, repeatedly assured Henry VIII that he would do everything to aid the English king’s cause ‘not offending the liberty and freedom of this realm’, while the earls of Argyll and Moray made similar assurances ‘not offending their duty of allegiance unto their sovereign lady, and the liberty and freedom of the realm’ (Hamilton Papers 1890–92: 1. no. 356; Sadler Papers 1809: 1.126, 169). Insofar as these protestations drew on the trope of libertas and the associated semantic fields played on by Boece and Bellenden, it is hardly surprising that the common weal also played a prominent role in expressing the Scots’ resistance to English aggression.
[12] Among the first to exploit the political purchase offered by the idea of the common weal was Cardinal David Beaton, the leader of the opposition to the Treaties of Greenwich, who managed to turn the Regent Arran against Henry VIII in September 1543 and orchestrate the Scottish parliament’s formal renunciation of the treaty three months later. According to the English agent, Sir Ralph Sadler, the cardinal and his party were willing to support Henry VIII ‘in all things reasonable standing with the honour and suretie of their sovereyng ladie and thonour lybertie and common wealthe of her realm’. ‘Which words of qualification’, he added, ‘they used always; but what exposicion they will make of the same I cannot tell’ (Hamilton Papers 1890–92: 2.no. 38; see also 1.no. 425). In fact, the ‘exposicion’ was not far to seek. On 24 July 1543, Beaton and many of his most prominent allies had put their names to the Linlithgow Bond – a pledge of mutual support – the text of which Sadler had himself conveyed to Henry VIII and which gives a clear indication of how the cardinal’s commitment to the common weal was to be construed. Thus it begins with the assurance that its signatories are ‘faythfull and trew subjects to the quenis grace our sowern lady, haiffand zele to justice and the just administracion and exercision therof, and als to the common weill of this realme and liberte and honour of the samyn’. It then goes on to stress how, since the death of James V, ‘thar is no maner of pollesy nor justice usit nor exercist within this realm’ and how the ‘gret besynes’ between Scotland and England is being handled by ‘prevat and suspek personis, haiffand na concedirasyon of the common weille, but to thar awn particular profyt’. As a result, it concludes, Scotland is in danger of subjection to ‘our auld enymyis of Ingland’ and it was therefore incumbent on all the queen’s subjects to ‘convene and assist all to gydder … in all and syndry matteris and affairis concernyng the common wele and lybertie of this realme’ (Hamilton Papers 1890–92: 1. no. 446).[vii]
[13] Whether or not such protestations were sincere is beside the present point. What is important is that this was the terminology in which political actors of all stripes thought best to couch and legitimize their behaviour. Invoking the common weal and liberty (or, with a nod towards law and custom, liberties) of the realm, in concert with professing loyal allegiance to the sovereign, was the rhetorical strategy believed most likely to offer an effective justification of their actions. It is telling that the English privy council advised Beaton’s opponents to issue a proclamation arguing that the cardinal and his friends were traitors intent on delivering the queen and her kingdom into French hands, while they themselves were committed only to ‘the defence of their yong maistres person and the preservacion of the common welth of the realme’ (Hamilton Papers 1890–92: 2. no. 75). On the opposing side, in the face of an English invasion in 1544, many border lairds swore allegiance to the queen and her mother Mary of Guise in identical terms. Walter Kerr of Cessford, for example, assured Guise that he would die ‘ane trewe Scottis man’ and fight ‘for defens and weill of the realme’, while Walter Scott of Buccleuch pledged his support in all that was done ‘conserning the commonweltht and liberte of this realm’ (Lorraine Correspondence 1927: 84–5, 86–7). Similar pledges of loyalty continued to be made throughout the Rough Wooing. Just as in 1543 the earl of Moray wrote to Guise expressing his loyalty and willingness to defend ‘the weill of this realme and liberte’, so in 1547 Lord Methven wrote of how one of her erstwhile opponents was now willing to ‘do his haill power to the wele of our soverane lady and the common weill of this realm’ (Lorraine Correspondence 1927: 50, 234).
