Chapter 5
Memory and Nation: Sir David Lyndsay’s
The Dreme and
The Testament of the Papyngo1Parts of this chapter appeared in an earlier version: ‘“I beseik thi Maiestie serene”: Difficulties of Diplomacy in Sir David Lyndsay’s Dreme’, in Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, ed. by Jason Powell and William T. Rossiter (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 69–83.Throughout this study I have argued that, for Scottish writers creatively recollecting the Wars of Independence, the past is crucial in shaping responses to the present situation; that is, rather than these historiographical and literary works being concerned solely with detailing the wars as historical record they recollect the past precisely to affect the present and the future. For example, in Chapter 4 I argued that Hary’s
Wallace creatively reimagines English violence as moments of punctual trauma, revealing a vehement conviction of the dangers posed to Scottish sovereignty and identity by rapprochement with the English. Hary’s assessment provides one way of reading, but it is misleading. James III’s policies, and his overall approach to governance, were met with opposition that resulted in open rebellion and his death at Sauchieburn in 1488; nevertheless, Alasdair MacDonald tempers the view that he alienated all of his nobility to note that James ‘retained the loyalty of important intellectuals and counsellors, such as John Ireland and William Elphinstone’.
2Alasdair A. MacDonald, ‘James III: Kinship and Contested Reputation’, in Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300–1625: Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald, ed. by Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 246–64 (263). See also R.J. Lyall, ‘The Court as a Cultural Centre’, in Scotland Revisited, ed. by Jenny Wormald (London: Collins and Brown, 1991), pp. 36–48. MacDonald points out that James III’s reputation inevitably suffered because he ‘had the ironic misfortune to be the father of a son whose reign is generally … upheld as marking the Golden Age of late medieval Scotland’.
3315315 MacDonald, ‘Kinship and Contested Reputation’, p. 246. James IV’s reign (1488–1513) began in the wake of regicide and parricide and ended with the catastrophic defeat at Flodden, following an invasion of England on behalf of the French king, Louis XII (1498–1515), with whom James had maintained close relations.
4As Roger Mason notes, ‘Thousands of common soldiers died at Flodden’, along with ‘the king, his bastard son (the archbishop of St Andrews), a bishop, two abbots, nine earls, and fourteen lords of parliament’; Roger A. Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation: The Sixteenth Century’, in Scotland: A History, ed. by Jenny Wormald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 107–42 (112). James IV developed the fiscal practices of his father and ‘exploited every device available to him to raise royal revenues … while successfully retaining the loyalty of his leading subjects’.
5Mason, ‘Renaissance and Reformation’, pp. 110–11. With regard to Anglo-Scottish relations, James’s campaign of 1496 – in support of Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the English throne – saw the Scottish king flex his military muscles in the borders. In Norman MacDougall’s assessment, James saw war as ‘a forceful extension of diplomacy’, but in 1496 all he achieved was a stalemate with his English counterpart, Henry VII.
6Norman MacDougall, James IV (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1997), p. 140. For all of Hary’s objections to rapprochement with the English in the 1470s, it was James IV’s marriage to Henry’s daughter, Margaret Tudor, in 1503 that brought Scotland and England into an alliance of sorts, although the Treaty of Perpetual Peace was short lived.
7Emily Wingfield briefly discusses the marriage of James and Margaret in Scotland’s Royal Women, pp. 191–6. See also Sarah Carpenter, ‘“Gely with tharmys of Scotland and England”: Word, Image and Performance at the Marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor’, in Fresche Fontanis: Studies in the Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, ed. by Janet Hadley Williams and Derek McClure (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), pp. 165–77. Most recently, Helen Newsome has demonstrated how Margaret sought to present herself as a mediator between the Scottish and English crowns, most notably when she assumed a brief regency for her son, James V, following James IV’s death at Flodden in 1513.
8Helen Newsome, ‘The Function, Format, and Performances of Margaret Tudor’s January 1522 Diplomatic Material’, Renaissance Studies, 35.3 (2020), 403–24; Newsome, ‘“sche that schuld be medyatryce (mediatrice) In thyr (these) matars”: Performances of Mediation in the Letters of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots (1489–1541)’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2018). Newsome’s edition of the holograph correspondence of Margaret Tudor is forthcoming with the Royal Historical Society Camden 5th Series. In 1514, Margaret negotiated a peace with England, but her regency came to a rather abrupt end in the wake of her marriage to Archibald Douglas, earl of Angus. James was placed into the care of John Stewart, duke of Albany as Margaret and Douglas fled to England, with Douglas returning to Scotland in late 1515 and Margaret in 1517. From 1525 to 1528, amid a deteriorating marriage, Archibald Douglas took custody of the young king. This period immediately pre- and post-Flodden once again demonstrates the interconnectedness of Scotland’s domestic and international relations. For at least one early sixteenth-century writer, the court also provided a rich imaginative space in which to draw and reshape personal and public memories in the service of the king and the community of the realm.
The early poetry of Sir David Lyndsay subtly shifts the focus of memory and identity from remembering the Wars of Independence to an insular, even court-centred, perspective. In doing so, Lyndsay looks closer to home for the foundation of Scottish identity. In ways similar to, but also quite different from, Bower’s interest in the political significance of the
mappa regni in the
Scotichronicon that I discussed in Chapter 3, Lyndsay’s early poetry concentrates attention on the monarch as the essential locus of communal and national identity. In doing so, Lyndsay suggests that the individual character and behaviour of the monarch reflected and determined the state of the nation as a whole, and that good governance relied on a companionate relationship of regulation of body and kingdom. As J.H. Burns notes, though, early modern kingship was ‘more than a matter of bringing personal character and power to bear upon the problems of government’; kingship was ‘an institutional role’ and the character of the king, ‘the virtues (and vices) he possessed and displayed, were matters of great political importance’.
9J.H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; repr. 2006), p. 2. The link between sovereignty and morality was, of course, hardly a new idea in sixteenth-century Scotland; as Mapstone has shown, the Advice to Princes tradition is ‘one of the most common motifs in the surviving fifteenth-century [Scottish] corpus’.
10Sally Mapstone, ‘Was there a Court Literature in Fifteenth-century Scotland?’ SSL, 26 (1991), 410–22 (412). This interest continued into the sixteenth century, assuming a prominent politico-literary position during a prolonged period of minority successions. John Ireland’s
Meroure of Wyssdome was originally written for James III, but was rededicated to his son, James IV, in 1490. In the
Meroure, Ireland explicitly sets out his educational project for the young monarch who, he insists, ‘suld her and ler doctrine and sciens to gowerne eftirwart þe peple’ of his kingdom.
11Johannes de Irlandia’s The Meroure of Wyssdome, vol. 3, ed. by Craig McDonald, STS 4th Ser., 19 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press for the Scottish Text Society, 1990), p. 136. The perceived failure of the king who rejected counsel and eschewed governing his person well became the focus of Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s assessment of James IV’s defeat and death at Flodden. Pitscottie remarks that the king ‘wald vse no counsall for defence of his honour and preserving of his airme bot wssit himself to his awin sensuall plesouris quhilk was the cause of his rwen’.
12Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie, The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ed. by Æneas J.G. Mackay, 3 vols, STS 1st ser., 42, 43, 60 (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899–1911), i.276. David Lyndsay, therefore, draws on a long tradition of Advice to Princes literature that assumes a particularly large presence in the cultural memory of late medieval Scotland.
What emerges through the sixteenth-century literature is a refocusing of the concerns of national identity, articulated within a reconsideration of Scotland’s own political and cultural milieu during a period marked, as Elizabeth Ewan notes, by ‘an unbridled self-confidence as its leaders asserted Scotland’s place’ as a sovereign state.
13Ewan, ‘Late Medieval Scotland’, p. 19. It is an expression simultaneously troubled by Scotland’s internal politics and by the attempt to present to the outside world an image of Scotland as a major European power, a project in which both James IV and James V were particularly invested. Alongside this ambitious national fashioning, the focus on the king as the representative of this confident Scotland meant that a significant portion of late medieval Scottish literature concerned itself with the responsibilities of good governance.
14See, for example, James I’s The Kingis Quair (1424), John of Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome (c. 1489), and the late fifteenth-century The Quare of Jelusy. On the Kingis Quair and the Quare of Jelusy, specifically, see Martin, Kingship and Love, pp. 19–40. The
Dreme of Schir David Lyndesay of the Mont (1528) and the
Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo (1530) focus on the regulation of the monarch’s body that directly influences the health of the national body, presented in ethical terms of moral life and the foundation of good character. This moral aspect of nationhood reimagines the ethical foundations of memory and the reshaping of the past to suggest that, in being a good example to his people, the well-ruled – and well-ruling – monarch was therefore responsible, in part, for defining and upholding national character.
‘Kepar of the Kingis grace’: Sir David Lyndsay and the Court of James V
Little is known of Lyndsay’s early life and education; he first appears in the court records during the reign of James IV (1488–1513) and it is possible that he was involved in the literary activity of the court as early as 1511, when there is a record of payment made to one ‘David Lindesay’ for ‘ane play coit … for the play playt in the King and Quenis presence in the Abbay’.
15T. Dickson and Paul J. Balfour (eds), Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1877–1916), vol. 4, p. 313. For a more detailed discussion of Lyndsay’s political career, see Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). He was eldest son of David Lyndsay (d.
c. 1524), a middle-ranking landowner, who held lands in the Mount, located just outside Cupar in Fife, and in Garleton near Haddington, East Lothian. Initially usher to the young prince James, in 1513 Lyndsay found himself ‘kepar of the Kingis grace’, or ‘maister uschar’.
16Treasury records show that from 1512, Lyndsay was in receipt of a royal pension of £40. See Dickson and Balfour (eds), Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, vol. 4, pp. 269 and 441. Responsible for James V’s safety, Lyndsay was thus at the centre of the royal household, at least until 1524, when Archibald Douglas, Margaret Tudor’s estranged second husband, took custody of James and Lyndsay was replaced at court. James escaped from his stepfather in 1528, and Lyndsay was reinstated, being appointed herald, an office in which he represented the crown both at home and abroad.
17RPS 1528/9/4. In 1530, Lyndsay was appointed Snowdon herald, an office that provided both livery and an annual fee. He was officially appointed Lyon king of arms, the highest heraldic office in Scotland, in October 1542, the same year in which he was knighted.
18J.K. McGinley, ‘Lyndsay [Lindsay], Sir David (1486–1555), writer and herald’, ODNB [accessed 16 May 2015]. Lyndsay’s literary output, particularly from 1528 to 1530, was thus being produced in the intimate environment of James V’s court and the beginnings of his personal rule, something relatively unusual in medieval Scotland, where literature was more likely to come to the court, rather than emanate from it.
19Mapstone, ‘Court Literature’, esp. pp. 413, 420–2. Moreover, Lyndsay’s early poetry is often directly concerned with court life, indicating, as Sarah Carpenter has noted, that Lyndsay sought to influence the young James V by using his ‘privileged private involvement in the king’s affairs’ in his poetry.
20Sarah Carpenter, ‘David Lindsay and James V: Court Literature as Current Event’, in Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the Early Sixteenth Century: France, England and Scotland, ed. by Jennifer and Richard Britnell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 135–52 (140). While Lyndsay’s later texts, most notably his
Satyre of the Thrie Estatis (1540s), have attracted much critical attention, his earlier work has received far less consideration. Yet it is Lyndsay’s earliest poetry that is particularly significant for examining the role of memory in kingly governance and literary patriotism.
Sir David Lyndsay is thought to have composed his
Dreme around 1528, the year in which James V assumed his majority. Framed by a prologue and an exhortation in which Lyndsay addresses the king directly, the poem is a dream vision allegory of contemporary Scotland in which the dream-narrator falls asleep and is taken on a tour of the earth and the heavenly spheres. Immediately after the narrator has fallen asleep, he sees a lady of ‘portatour perfyte’ and, demanding her name, learns that she is called ‘Dame Remembrance’ (
Dreme, 148, 154). Remembrance leads the narrator on a journey through hell, purgatory, the heavens, the planetary spheres and earth. She then provides the Dreamer with a description of the ‘deuisioun of the Eirth’ before showing him ‘Paradyce’ (
Dreme, 659–76, 757). This, in turn, prompts the Dreamer to ask his guide to ‘schaw’ him the ‘countre of Scotland’ (
Dreme, 788), at which point the Dreamer cannot comprehend how a country of ‘gret commoditeis’, with an ‘haboundance of fyschis in [the] seis’, ‘suld nocht […] redound’ ‘considderand the peple and the ground’ (
Dreme, 81–7, 838–40). In addition to dispensing conventional princely counsel, this visionary journey is systematic, encompassing what would have been considered established knowledge. Through this journey, Lyndsay provides James V with pertinent information about his realm precisely when he most needed it: at the outset of his personal rule. As part of a poem – a story like those with which Lyndsay used to entertain the king in his infancy – this chorographical and historiographical material is rendered more readable than, for example Boece’s
Scotorum Historiae. This is not only because the poem is in Scots rather than Latin but because it is presented as a continuation of the material of the story, therefore appealing to the king as entertainment.