[14] Such a range of examples, and more could be cited, indicates how quickly and effectively the common weal had become embedded in Scottish political discourse as well as its clear association with the defence of the realm. This is more fully illustrated by one of the few contemporary Scottish texts (perhaps the only one) in which the idea of the common weal is subject to reflective analysis. That is, the Complaynt of Scotland, assumed to have been composed by Robert Wedderburn, and known only through the edition printed in Paris c. 1550 (Wedderburn 1979; Mason 2020; Burns 1996: 112–7). Written primarily as a response to the English invasion and occupation of Scotland in the late 1540s, it exhorts the beleaguered Scots to take up arms in defence of their common weal. Intriguingly, however, Wedderburn uses a personification of Scotland, Dame Scotia, as a mouthpiece for addressing the shortcomings of her three children – the three estates of the realm. Here he is drawing on and extensively re-working, though without ever acknowledging the fact, the French tract Le Qudrilogue Invectif of Alain Chartier, written in 1422 in an attempt to rally the French in the wake of their defeat at the hands of the English at Agincourt in 1415. Chartier’s work is structured in terms of a personified Dame France addressing her children – the three estates – and is notable for its emphasis on ‘le bien publique’ and the constant refrain that they must fight for ‘le salut et liberté publique’. Wedderburn’s Complaynt elaborates on this theme at length, reinforcing it with repeated references to Cicero – cited more than thirty times – and what might be described as a Ciceronian sense of responsibility for and to the common weal (Mason 2020: 138–9).
[15] In some ways, this is expressed in conventional enough terms. For example, Wedderburn has Dame Scotia end her opening address to her sons by exhorting them to ‘detest avarese, ambition and traison’ and to place ‘the deffens of ȝour comont veil’ above the pursuit of ‘ȝour particular veil’. But that this juxtaposition was more than a hackneyed cliché for Wedderburn is borne out by the fuller rationale for this imperative that he attributes to Dame Scotia:
Quhen ȝour particular veil is spulȝeit or hurt be ȝour enemies it may be remedit be ȝour comont veil. Ande in opposite, gyf ȝour comont veil be distroyt than it sal neuyr be remedit be ȝour particular veil, for ȝour particular veil is bot ane accessor of ȝour comont veil and the accessor followis the natur of the principal, accessorium sequitur naturam sui principalis (88).
The Latin tag has its origins in Roman property law but is the first entry in contemporary alphabetical compendia of legal maxims known as Brocardica Iuris, frequently printed throughout the sixteenth century, and in this instance giving the idea of the common weal some sort of quasi-legal standing. Moreover, for Wedderburn, the common weal as public good here takes on the connotations of the common weal as community or kingdom and was evidently not just more important than any of the individuals who composed it but imposed on those individuals the highest duty of its defence. Indeed, following Cicero, he elevated the defence of the common weal to the status of a natural law. Explicitly citing Cicero, Dame Scotia reminds her sons that ‘natur hes oblist ȝou, til avance the salute and deffens of ȝour public veil’ and that those who damage ‘the public veil … deserve as grite reproche as tha hed sellit traisonablye the realme to there enemeis’ (57).
[16] As with the writers previously discussed, Wedderburn’s focus is primarily on maintaining Scottish integrity – defending the realm – in the face of English military aggression. Scotland was certainly enduring severe economic and social consequences that impacted on the welfare of the people and he has interesting things to say about the parlous state of the poor labourers of the ground as well as discussing at length the related issue of the nature of true nobility (Mason 2020: 143–7). Yet there is nothing comparable in Wedderburn to the much more detailed critiques of English social and economic policy that were characteristic of radical Protestant preachers in Edward VI’s reign, many of whom were outspoken in their denunciations of rapacious landowners and whose sermons and tracts poured from the press between 1547 and 1553. Among the most prominent and prolific of these polemicists was Robert Crowley who, among his many other writings, published in 1550 successive new editions of Piers Plowman as part of his reforming agenda (Wood 2007: 30–8). There is no direct Scottish equivalent of these English ‘commonwealth men’, but in Sir David Lindsay there is a Scottish poet and dramatist whose commitment to the common weal is in some respects quite similar.[viii]
III John the Common Weal
[17] Lindsay’s great dramatic work, The Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, was first performed in 1552, though it had presumably been gestating for some time before then, even if one discounts any direct or substantial link to the Interlude performed before James V and his court at Linlithgow on Twelfth Night 1540 (Lindsay 1989: x–xii). In any event, his preoccupation with the common weal was of long standing – the flipside of his concern with kingship and good governance – and may well have arisen from his close relationship with James V during the years of the king’s minority (Hadley Williams 1996). Very little is known of Lindsay’s education and, while his writings could hardly be classified as humanist in form or inspiration, he was undoubtedly well read and certainly shared with Boece and Bellenden a deep commitment to the reform of Scottish morals and mores (Edington 1994). This is clearly apparent in his first surviving poem, The Dreme of Schir David Lyndsay, usually dated to 1528, when the sixteen-year-old James escaped confinement and began to assert his personal authority, though Carol Edington has plausibly argued for the slightly earlier date of 1526 (Edington 1994: 24; for the full text, Lindsay 2000: 1–40). Either way, it was written at a time when the term common weal was becoming more prominent in public discourse, when Boece’s Historia first became available, and when Bellenden – whose poetry is highly commended by Lindsay – began work on his vernacular translations of both Boece and Livy.[ix]
[18] Somewhat surprisingly, Lindsay’s Dreme is one of the least studied of his poems, though it is there that the personification of bonum commune, John the Common Weal, makes his literary debut, a creative leap by Lindsay that deserves more credit than it has hitherto received.[x] Perhaps its relative neglect is due to the fact that much of the poem is a conventional and prolix dream vision (or voyage) that sees the narrator, guided by Dame Remembrance, embark on a scholarly tour of the cosmos – hell, heaven, and earth – before eventually coming to focus on Scotland which, despite being ‘of nature gude and fair’, has fallen into a state of poverty for want of ‘justice, polycie and peace’ and whose rulers have ‘small ee unto the comoun weill, / Bot to thare singular proffect everilk deill’ (Lindsay 2000: 29–33, ‘Of the realme of Scotland’). At this point, however, presumably reflecting on the self-interested behaviour of the nobility during the king’s minority, the narrator catches sight of the fleeing figure of ‘a boustious berne … Quhose rayment wes all raggit, revin and rent’ and who is introduced as ‘Jhone the Comoun Weill’. John in his own voice then utters his ‘complaynt’, detailing the woes that have made him homeless, among Highlanders and Lowlanders, laymen and clerics, all of whom have turned their backs on the common weal. The vices John identifies among them are conventional enough – flattery, deceit, falsehood, sensuality – and in many ways anticipate their dramatization in the Thrie Estaitis, but lurking behind them all is ‘Singulare Proffect’, the self-interested behaviour of every section of Scottish society that has forced John into miserable exile (Lindsay 2000: 33–7 ‘Complaynt of the Comoun Weill of Scotland’).
[19] The poem concludes with an ‘Exhortation to the Kyngis Grace’ that highlights for James V, in terms familiar from the advice literature discussed earlier, the importance of the cardinal virtues, the need to seek and attend to wise counsel and to keep the common good of all his subjects uppermost in his mind (Lindsay 2000: 37–40, ll. 1037-1126). In essence, these are the same lessons that Lindsay sought to inculcate in the series of admonitory poems he addressed to James V in the 1530s and that still preoccupied him some twenty years later when the Thrie Estaitis was first performed. There are, of course, differences, and not just of scale and format. In the Dreme, Lindsay could look forward to moral regeneration through the agency of what John the Common Weal called ‘ane gude auld prudent kyng’ (Lindsay 2000: 36). This was less clearly the case in the 1550s when the monarch was both a woman, Mary Queen of Scots, and resident at the French court. The figure of Rex Humanitas in the Thrie Estaitis is obviously more typological than the king of the Dreme, who can readily be identified with Lindsay’s young tutee and charge (Lindsay 1989: x). A more important difference, however, though perhaps one of degree rather than of kind, is that Lindsay had honed his critique of the morality of the Scottish elite, particularly the clerical estate, and mounted an attack on what he saw as their corruption and moral degeneracy that went well beyond his earlier anti-clerical poems.
[20] It is possible that Lindsay’s thinking was informed by the polemics of the English commonwealth writers mentioned above, though as Edington points out, his approach to socio-economic issues was selective and ‘quirky’ rather than systematic (Edington 1994: 138). And while his swingeing critique of the clergy and championing of a vernacular Bible align him with the evangelical cause, his religious stance remains ambiguous rather than clear-cut (Edington 2000: chs. 8–9; Ryrie 2006: ch. 6; Cratty 2022). What is much clearer, however, is that attempts to construe John the Common Weal in populist terms – as representative of the oppressed commons – are potentially misleading (e.g. Cowan 2008).[xi] The key dramatic moment in the Thrie Estaitis, when John the Common Weal is welcomed into the body of the three estates, is symbolic of nothing more, though nothing less, than the renunciation of ‘singular profit’ in favour of a public-spirited commitment to the bonum commune. While the lords and merchants are quickly persuaded of the need (as the stage direction has it) to ‘imbreasse Johne the Common-weill’, the clergy are much more reluctant to do so. Nevertheless, stripped of his rags and re-dressed in ‘ane gay garmoun’, John eventually takes his place in parliament alongside ‘Gude Counsall with Ladie Veritie’ and presides over the enactment of the legislation deemed essential to the reform of the common weal.[xii] This was not so much the world turned upside down as the kingdom restored to an ideal natural order. Lindsay certainly had a profound concern for the welfare of the common people, represented in the Thrie Estaitis primarily by the Pauper or Pure Man, but that concern should not be over-interpreted. Lindsay was both a courtier and, as Lyon King of Arms, Scotland’s highest heraldic officer, a guardian of aristocratic privilege. In his view, however, with such privilege and status came duty and responsibility. As Edington pointed out, one of the earliest occurrences of the term common weal is in a heraldic manuscript made by Adam Loutfut, Kintyre Pursuivant, in 1494, and probably well known to Lindsay, where it is stressed in terms reminiscent of Gilbert Haye that a knight should be ‘a lover of the comyn weil’ and that ‘the comyn wele is grettar & mair necessary than proper gude and speciale’ (Edington 1994: 121). These were maxims that Lindsay, himself of course a knight, evidently took very much to heart.