21I am grateful to Janet Hadley Williams for this suggestion. It is also worth noting that, at the beginning of the 1530s, James V commissioned John Bellenden to translate Boece’s Scotorum Historiae into Scots. At this point, the Dreamer and Remembrance enter into a dialogue in which Remembrance seeks to answer the Dreamer’s questions about the ways in which Scotland is no longer experiencing a golden age. Remembrance explains that the lack of prosperity in Scotland is not the fault of the ‘peple nor the land’ (
Dreme, 845); the ‘cause of thir vnhappynes’ is ‘Wanting of Iustice, polycie, and peace’ (
Dreme, 861). Furthermore, Remembrance makes it clear that she finds the ‘falt in to the heid’, for ‘thay in quhome dois ly our hole relief, / I fynd tham rute and grund of all our greif’ (
Dreme, 878–80). Remembrance concludes:
The causis principall
Off all the trubyll of this Natioun
Ar in to Prencis, in to special,
The quhilkis hes the Gubernatioun,
And of the peple Dominatioun,
Quhose contynewall exersitioun
Sule be in Iustice Exicutioun. (Dreme, 883–9)
Remembrance’s final remark several stanzas later provides a bleak outlook, for ‘rycht difficill is to mak remeid, / Quhen that the falt is so in to the heid’ (Dreme, 916–17). This damning tirade, which reminds the reader of the self-interested rulers the Dreamer encounters in the spheres of hell, places responsibility for Scotland’s prosperity directly at the feet of the monarch. At this point in the poem the Dreamer and Remembrance are interrupted by a ‘boustius berne’ (Dreme, 919) who, identifying himself as ‘Iohne the comoun weill’ (Dreme, 931), begins a lament about the plight of Scotland and its lack of good governance that, through the lens of his personal experience, reaffirms everything that Remembrance has just told the Dreamer. It is at this point that Remembrance leads the Dreamer back to the ‘cove quhare [he] began to sleip’ (Dreme, 1017). Before he wakes, the dreamer sees a ship ‘spedalye approche’ that loosens its sails and ‘gan to creip / Towart the land’ (Dreme, 1019–20). The dreamer experiences ‘ane fellown fraye’ from the ‘cannounis sche leit craik of at onis’ and the mariners who ‘did so youte and yell’ (Dreme, 1022–23, 1027), while the ship’s assault shakes the ‘stremaris frome the topcastell’ (Dreme, 1024). Here Lyndsay presents a possible future too much like the past that Dame Remembrance has just shown the Dreamer; it is this prospect of division and invasion that ‘haistalie’ wakens the Dreamer and prompts his hasty return home (Dreme, 1028). Removing himself ‘in tyll an Oritore’, the Dreamer takes his pen and begins the creative composition of setting down ‘All the visioun’ (Dreme, 1031–33) for the king. The prayer that concludes the dream section of the poem exhorts to James the benefit of an opposite kind of future to that presented by the rapidly approaching ship: ‘I beseik God for to send the grace / To rewle thy realme in unitie and peace’ (Dreme, 1035–6). The Dreme then ends with an Exhortation to James V, focusing on the young king’s responsibilities as Scotland’s monarch and urging him to take action to relieve Scotland’s troubles.
It is clear from the name of the dreamer’s guide – Dame Remembrance – that memory underpins this poem, and this is made explicit in the poem’s frame address directly to James V, where it strikes a distinctly personal cadence, requiring the poem’s principal reader, the king, to engage in specific acts of memory work. In the ‘Epistil’ to the Dreme, Lyndsay reminds James, the ‘Rycht Potent Prince of hie Imperial blude’, that
Sen thy birth, I haue continewalye
Bene occupyit, and aye to thy pleasoure;
And, sumtyme, seware, Coppare, Caruoure,
Thy purs maister, and secreit Thesaurare
Thy Yschare, aye sen they Natyuitie,
And of they chalmer cheiffe Cubiculare,
Qhuilk, to this houre, hes keipit my lawtie. (Dreme, 19–25)
Similarly, in the Complaynt of Schir Dauid Lindesay (c. 1530), Lyndsay asks James to remember how he
bure thy grace vpon my bak,
And, sumtymes, strydlingis on my nek,
dansand with mony bend and bek.
The first sillabis that thow did mute
Was pa, Da Lyn. (Comp. Lynd. 88–92)
In both poems, Lyndsay deliberately asks James to remember that, in the unstable environment of the young king’s minority, it was Lyndsay who, alongside his other duties at court, was responsible for his safekeeping. And, while Lyndsay suggests a willingness to maintain the role held since James’s ‘Natyuitie’, his use of ‘my lawtie’ indicates a desire for, or a perceived entitlement to, recompense in light of his former role. Indeed, in his Complaynt, Lyndsay teasingly requests that James V grant him a loan of ‘ane thousand pound or tway’ (462), and in stressing loyal service in the Complaynt of Bagsche, the out-of-favour royal hound Bagsche apppeals to ‘gude brother Lanceman, Lyndesayis dog, / Quhilk ay hes keipit thy laute’ (89–90). The Dreme, and these other early works, therefore, petition the new king not to forget the welfare of those who have his best interests at heart.
In detailing his responsibilities within the Stewart household, Lyndsay capitalises on the double meaning of his role as James’s ‘purs maister and secreit Thesaurare’. These are both financial offices, at least on one level, and the phrase immediately suggests that Lyndsay was the keeper of the king’s accounts and private treasury, but there is another layer of meaning here: if Lyndsay was James’s private secretary, he was also the keeper of the king’s secrets. This has important implications for Lyndsay’s self-representation within the royal household and indicates that he was entrusted with James’s most intimate affairs.
22On the administrative roles imagined by these lines, see Athol L. Murray (ed.), ‘Accounts of the King’s Pursemaster, 1539–40’, Miscellany of the Scottish History Society, 10 (1965), 13–51. As previously noted, the thesaurus (or storebox) was an important image in medieval memory techniques, providing a way of visualising the mind as a compartmentalised structure in which memories could be organised and stored. Lyndsay thus posits himself as a keeper – and, therefore, also as a recollector – of the king’s personal memories. Given the familiar tone of the
Dreme’s
prologue, and the exploitation of Lyndsay’s intensely personal memories of James V’s childhood, this seems to be a position that the poet does not want to relinquish. From the outset, the reader sees Lyndsay using the memorial function politically and with a view to situating his text and himself within an advisory role.
23See Janet Hadley Williams, ‘David Lyndsay and the Making of James V’, in Stewart Style, 1513–1542: Essays on the Court of James V, ed. by Janet Hadley Williams (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1996), pp. 201–25. This advisory stance is reinforced throughout the
Dreme’s prologue, particularly at the moment where Lyndsay recalls at length the stories that he used to tell the young king: stories of Hector, Arthur, Jason and the ‘Prophiseis of Rymour’ among others (
Dreme, 32–46). These tales, all exemplary and easily recognisable as such, provide an interpretive context for the ‘storye of the new’ that Lyndsay tells the king he is about to narrate. The inclusion of Thomas the Rhymer (
c. 1220–
c. 1298), famous for his prophetic writings, provides a particularly Scottish context for the dream vision that James is about to hear. James and the rest of Lyndsay’s audience must discern that this new story will have an advisory component and should be understood as seeking to provide instruction within a specifically Scottish framework.