[21] Lindsay died in 1555 and was thus spared the turmoil and, one imagines, the acute personal tensions, confessional and political, thrown up by the Reformation rebellion of 1559–60. His writings, however, lived on, appropriated to the Protestant cause, and editions of his works were published in 1568 and 1571 and periodically thereafter.[xiii] That these editions did not include the Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis may explain why the figure of John the Common Weal has much less of an afterlife than one might expect. In fact, there appears to be only one further instance of his incarnation, in a poem printed in St Andrews in 1572 by Robert Lekprevik, entitled The Lamentatioun of Lady Scotland (Satirical Poems 1891–93: 1.227–39). This is one of the many polemical pieces that are such a feature of the civil war that followed Mary’s deposition and flight to England in 1567–68 and was written from a decidedly Protestant and anti-Marian perspective. James Cranstoun, who edited many of these pieces in the Satirical Poems of the Reformation, described it as ‘one of the most tedious in the Collection’ (Satirical Poems 1891–93: 2.154). He may well be right, but its central conceit is of interest here as it has Lady Scotland (perhaps an echo of Wedderburn’s Dame Scotia) being deserted by her husband, ‘deir gude Johne, the Commoun-weill’, leaving her a single mother of the ‘Trew, faithful Children he begat on me’ who can only lament the passing of all ‘Justice and Equitie’. This leads into a lengthy breakdown of the social, religious and political ills that have driven her husband into exile, a social satire that is comparable to Lindsay but adapted to its post-Reformation context, including a lambasting of the failings of the new Protestant clergy as well as those of the country’s colleges and universities. Notably, its author distinguishes clearly between John and the commonalty of Scotland, for it is the behaviour of the commons as well as of lords, ladies, lairds, burgesses, and kirkmen that has ‘chaist away the Commoun-weill’ (Satirical Poems: 1.238).
[22] Although the author of the Lamentation is unknown, it is likely that he was familiar at least with Lindsay’s Dreme if not the Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. But if the figure of John as a personification of the common weal is of vestigial significance in the Reformation era, the idea itself was central to it. In literary terms, for example, William Lauder and particularly Richard Maitland, both of whom probably knew Lindsay but both of whom came to terms with the new Protestant dispensation, evince a similar concern for social justice and the restoration of peace and order. As Joanna Martin has shown, Lauder’s 1556 Compendious and Breue Tractate, Concernyng ye Office and dewtie of Kyngis is redolent of the tradition of advice to princes already discussed and shares both Lindsay’s concern for clerical reform and his broader interest in social justice and the common weal (Martin 2017). The same themes figure prominently in the verse of Richard Maitland, much of it dating from the 1560s and 1570s, though perhaps reflecting his long experience of life as a lawyer and judge (he was born in 1496). Thus his concern for peace and social justice often has an air of world-weary resignation as when he opens a poem with the line ‘How sould our common weill induire?’ and then proceeds to lament the sin and wickedness of great men and common people alike (Maitland Quarto 2015: 109). However, while Maitland’s poetry is thoroughly traditional in its use and understanding of the common weal, there were others in post-Reformation Scotland who were prepared to interpret it in ways that Lindsay and his contemporaries and predecessors had, perhaps wittingly, left unexplored.
IV Kingdoms and commonwealths
[23] During the conflict that brought about the Reformation in Scotland in 1559–60, the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, in a rhetorical move identical to the strategy pursued after 1542, tried desperately to align their cause with the defence of the common weal and liberty of the realm. While initially their propaganda was couched by John Knox himself in religious terms, there was a marked change of emphasis in the latter half of 1559, when Knox was replaced as the Congregation’s secretary by William Maitland of Lethington (Richard Maitland’s son) and the beleaguered insurgents adopted a posture that was as much anti-French as it was anti-Catholic. The details of this have been explored at length elsewhere and need not detain us here (Mason 1983; Burns 1996: ch. 5). What is significant is that defending and promoting the common weal was still seen as the most effective rhetorical strategy for harnessing the support of the wider community. Yet at the same time it began to expose a profound ideological fissure, though one the Congregation repeatedly fudged, between allegiance to the crown and commitment to the common weal. What was to be done when the actions of a king – or queen – were perceived as an existential threat to the kingdom?
[24] Lindsay and his predecessors seem generally to have shied away from this conundrum. While frequently exhorting kings to eschew tyrannical behaviour, they did not normally offer any remedy for when a king did turn into a tyrant (Burns 1996; Mason 1998). The early history of Scotland, as recounted by Boece and Bellenden, in fact offered a range of examples of how vicious kings had in the past been held to account – imprisoned, deposed, exiled, and even executed – by virtuous nobles. Yet for the most part pre-Reformation Scots appear to have avoided confronting the issue of when and how the defence of the common weal might take priority over allegiance to an individual monarch (Mason 2014). If the Reformation brought this political dilemma to the fore, it was the personal rule of Mary, a Catholic queen of an at least nominally Protestant kingdom, that brought it to a head. In a meeting of the General Assembly of the new kirk in 1564 Knox and William Maitland sparred at length over the rights and wrongs of resisting a Catholic – and, by definition, in the eyes of radical Protestants, tyrannical – monarch. But more pertinent here than their arguments was the intervention of the minister John Craig, a former Dominican who claimed to have attended a disputation in Bologna in 1554 where it was concluded that, if rulers break the oaths made to their subjects, they ‘may and aucht to be reformed or deposed be thame be whom thay ar chosin, confirmed or admitted to their office’ (Knox 1846–64: 2.456). Tellingly, when told that his argument was irrelevant because, unlike Bologna, Scotland was a kingdom, not a commonwealth (i.e., a republic), Craig averred that ‘everie kingdom is, or at leist should be ane Commounwelth, albeit that everie Commonwelth be nocht a kingdom’ (Knox 1846–64: 2.458).
[25] Here, clearly, the ambiguities of the Latin res publica are being transferred to the vernacular common weal / commonwealth, while also being given a political spin that located ultimate sovereignty not with the crown but with the community. While such ideas had Scottish precedents, most notably in the writings of the scholastic theologian John Mair, it was Mair’s erstwhile pupil, George Buchanan, who gave them widespread currency, or at least notoriety. The overthrow of Mary in 1567 – a deposition disguised as an abdication – elicited a number of justifications of resistance. The poetry of Robert Sempill, for example, not only brought Boece’s ancient kings into the polemical arena, but often riffed on the nobility’s duty to the common weal in ways that sanctioned resistance to established authority.[xiv] However, it was Buchanan who developed these ideas to their fullest extent. Although not published until 1579, his brief treatise De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus was written in the immediate aftermath of Mary’s deposition, expressly to legitimize the action taken against her (Buchanan 2004). The precise nature of these arguments is less important here than the fact that, in dealing with kingship and tyranny, Buchanan operated within the same semantic field as all those writers already discussed. Admittedly, his thinking was more deeply informed by classical literature, both Greek and Roman, but governance was still conceived of in terms of a ruler’s propensity to virtue or to vice, good counsel was still critical to good kingship and, above all, he saw as ‘sacrosanct and inviolable that Ciceronian maxim: “Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law”’ (Buchanan 2004: 56–7; Cicero De Legibus: 3.3.8).[xv]
[26] For all its political radicalism, then, at the heart of Buchanan’s De Iure Regni, and also his Rerum Scoticarum Historia of 1582, lies a moral economy of vice and virtue that is, in many respects, conservative and backward-looking. Although remembered now as a poet and dramatist, historian, and political theorist, Buchanan was first and foremost a humanist educator and his views were shaped by an Erasmian belief in the power of reason – and hence education – both to tame unruly passions and to discern and promote the common good. His understanding of reason as a masculine faculty and the passions as feminine goes some way towards explaining (and self-justifying) his vicious portrayal of Mary Queen of Scots as weak, fickle and prey to wicked lust (Mason 2000). But it also underlay the severe educational regime that Buchanan imposed on his most illustrious pupil, James VI, who famously complained that he had been forced to ‘speik latin ar I could speik Scots’ and who emerged from the schoolroom as himself a remarkably accomplished Erasmian humanist (Pollnitz 2015: ch. 6; quote 277). Buchanan’s De Iure was dedicated to the young prince with stern admonitions about the perils of flattery and evil company – ‘the fawning foster-mother of the vices’ – while the Historia was intended to provide its dedicatee with ‘faithful monitors from history whose counsel may be useful in your deliberations and their virtues patterns for imitation in active life’ (Buchanan 2004: 2–3; Buchanan 1827: 1.ciii–civ). What Buchanan termed a ‘Stoic king’ (rex Stoicus) was a citizen-king – primus inter pares – committed like every citizen to the welfare of the community as a whole.[xvi]