24It is also possible that Lyndsay refers here to ‘The Prophesies of Rhymour, Beid, and Marlyng’, a poem popular in Scotland and the north of England. See Marcus Merriman, ‘Mary, Queen of France’, in Mary, Queen of Three Kingdoms, ed. by Michael Lynch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 291–9. In this way, Lyndsay portrays himself as having acted not only as James’s servant, but also as an educator, one who has tried to teach the young king the arts of good governance through examples from antiquity. At the same time, Lyndsay leverages his knowledge of James’s personality to entertain as well as teach and advise the young monarch. In both the
Dreme and the
Testament of the Papyngo (discussed later in the chapter), he uses dramatic delivery to amuse and enliven the didactic content. At this point, then, Lyndsay is not only a ‘secreit Thesaurare’ (a storehouse), but a poet who can create and recreate memory imaginatively and for the situation at hand. What Lyndsay presents next – his ‘storye of the new’ – is a far more contemporary example, but one which requires its reader to recollect the previous stories that form its advisory framework. The
Dreme’s Epistil thus pre-empts the role of Dame Remembrance within the dream vision, prompting the reader to see her not only as a guide but also as a mode of interpretation. The Epistil and its partner Exhortation at the end of the poem frame the narrative of the dream-narrator’s account of his vision and the events leading up to it, as well as a providing a context for the interpretation of the dream itself.
The dream vision was a well-established form in Scotland by the fifteenth century and it continued to flourish into the sixteenth. I briefly discussed in the previous chapter the use of the dream vision as a form of prophecy in Hary’s
Wallace, and Bower’s
Scotichronicon contains about eighty dream visions, suggesting a political use of the genre in Scotland. But dream visions did not just appear in these epic and historical texts and are made use of throughout the Scots literary corpus. For example, the
Kingis Quair (
c. 1424), surviving uniquely in Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, is a semi-autobiographical poem attributed to James I, which, although it touches on the Advice to Princes tradition, leans more toward the amatory than the overly political.
25See Martin, Kingship and Love, esp. pp. 19–39. The form continues in such texts as Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-century
Testament of Cresseid, in William Dunbar’s ‘Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past’ (concerning the marriage of James IV and Margaret Tudor in 1503) and
The Goldin Targe (1490s), and in Gavin Douglas’s
The Palice of Honour (1503), although these works do not focus explicitly on advisory concerns. Lyndsay does, however, note his debt to Douglas in particular, whom he regards as having ‘prerogative’ – superiority – ‘abufe’ all of his contemporaries ‘quhen he wes in to this land on lyuve’ (
Papyngo, 27–30). Thus, rather than seeming an outdated genre in late medieval and early modern Scotland, the dream vision was still being used as an authoritative vehicle for the exploration of sensitive political dilemmas. This is not to say that it did not change and evolve in this period; while Douglas Gray argues that later medieval examples of the genre ‘cannot match the subtlety of Chaucer or the strange power of Langland’, he suggests that the works of Dunbar, Douglas and Skelton ‘triumphantly demonstrate the genre’s power and possibilities’.
26Douglas Gray, ‘Gavin Douglas’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, pp. 149–64 (151). Moreover, there seems to be a change in the concerns of the use of the dream vision after Flodden; where the poetry of Dunbar and Douglas revels in the flourishing cultural environment of James IV’s court, Lyndsay’s writing, despite being influenced and informed by this period, is preoccupied with the uncertainty and instability of another Scottish minority kingship, seeing James IV’s court as a lost golden age to be remembered and lamented.
The main section of Lyndsay’s
Dreme, the dream vision itself, begins in a conventional style: Lyndsay’s narrator finds himself unable to sleep ‘throuch heuy thocht’ (
Dreme, 66). However, instead of picking up a book to read, as the narrators of Chaucer’s
Parliament of Fowls and Henryson’s
Testament of Cresseid do, he wanders through the ‘sleit’ (
Dreme, 61) to the sea, where he finds a cave in which to rest, with the purpose of passing the time with ‘pen and paper to Register, in ryme, / Sum mery mater of Antiquitie’ (
Dreme, 122–3).
27Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson and F.N. Robinson, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 385–94; Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson, ed. by H. Harvey Wood (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1958), pp. 103–26. Recording how his ‘spreit’ was ‘opprest’ with ‘sleip’ (
Dreme, 140), the narrator, ‘Constranit […] to sleip’, ‘dremit’ ‘ane maruellous visioun’ (
Dreme, 145–7). Where the dream visions of Chaucer, Langland, Dunbar and Douglas open with descriptions of springtime, Lyndsay’s
Dreme situates the narrator within the harsher and bleaker winter month of January, in which ‘snaw and sleit perturbit all the air’ (
Dreme, 61). While this is reminiscent of Henryson’s opening to the
Testament of Cresseid with its ‘doolie sessoun’ of Lent in which ‘Schouris of haill gart fra the north discend’,
28Henryson, Testament of Cresseid, lines 1–7. there are also parallels with John Bellenden’s ‘Proheme apon the Cosmographie’, another political poem from a writer with close connections to the household of James V.
29Between August 1515 and August 1522, Bellenden was employed as clericus expensarum (clerk of expenses) in James’s household. His involvement with the court in many ways mirrors Lyndsay’s as both appear to have become casualties of the duke of Albany’s regency before being reinstated at the king’s assumption of personal rule in 1528. Lyndsay refers to Bellenden’s literary activities in The Testament of the Papyngo, line 51. See Nicola Royan, ‘John Bellenden [Bannatyne], c. 1495–1545x8, poet and translator’, ODNB [accessed 3 November 2021]. The ‘Proheme’ opens with a wintry astrological scene:
The frosty nicht wt hir prolixit houris
hir mantill quhyt spred on the tendir flouris.
Quhen ardent labour hes addressit me
Translait the story of oure progenitouris.
Thair greit manheid wisdom and honouris.
Quhair we may cleir (as in ane mirror) se
The furius End sumtyme of tirannye.
Sumtyme the gloir of prudent gouernouris
Ilk stait apprysit in their facultie
My wery spreit desiring to repress
My Emptiue pen of frutles besiness
Awalkit furth to tak the recent are.
30John Bellenden, ‘The proheme of the croniculs compylit be the famous and Renownit clerk maister Iohine bellentyne’, in The Bannatyne Manuscript Written in Tyme of Pest, 1568 by George Bannatyne, ed. by William Tod Ritchie, 4 vols, STS 2nd ser., 22, 23, 26; 3rd ser., 5 (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1928–34), vol. 2, pp. 9–19, lines 10–21. In both the Testament of Cresseid and the Dreme, Henryson and Lyndsay’s narrators seek out the distinctly practical way of escaping the ‘snaw and sleit’ of the Scottish coastal environment by visiting caves on the shoreline. Lyndsay’s cave also has distinctly memorial implications and serves as a memory space within the poem. The narrator envisages using the cave as a natural oratory in which to pursue his writing (Dreme, 120–3) and, like the storebox, it acts as an analogy for memory itself. As Albertus Magnus observes in his commentary on De memoria et reminiscentia:
Those wishing to reminisce [i.e. wishing to do something more spiritual and intellectual than merely remember] [should] withdraw from the public light […] because in the public light the images of sensible things are scattered and their movement is confused […] This is why Tullius in the
ars memoranda […] prescribes that we should imagine and seek out dark places having little light.