[27] In some respects, Buchanan can be viewed as articulating the kind of ‘monarchical republicanism’ that Tudor historians, following Patrick Collinson, have argued to be central to Elizabethan political thought.[xvii] A key exponent of this English ‘commonwealth’ tradition was Sir Thomas Smith, whose De Republica Anglorum, written in the 1560s though not published until 1583, and going through at least four subsequent printings in Elizabeth’s reign as The Common-welth of England, might be read as an extended commentary on Craig’s belief that all kingdoms are or should be commonwealths, albeit not all commonwealths are kingdoms. Smith’s England was a mixed monarchy in which crown and parliament – made up of nobles, bishops, gentlemen and commons – ‘consult and shew what is good and necessarie for the common wealth’ (Smith 1583: 34). Indeed, like Craig and Buchanan, he evidently believed that rulers who failed to adhere to the law and thus acted tyrannically might well be resisted. This, however, he hedged about with caution: ‘it is alwayes a doubtfull and hasardous matter to meddle with the chaunging of the lawes and gouernement’ (Smith 1583: 5). James VI would have heartily agreed. Indeed, in 1584, a year after Smith’s work appeared, the king issued his Essays of a Prentise in the Divine Art of Poesie in which he warned budding versifiers against ‘writing any thing of materis of common weill’ for ‘they are to[o] grave materis for a Poet to mell in’ (James VI 2003: 35). It may or may not be a measure of the impact of this statement that, while the plight of the ‘common weill’ was a leitmotif of Richard Maitland’s poetry of the 1560s and 1570s, Alexander Montgomerie, the king’s favoured poet of the 1580s, used the term only twice, one of them simply echoing his royal patron’s warning: ‘With mightie maters mynd I not to mell / As copping Courts or Commonwelthis or Kings’ (Montgomerie 2000: 1. 113; cf. 1.100).
[28] Of course, James himself wrote extensively on the theme of kingship and the common weal in terms that reflect the humanist education he received at Buchanan’s hands while simultaneously rejecting its ‘republican’ bias. As he put it in his terse tract on kingship, The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), although a king is theoretically above the law (a proposition that Buchanan would have vehemently denied), he should delight nonetheless in ruling according to the law, ‘alwaies keeping that ground, that the health of the common-welth be his cheefe law’ (James VI 1982: 72). If this was intended as an echo of Buchanan’s Ciceronianism, it must be remembered that Cicero was not the preserve of advocates of limited monarchy. Jean Bodin, the French theorist of absolute sovereignty, whose Les Six Livres de La République, first published in 1576, and subsequently Englished as The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (1606), was equally explicit in stating that ‘the first and chiefe law of all Commonweales, is this, SALVS POPVLI SVPREMA LEX ESTO’ (Bodin 1606: 471).[xviii] King James was understandably rather keener on Bodin’s view of royal authority than on Buchanan’s – an early edition of the Six Livres was in his library.[xix] Yet when he wrote his own contribution to the mirror-of-princes genre, the Basilicon Doron, for his son Prince Henry in 1599, he opened Book II (‘Of a Kings Duetie in His Office’) with a quotation from Claudian that also features in the De Iure emphasizing how the example of a king shapes the behaviour of his subjects (James VI 2003: 218; Buchanan 2004: 72–3). A good king, James went on, ‘emploieth all his studie and paines, to procure and maintaine, by the making and execution of good Lawes, the well-fare and peace of his people’; by contrast, a tyrant will ‘(by inverting all good Lawes to serve onely for his unrulie private affections) frame the common-weale ever to advance his particular … [and] make up his owne hand upon the ruines of the Republike’ (James VI 2003: 218–9). This too echoes the teachings of Buchanan. Yet it is also a variation on the Aristotelian theme that lies at the heart of so much of the literature discussed throughout this paper. By the late sixteenth century, the idea of the common weal had lost much of the distinctively patriotic and reforming resonances it had once possessed. Indeed, by the century’s end, the king’s duty to promote the welfare of the people was not only a commonplace but was so devoid of republican connotations that in 1602 James could issue a gold half sovereign bearing the legend ‘SALVS POPVLI SUPREMA LEX’ (Stewart 1967: 97, 197).
[29] It is an intriguing coda to this story that in some ways James’s view of kingship ran counter to the fin-de-siècle vogue for a much more sceptical understanding of political power and authority, one that was informed not just by Machiavellian political realism but also by Tacitean raison d’état (Mortimer 2021: ch. 9). As is well known, the courtier William Fowler translated Machiavelli’s Prince into Scots in the early 1590s (Machiavelli 2009). He may also have a had a hand in encouraging the 1594 translation by the Aberdeen schoolmaster Thomas Cargill of Justus Lipsius’ Politicorum sive Civilis Doctrinae Libri Sex (Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine), first published in 1589.[xx] Lipsius’ work was a handbook of practical advice on ruling a kingdom, but one based on weaving together the sententiae of dozens of classical authors, among whom Tacitus was by far the most prominent. Significantly, the only modern author alluded to (and defended) by Lipsius was Machiavelli and, while the purpose of political rule remained for him the promotion of the common weal, the means to that end were informed by his long engagement with Tacitus’ darker and more realistic understanding of the practicalities of the art of rule. As a historian, Tacitus had long been known to humanist scholars, including Scots like Boece and Buchanan, but it was Lipsius who brought out his more jaundiced view of the machinations of the imperial court of Rome (Philo 2020). James was unimpressed. Unlike Elizabeth, who is known not just to have engaged with Tacitus but to have translated key passages from his works, James remained aloof (Philo 2022). In theory (though hardly in practice), he was hostile to such faddish political cynicism, remaining true to the Erasmian humanism of his tutor and a more conventional understanding of his duty to the common weal.[xxi]
V Conclusion
[30] A survey such as this cannot possibly do full justice to the range of ways in which the term common weal was deployed in sixteenth-century Scotland. For example, it has barely touched on its use in local and perhaps especially urban communities where it might readily encapsulate a sense of collective well-being. Nor, beyond occasional references to its use in England, has it attempted any broader European comparisons or considered how the bonum commune was expressed in other languages, cultures and polities. Such a comparative exercise, while no doubt highly desirable, is well beyond the scope of this brief overview. By way of conclusion, however, it is worth remarking that the recent revision of the entry on the common weal in the OED, referred to at the outset, is probably justified in that, while the term is now largely obsolete, except in oddly incongruous compounds such as the UK’s post-imperial ‘commonwealth of nations’, it was by the end of the sixteenth century being used as much in the sense of a political entity as an expression of concern for the welfare of all. These were not of course mutually exclusive and well into the eighteenth century there were advocates of social and political reform who described themselves as ‘commonwealthmen’ or ‘patriots’ (Robbins: 1959). They were not necessarily republican, though Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth of England certainly gave the word a powerful anti-monarchical spin. It was a spin, moreover, that propelled it across the Atlantic where four of the young United States of America were constituted (and are still formally described) as ‘Commonwealths’.[xxii]
[31] As for Scotland, it has been argued here that the idea of the common weal had its heyday in the decades between 1520 and 1580. Often closely associated with the kingdom’s freedom from English lordship, it was a key word in a semantic field that encompassed an essentially Aristotelian understanding of kingship and tyranny, but one that was energized by Roman republican notions of public duty and participation. It was a term that resonated particularly for those whose literary and political sensibilities were informed by a broadly Erasmian Christian humanism that saw social improvement and religious reform – whether Catholic or Protestant – as the true ends of government. By the late sixteenth century, however, the term had lost much of the potency that it had once possessed for writers such as Bellenden, Lindsay and Wedderburn and the audiences that they addressed. Its moment of maximum impact, when the defence of the common weal and liberty of the realm proved a powerful rhetorical weapon, was long gone. While commonwealth remained in common currency in Scotland as in England, the distinctive connotations that the common weal possessed for sixteenth-century Scots was now a thing of the past.[xxiii]
Acknowledgements
This a much extended version of the paper given online to the ICMRSLL conference hosted by the University of Alabama in 2021. I am grateful to the participants in the conference for their helpful comments and to the editors (and anonymous readers) for their careful reading of subsequent iterations of the text. Finally, I have also benefitted from the advice and expertise of Amy Blakeway, Janet Hadley Williams, Claire Hawes, Alasdair MacDonald, Sally Mapstone and Steven Reid. Any errors of fact and interpretation are, however, entirely my own responsibility.
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[i] MED cites some twenty examples of ‘commun(e) wele’ and five of ‘commun(e) wealth’, almost all dated between 1450 and 1500; the terms do not occur in the earlier extant writings of Chaucer, Gower or Langland; for the political usage of the term in England up to the 1530s, see Watts 2011.
[ii] For a sensitive discussion of communitas in fifteenth-century Scottish towns, including ideas of the common good, see Hawes 2017.
[iii] The dating of the poem, and the extent to which it is a critique of James III’s kingship, is reappraised in Hawes 2016.
[iv] ‘lapsum cleri Scociae, ruina populi, casus regni et destruccio rei publicae’.