31Albertus Magnus, De memoria et reminiscentia, Opera omnia, ed. by Borgnet, IX, p. 108; cited in Yates, Art of Memory, p. 79. As the narrator’s idea is to ‘defende’ himself from ‘Ociositie’ (idleness) in the cave (
Dreme, 121), it is not improbable that his desire to ‘Regester, in ryme’, involves memory work of the intellectual kind – reminiscence and active composition – that forms the basis of the poem itself. In addition to using the cave as a space in which to conduct memory work, the narrator’s disposition also invokes the memorial activity that takes place throughout the poem. The
Dreme’s opening, with its melancholic narrator unable to sleep because of his ‘Remembryng of diuers thyngis gone’ (
Dreme, 67), points to a moment of unorganised recollection that seems to derive from Aristotle’s theory that melancholics remember uncontrollably because they are too fluid; the narrator’s sleepless state is a consequence of being out of humoral and memorial balance.
32Aristotle, De memoria, 453a 14. This is an idea I return to in my discussion of The Complaynt of Scotland in Chapter 6. Yet, Boncompagno (b.
c. 1170) posits that those suffering from melancholia retain information well due to their hard and dry disposition. Albertus appears to negotiate these two aspects of melancholia and memory and, in discussing the ‘type of melancholia which is the temperament of
reminiscibilitas’, he proposes that the ‘temperament of reminiscence’ is not the dry-cold melancholy that Boncampagno argues allows for good memory, but the ‘dry-hot melancholy’ that is ‘intellectual’ and ‘inspired’. The
Dreme’s narrator appears to display all of these attributes at some point throughout the poem, but, in the instance of his seeking shelter in the cave, it would seem that the uncontrollable memory that keeps him awake gives way to the inspired and intellectual reminiscence of the dream itself. Camillo also uses the cave as one of the grades of his memory structure; in part, this is linked to Saturn, the planet of melancholy, suggesting that Lyndsay’s
Dreme draws on quite specific images of the cave and its connection to memory and melancholia.
33See Yates, Art of Memory, p. 165. Coupled with the image of the cave as a space for memory (rather than simply as a practical place of shelter), the beginning of the
Dreme specifically points to the use and importance of memory within the poem and its fundamental association with individual consciousness that will have a bearing on the state of the nation later in the poem.
On his way to the cave, the
Dreme’s narrator meets ‘dame Flora’, ‘dissagysit’ in ‘dule weid’, reminiscing that in May she ‘wes dulce and delectabyll’ (
Dreme, 78–9). Moreover, the ‘small fowlis’ make ‘great lamentatioun’ to Nature, saying ‘blyssit be Somer, with his flouris; / And waryit be thow, winter, with thy schouris’ (
Dreme, 85–91). Lyndsay’s use of symbolic naturalism here hints at the pessimism of the dream to come, in particular the dialogue section in which the Dreamer comments on the natural fertility of the land of Scotland, which is being misused; this is followed by the complaint of John the Commoun Weill. In stark contrast to, and yet with strong echoes of, Dunbar’s
Goldyn Targe, in which the narrator sees ‘May, of myrthfull monethis quene, / Betuix Aprile and Iune hir sistir schene’, Lyndsay’s
Dreme points to the political instability of the 1520s that meant Scotland was experiencing the opposite of the sunny paradise that Dunbar describes.
34William Dunbar, The Goldyn Targe, in The Poems of Willliam Dunbar, ed. by Priscilla Bawcutt, 2 vols (Glasgow: ASLS, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 184–92, lines 82–3. This is not to say that Lyndsay’s poem finds no consolation or opportunity for a return to a glorious age like that of James IV’s rule; the Exhortation, for all its stern language and demands, reminds the reader of the lessons of the dream and indicates that it is possible to return Scotland to a state of stability and wealth. This, however, must begin from a point of recollection and the use of a good memory to prompt correct action. Lyndsay tells James:
Faill nocht to prent in thy Remembrance,
That he [God] wyll nocht excuse thyne Ignorance,
Geue thow be rekles in thy gouernyng.
Quharefore, dres the, abone all vther thing,
Off his lawis to keip the obseruance,
And thow schaip lang in Ryaltie to ryng. (Dreme, 1040–45)
Lyndsay’s
Dreme argues that what is required for a stable nation is the education and good counsel of the king, allowing him to ‘Tak Manlie curage, and leif thyne Insolence, / And vse counsale of nobyll dame Prudence’ in order to ‘Drawe to thy courte Iustice and Temporance; / And to the Commoun weill haue attendance’ (
Dreme, 1064–5, 1067–8). As a cardinal virtue, Prudence was one of the four chief moral virtues, along with justice, temperance and fortitude, to which Lyndsay refers in this advice to James.
35Lyndsay also refers to the ‘four gret verteous cardinalis’; The Complaynt of Schir David Lindesay, in Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. by Janet Hadley Williams (Glasgow: ASLS, 2000), pp. 41–57, line 379. He lists them at lines 380–90. For Lyndsay, the wisdom and prudence of the king (mastered by ethical self-government), as well as the good advice of his counsellors, provide the way by which Scotland can return from a cold winter to a ‘blyssit’ summer (
Dreme, 90). From its outset, then, Lyndsay’s
Dreme serves as an advisory piece, not only for the young king to whom it is specifically addressed, but also implicitly for those would-be advisors and for a wider Scots audience. At its heart, the
Dreme advocates that the return to a glorious age of Scottish political and cultural identity is achievable through a concerted effort of good governance, which is informed and motivated by memory.
Prudence in Scotland
The Dreme is not unique in advocating prudence as central to the remembrance of good governance; it is a concern that appears in Scottish literature from at least the time of John Barbour’s Bruce and was an idea that the earlier Brucean propaganda machine sought to promote. It is certainly the aspect of kingship that preoccupies the Stewart dynasty, which constantly looked to secure the memory of Bruce as a political and behavioural model. Furthermore, in Book 12 of the Scotichronicon, Bower specifically refers to the quality of prudence in relation to King Robert I, recollecting that Bruce as ‘very bold, whilst at the same time wary and provident, perspicacious and prudent’ (Chron. Bower 6. 321). Bower clarifies this by stating that the ‘three chief constituent elements of prudence flourished in [Bruce], namely memory, intelligence and foresight, which are chiefly required in a ruler’ (Chron. Bower 6. 321). That the Scotichronicon regards prudence as a quality required by the monarch implicitly suggests that it should be a quality of the Stewart kings that they have inherited from Bruce or, at the very least, that they should aspire to the example set by their ancestor. Moreover, Bower states that prudence is depicted with three faces (trifaciata depingitur), representing the wise man who is able to consider the past, present and future together. Bower’s description of Bruce’s prudent nature continues in Book 12, in which he discusses Seneca’s views of good counsel, writing that, in his Four Virtues, Seneca says that ‘it is fitting for the prudent man to weigh up advice and not slide swiftly towards false counsels with easy credulity’ (Chron. Bower 6. 327). As a prudent ruler, Bruce is able to foresee the consequences of particular events and is able to act upon this knowledge; Bower here creates a relationship between memory, prudence and good counsel that continues into Lyndsay’s work of the early sixteenth century.