[v] The edition used here is a transcription of the first printed version, issued by the Edinburgh printer Thomas Davidson at an unknown date, but probably the mid-1530s, and available as a searchable text online via archive.org.
[vi] Bellenden appears never to use the term ‘freedom’, invariably preferring ‘liberte’, though he does refer to Scots fighting ‘to the deith for thair commoun weill’ (1.258; 2.17).
[vii] It is noted among the political bonds listed in Wormald 1985: 404, but has generally escaped comment except briefly in Sanderson 1986: 167–8.
[viii] Arguably, an exception to this is the unionist polemicist James Henrisoun, whose unpublished ‘Godly and Golden Book’ addresses the economic recovery of Scotland after the Rough Wooing more directly: see Marcus Merriman 1987 and Williamson 2022.
[ix] See ‘The Testament of the Papyngo’, lines 49–54 (Lindsay 2000: 59). In the same place (lines 44–5), Lindsay also commends the work of William Stewart who in his poem This hynder nicht has ‘Lady Veritie’ appear to him in a dream and, after detailing all the ills that have afflicted Scotland since Flodden, advises that the remedy lies in reinstating ‘ffirst iustice, prudence force and temperance / Wit common wele and auld experience’ (Maitland Folio 1919–27: 1.353–5, lines 65–6). The poem presumably dates from late in James V’s minority and has much in common with Lindsay’s contemporary writings, though whether Stewart influenced Lindsay, Lindsay Stewart or both cut their poems from the same literary cloth remains a moot point (see MacDonald 1996).
[x] As Hadley Williams makes clear, John the Common Weal is an altogether more inclusive figure than the rustic John or Jock ‘Upeland’ who appears in Lindsay’s Complaynt (line 407) and Papyngo (line 540), (see Lindsay 2000: 225, 236). The figure originates in English Lollard literature (Philips 2017).
[xi] For a more cautious approach, see Greg Walker’s 2013 contribution to the project that re-staged the Thrie Estaitis Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court (brunel.ac.uk): More-Thoughts-about-John-the-Commonweal-and-Pauper.pdf (brunel.ac.uk). For views similar to those expressed here, see Burns 1996: 111–2; McElroy and Maier 2018: 210–1.
[xii] Lindsay 1989: lines 2424ff (John’s eruption on the stage); lines 2720ff (lords and merchants embrace John); 3793ff (‘Heir sal thay claith Johne the Common-weil gorgeouslie and set him doun amang them in the Parliament’).
[xiii] These early editions of the Works do not include the Thrie Estaitis (which did not appear in print until 1602): see Scottish Books 1505-1700 (Aldis Updated): Main | National Library of Scotland (nls.uk), accessed 8 February 2022. For further discussion of the circulation of the Thrie Estaitis, see Hadley Williams 2015; MacDonald 2022: 37ff.
[xiv] This is assuming Sempill is the author of such anonymous broadside ballads as Ane Exhortatioun to the Lordis and Ane Declaratioun of the Lordis Iust Quarrel (Satirical Poems 1891-93: 1. 48–51, 57–64).
[xv] Earlier in the De Iure, Buchanan described Cicero as ‘the greatest teacher of the art of governing a commonwealth (respublica)’ (Buchanan 2004: 34–5).
[xvi] The De Iure ends with an extract from Seneca’s Thyestes under the heading ‘Rex Stoicus ex Seneca’ (Buchanan 2004: 162–5).
[xvii] See McDiarmid 2007; despite his numerous contacts with the so-called Leicester circle in England, Buchanan does not figure in this volume.
[xviii] Bodin revised and expanded his work after its initial publication and the early French editions do not contain this reference.
[xix] On the king’s engagement with Bodin, see Evrigenis 2019, who has identified James’s copy of Bodin (the 1577 French edition) in Harvard University Library.
[xx] The manuscript of this was recently uncovered in Aberdeen University Library by Dr Miles Kerr-Peterson. I am grateful to him for sharing his findings with me. On Cargill’s connection to Fowler, see Verweij 2016: 87–91, and the introduction to the forthcoming Scottish History Society edition of the manuscript ed. by Miles Kerr-Peterson and Roger A. Mason.
[xxi] In the first edition of Basilicon Doron, James openly disparaged Lipsius’ shifts in confessional allegiance, taking to task the author of the neo-Stoic De Constantia (1584) for his religious inconstancy, though subsequent editions do not mention him by name (James VI 2003: 245).
[xxii] Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia and Kentucky; it also lives on in the Commonwealth of Australia.
[xxiii] In the present, however, the more demotic understanding of its original meaning is echoed in the left-wing pro-independence think tank Common Weal, founded in 2014.