Memoria was seen as an integral part of the cardinal virtue of Prudence alongside intelligence [
intelligencia] and foresight [
providencia], whereby one was enabled to make good decisions concerning future actions. Recollection was thus seen as a way of comprehending the present and contemplating the future, suggesting its pre-emptive role in making good judgements, rather than recalling the past for its own sake. The anonymous
Ad Herennium, which describes the art of memory ‘based upon the building plan of a familiar house’, classifies Prudence as ‘intelligence capable, by a certain judicious method, of distinguishing good and bad; likewise the knowledge of an art is called Wisdom; and again, a well-furnished memory and experience in diverse matters is termed Wisdom’.
36[Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. by Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), III, 2–3. Thomas Aquinas later argued for a consideration of Prudence as a moral virtue, ‘of the utmost necessity for human life’, for to ‘live well means acting well’.
37Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Blackfriars edition (Latin and English), 61 vols (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–81), i–ii, Q.57, art. 5, resp.; cited in Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 82. This certainly seems to be the case in Lyndsay’s text, which concerns itself with the governance of the king’s body as a reflection of the state of the nation: its repeated advice is concerned with how to behave morally and devoutly. Moreover, if memory was believed to be the primary repository of wisdom, then such a reading of Lyndsay’s
Dreme would be entirely appropriate for a text so clearly situating itself within the Advice to Princes genre. In a text that revolves around advising the young James V, and which demonstrates the need for wisdom and good judgement, it is perhaps not surprising that the Dreamer’s teacher is the personification of memory precisely because of the association of remembrance with the cardinal virtue of Prudence. Finally Lyndsay’s instruction in the Exhortation is that James follow the counsel of ‘dame Prudence’ (
Dreme, 1065); thus the poem moves from the recollection of the Dreamer, allegorised as his journey with Lady Remembrance, to the ability to interpret past events that is characterised by Dame Prudence and the memory work that James is being asked to engage with.
The quality of Prudence requires both a knowledge of the past and an ability to interpret and use this knowledge wisely. Lyndsay’s
Dreme provides James with a written record of memory (of his own life and that of Scotland’s condition), and the means with which to interpret it by giving him Remembrance as a guide who answers the Dreamer’s questions, and through the Exhortation which directs James to the right course of action. In asking James to ‘prent’ in his ‘Rememb[e]rance’ (
Dreme, 1040) the fact that God will not excuse immoral behaviour, Lyndsay is not only urging him to see that the king is answerable to an omniscient God, but also to fix in his mind the ways in which James should not allow himself to become, or remain, ignorant – ways in which the
Dreme,
as an advisory poem, seeks to teach him. Lyndsay’s use of ‘prent’ here is also significant.
DOST defines its primary meaning as ‘an impression or imprint on a surface’, especially ‘one made by a stamp, die, seal, or the like’.
38DOST, prent, n. 1. Of course, given the date of Lyndsay’s text, it is also likely that the
Dreme here refers to print culture and the printing of letters on paper. Although Lyndsay provides a written memory in the form of his
Dreme, the insistence to James that he should imprint the lessons within his own memory again recalls the ways in which the memory was thought of as a wax tablet on which memorial impressions were made, and to the ways in which memories or experiences physically altered the body. Here the desire is that the printing of memory within both James’s personal and kingly selves will ensure a behaviour that ‘embodies’ his education. With echoes of Hary’s
Wallace, the
Dreme indicates that it is not only memory that is inscribed on the page; the text also demands that the kingly body be
inscribed with the memory of the narrative in such a way that it is easily remembered and recalled.
As an Advice to Princes work, Lyndsay’s
Dreme provides a point of reflexive exchange where the king as reader of a literary text and as interpreter of the educative mode are brought face to face. It is a text which requires James to apply the lessons the Dreamer has learnt within the political realm of Scotland. For this reason, the Exhortation entreats James to ‘Hait vicious men, and lufe thame that ar gude; / And ilke flattrer thow fleme frome thy presence, / And flas reporte out of thy courte exclude’ (
Dreme, 1070–2). Yet, while the Advice to Princes tradition shaped the king’s role as verbal and literary interpreter, Lyndsay does not expect his young king to begin to decipher the
Dreme’s allegory alone. For if the foundation of good moral character consisted of the combination of action and memory, the Dreamer, on waking, must exchange his vision for action, translating it into a programme for the king to consider. As Joanna Martin observes, Dame Remembrance represents the ‘important intellectual power of memory and of learning from the past’; in this way, she acts as a guide for the dream-narrator in the ways similar to Lady Philosophy who guides Boethius, and Beatrice and Virgil who guide Dante.
39Martin, Kingship and Love, p. 166. Memory also acts as one of the guides for the dream-narrator pilgrim in Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1426); see Susan Hagen, Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man as a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990). But Remembrance is also very different from these and functions, in some ways, like the Sibyl in
Scalacronica’s prologue and the Virgin Mary in the
Wallace’s dream. She does not offer consolation but, rather, points to solutions that might be learnt from applying the lessons of the past to the present. It is Remembrance who is instrumental in teaching the dream-narrator, training his memory to recall and interpret the events of his dream, but it is the responsibility of the Dreamer himself (and, by extension, James V) to translate the text of the dream and apply it to the problems facing Scotland. The poet eventually adopts the role of Dame Remembrance himself, recalling and recounting the vision and all that it encompasses for the benefit of the young king: as Remembrance ‘did to [the Dreamer] report’ (
Dreme, 800), so does Lyndsay report to his king. Lyndsay thus posits himself as a guide and figure of good counsel (and memory) for the young King James, and this is further emphasised in Lyndsay’s Exhortation at the very end of the
Dreme. Lyndsay directs James to ‘[u]se counsall of thy prudent Lordis trew’ (
Dreme, 1110), and to ‘[w]yrk with counsall, so sall thow neuer rew’ (
Dreme, 1113), implicitly including himself and his narrative in this selection of good counsellors.
40Nicholas Perkins notes that the role of good counsel was ‘agreed by medieval commentators to be vital to the health of the body politic, and the problems and benefits of counsel are discussed at length in medieval mirrors for princes’; Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes: Counsel and Constraint (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 57. While drawing on the ars memoria, Lyndsay’s Dreme does not mark formal memory training as the only, or even the most important, aspect of memoria or prudence. Instead, the Dreme looks to the ways in which the recollective aspect of the individual mind might be used effectively in the application of good judgement. Through the call to self-governance and action through interpretation, Lyndsay marks Prudence as an ethical structure, appealing to personal experience and addressing questions of how the ability to govern oneself serves as a theoretical model whose application could be universal. Experience was understood as a composite of memories – both individual and communal – generalised and judged, that gave rise to knowledge as the foundation of ethical training and behaviour. Throughout the dream the appeals to James to govern himself correctly are linked to the Dreamer’s witnessing of the suffering of Scotland through the misgovernance of the land, suggesting that the self could be seen as a microcosm of the created world. In his warning that God ‘wyll not excuse’ James ‘Geue [he is] rekles in gouernyng’ (Dreme, 1041–2), Lyndsay refers both to the governance of the king’s own body and to the national body of which he has ‘the gubernatioun’ (Dreme, 1056). The land here becomes a reflection of the king’s body, and it is the microcosm of the kingly self that directly determines the condition of the macrocosm of Scotland. In drawing a further parallel with the body and earthly society, Lyndsay’s text intimates that if James is incapable of governing his own body, then he has little chance of being able to govern the kingdom. In creating this link in the Dreme, Lyndsay deals with several networks of memory – historical, personal and cosmological – and these memories become layered within the text as well as in the individual and the national imaginations.
The cultivation of ethical memory based on experience thus forms the basis of Lyndsay’s advisory programme, reflecting the widespread belief that prudence was a fundamental characteristic of good moral character. The Epistil, in particular, recreates a personal memory of Lyndsay’s that is designed to prompt the same (or a similar) memory within the king’s consciousness, providing a catalyst for the dream narrative that forms the main section of the poem. It is also, as Sandra Cairns notes, a section in which pleasure is emphasised through the recollection of happy memories; the way in which Lyndsay cares for the infant ‘full tenderlie’ (
Dreme, 9), for example, provides a contrast with the later section of the poem where the reader is to learn from unhappy recollections.
41Sandra Cairns, ‘Sir David Lyndsay’s Dreme: Poetry, Propaganda and Encomium in the Scottish Court’, in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Toronto 1983), ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), pp. 110–19 (110). This sense of pleasure and nostalgia is distinctly absent in the Exhortation, where, in light of the dream narrative that the reader has just experienced, the emphasis is placed on the duties and responsibilities of the new king. As such, Cairns argues, the purpose of the poem is to educate the king, transforming him from child to adult.
42Cairns, ‘Sir David Lyndsay’s Dreme’, p. 110. Janet Hadley Williams also takes this view, remarking that the ‘opening epistle, lightly petitionary, is affectionate panegyric; the concluding epistle is austerely formal counsel’; ‘Sir David Lyndsay’, in A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry, pp. 179–91 (187). The Exhortation is certainly more public in tone; the nostalgic and intimate references to Lyndsay telling the young James stories are replaced by commands that the king ‘[u]se counsall of thy
prudent Lordis […] / And se thow nocht presumpteouslie pretend / Thy awin perticulare weill for tyll Ensew’ (
Dreme, 1110–12; my emphasis). The concerns of medieval scholarship – where textual authority is seen as a source of ethical guidance – are imbued with the craft of memory, emphasising the need to convert the wisdom of the
auctores into private property, by replacing original texts in favour of a version which has been transformed by the reader and tied to networks already connected in the mind. In the case of the
Dreme, Lyndsay displaces the well-known stories that he used to tell the infant king with a new version of advisory literature and moves from the general descriptions of hell and the heavens to the specific complaints of the commonweal of Scotland. Moreover, Lyndsay uses the memory of the Epistil, as well as the dream narrative, as an associative network that he hopes will strike a chord in James’s own memory and will motivate him to practical action.
43On the association between ethics and practical action, rather than speculation, see Dante Alighieri, ‘Epistle to Can Grande della Scala’, in Medieval Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, ed. by A.J. Minnis and A.B. Scott, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 462. Throughout the
Dreme, Lyndsay seeks to use personal memories to counsel the king and his audience. These memories are both Lyndsay’s own recollections of a politically stable Scotland and his own loyalty to the crown (in which loyalty acts as a personalised form of political stability), and also the memory of the experiences of the Dreamer in his narrative. Lyndsay’s continual emphasis is on the way memory (and its relationship to good governance and prudence) acts as the foundation of ethical behaviour and how the king’s individual behaviour serves as a model for (and reflection of) the state of his kingdom.
A Country ‘raggit, rewin, & rent’: The Consequences of Forgetting Prudence
Lyndsay’s
Dreme encompasses two frame structures that signal interpretive modes of reading. Firstly, the Epistle and Exhortation speak directly to James V, situating him as the main – or at least the most significant – reader of the text. These sections, focusing on the personal relationship between monarch and poet, frame the dream-narrator’s story which, in turn, frames the dream vision itself. In a structure that comprises narrative within narrative, the
Dreme mirrors the journey that the Dreamer takes through the various segments of hell and purgatory, and the order of the planets in the cosmographical section of the poem (
Dreme, 365–525). While the structure of this section echoes medieval encylopedic texts, it also recalls formal memory-training treatises that suggest the use of mental images of heaven and hell in the construction of artificial memory.
44For example, Cosmas Rossellius’ Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (Venice, 1579) includes woodcuts depicting both heaven and hell as artificial memory models. See Yates, Art of Memory, plates 8a and 8b. Guiding the Dreamer, Dame Remembrance descends ‘Doun throw eird’ into ‘the lawest hell’ where ‘ȝowting and ȝowling’ can be heard from the ‘mony cairfull creature[s]’ in the ‘flame of fyre’ (
Dreme, 162–6). Religious men and those in positions of power attract the greatest condemnation in Lyndsay’s hell, as they would do to a greater extent in his later dramatic representation,
Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. The images of ‘Proude and peruerst Prelattis’, ‘fals flattrand freris’ alongside ‘diuers Papis and Empriouris’ (
Dreme, 169–78), act as moral recollections for both the Dreamer and the reader as both are told these figures have been punished for ‘Couatyce, Luste, and ambysioun’ (
Dreme, 186–8). Like a mnemonist, Lyndsay’s narrator appeals to the human capacity for emotion in order to create a secure impression in the memory; by repeatedly focusing on the consequences of living badly, the poet reminds his audience of the spiritual and civic repercussions of indulging in an immoral life. The repetition of the grotesque image is integral to attempts to shape individual character, such that the reader’s memory of the Dreamer’s experience aims to influence future behaviour. Memory works negatively within Lyndsay’s
Dreme here, imprinting hideous (and therefore more likely to be remembered) images in the Dreamer’s mind – and that of the reader – in order that he should recollect how
not to behave. The journey through hell brings both the Dreamer and the reader face to face with previous generations; quite literally the present encounters the past. The ability to recollect acts as a way to salvation because, through memory, the individual can strive to fulfil the Christian duty to perfect oneself. But Lyndsay’s
Dreme does not only focus on teaching the king how to behave morally; it also provides him with the means by which to begin this process. Following the
Secretum Secretorum, the
Dreme covers a wide range of topics, including statecraft (good governance), astrology and geography, to provide the knowledge necessary for cultivating the royal virtue of prudence. Working within this framework, Lyndsay’s
Dreme advocates the regulation of the king’s personal body as a way of creating a link between the king as an individual and the monarch as an institution.
Having asked to leave hell and purgatory, the Dreamer is taken by Remembrance through the elements of ‘Erth, walter, air, and fire’ and then ‘Upwart’ to ‘se the Heuynnis’ (
Dreme, 380–2). Here the reader is directly confronted with the relationship between the moral state of the individual and the health of the wider community. Following a journey covering the Ptolemaic cosmos, the Dreamer travels ‘[u]p throuch the Speris of the Planetis sewin’ (
Dreme, 385), mirroring the journey he has previously taken through hell; but here the emphasis on the regulation of the planets in their orbits, the nature of the planets and the relations between the planets presents the reader with a world distinctly ordered, well governed and natural.
45Lyndsay’s poem precisely follows the Ptolemaic model, which depicted a series of circles radiating out from the earth, through the elements of earth and water, then through the planetary spheres of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Zodiac, the Crystalline sphere to the Emperean ‘Quhare God, in to his holy throne deuyne, / Ryngis’ (Dreme, 516–17). The structuring and compartmentalising of the astrological images that Lyndsay uses suggests a knowledge of formal memory-training schemes and the ways in which they might be used in an advisory context. Thomas Bradwardine’s treatise on how to acquire a trained memory, for example, uses the structure of the twelve signs of the zodiac as an elementary memory design and, in perhaps the most famous example from the sixteenth century, Giulio Camillo constructed a memory theatre in which the zodiac, planets and the cave all form vital components of the trained memory.
46On Bradwardine, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 163–72; on Camillo, see Yates, Arts of Memory, pp. 35–74. Lyndsay’s tight narrative structure indicates that there is a mnemotechnical dimension to the
Dreme, which mirrors and complements the journey through the spheres of the planets and hell. The use of the zodiac as an indicator of – or influence on – health also suggests a visual map that enabled the reader to consider the health of the body and the soul in relation to ideas of planetary order. As Michael Camille argues, ‘Most medieval people … saw an inextricable link between heavenly and earthly bodies’, and the human body was understood in relation to the cosmos.
47Camille, ‘Image and the Self’, p. 67. It was an understanding that created a close association between cosmology, medicine and politics. This relationship was often depicted pictorially with the image of the Zodiac man in which the man was surrounded by signs of the zodiac, which directly mapped onto the parts of the body which they were thought to govern. The thirteenth century also saw the dissemination of humoral theory into popular literature, usually through short mnemonic verses.
48See Sally Mapstone, ‘The Scots Buke of Physnomy and Sir Gilbert Hay’, in The Renaissance in Scotland: Studies in Literature, Religion, History and Culture, Offered to John Durkan, ed. by A.A. MacDonald, Michael Lynch and Ian B. Cowan (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 1–44. Mapstone notes that such literature was popular among Scottish readers until at least the early seventeenth century (p. 11). Sir Gilbert Hay’s
Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror (
c. 1460), for example, contains a ‘Regiment’ of the body section based on the widely read
Secretum secretorum.
49The Buik of King Alexander the Conqueror, ed. by John Cartwright, 2 vols, STS 4th ser., 13, 16 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press for the Scottish Text Society, 1986–90), lines 10, 108–10, 439. This ‘Regiment’ discusses how the health of the physical body might be affected by the moral well-being of the individual. Mapstone argues that in ‘the context of this Scottish romance … it makes good sense’, for the advice on good government is ‘entirely in keeping with the presentation of Alexander as an exemplary model for Christian knighthood and kingship’.
50Mapstone, ‘Scots Buke of Physnomy’, p. 4. Lyndsay’s
Dreme reinforces these concerns with its focus on the wrongdoings of the monarchs and prelates who occupy hell, coupled with the repeated references to the zodiac and the cycles of the year at the beginning of the poem.
While the Zodiac man was mainly thought of as a map of the individual body, in Lyndsay’s
Dreme an association between the zodiac and the nation occurs. Nor is Lyndsay alone in thinking of the national body as being governed by astrological forces. The fourteenth-century English astrologer, John Ashenden, comments that Scotland must be governed by the zodiacal sign of Scorpio because, like a scorpion, the Scots are ‘cruel, proud, excitable, luxurious, bestial, false, and underhanded, and contemptuous of faith and faithfulness’.
51‘Et dicit Albumasar istius in libro suo de annorum revolutionibus quod Scorpio preest terre Scotie eo quod homines conveniunt ipsi scorpioni in moribus, sunt ei crudeles, superbi, elati, luxuria et bestialitati, falsi et subdoli, fidem et fidelitatem inflagrentos, et plus mori quam similia cupierit’; John Ashenden, Pronosticatio coniunctionis Saturni et Martis [1357]; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 176, fol. 34v; cited in Hilary M. Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992), p. 88. For Ashenden, national character is determined by astrological influence but this material also performs memory work, becoming a schema that enables a nation to recall either its own or its neighbour’s identity. The schema of mapped associations stress natural order and are comparable to visual representations of the memory, which structure and compartmentalise knowledge. The sense of order that comes through the narrative structure and the descriptions of the spheres further manifests the advisory role that the
Dreme adopts, by urging the need for good order in the kingdom and the essential part it plays in good governance. Reminding the reader of the need for princely self-government as stressed by the Dreamer’s journey through hell, the emphasis on a harmonious working together in the image of the planetary spheres demonstrates a causal link between the ethical microcosm and political macrocosm that was the central tenet of medieval political thought, and suggests that politics was to be seen as something ‘natural’. Highlighting ideas derived from Aristotle and given expression in influential treatises such as John of Salisbury’s
Policraticus (
c. 1155) and the
Secretum Secretorum,
the
Dreme emphasises the relationship between the moral state of the individual (in Lyndsay’s case, the monarch) and the health of the body politic that can be traced back to cosmic order.
52See Elizabeth Porter, ‘Gower’s Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm’, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis: Responses and Reassessments, ed. by A.J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 135–62. It is national harmony, secured through good governance, that is distinctly absent in the descriptions of Scotland by Remembrance and John the Commoun Weill.
From Dreams to Letters: The Recollections of the King’s Parrot
Thus far, this chapter has considered the ways in which formal memory schemes and the poetic recollection of royal childhood memories were deployed by Lyndsay to educate the young James V in the arts of good governance. The emphasis in the Dreme is on the regulation of the royal body and the implications this might have for the ways in which the king was deemed fit to rule the national body of Scotland. Axiomatically, national memories – given a voice in John the Commoun Weill – prompt the dream-narrator to counsel the king as to the best way to govern himself and the kingdom, seeing the two as inextricably linked, just as texts such as the Buke of the Howlat had memorially connected family and nation. In the final section of this chapter I turn to a text that develops these ideas and which has clear parallels with Holland’s bird-fable. Lyndsay’s Testament of the Papyngo was written in 1530, two years after the Dreme and in the year following the Complaynt, in which the poet had used his position of familiarity in James V’s court to increase his caustic blame of others for Scotland’s recent social and political predicament. Even more secure in his position, Lyndsay’s Papyngo presents a bolder criticism of the courtiers and their role in James V’s administration. From the very beginning of the poem, memory becomes a way of consolidating Lyndsay’s position as advisor and social critic.
Through the literary models of complaint and epistle, the Testament of the Papyngo combines satire and moral instruction as the king’s dying parrot doles out advice to both the king and the court. Through her testimony, the Papyngo attacks the corruption of the Scottish clergy and nobility. The poem tells how the narrator accompanies the king’s pet parrot to a lovely garden. Against the narrator’s advice, the Papyngo climbs to ‘the heychast lytill tender twyste’ and sits ‘With wyng displayit … full wantounlie’ (Papyngo, 164–5). Lacking prudence in climbing so high onto a branch that cannot support her, the Papyngo is destined to be blown off the branch as it breaks in ‘one blast’ from ‘Boreas’ (Papyngo, 166). Mortally wounded by falling upon a ‘stob’ (stake; Papyngo, 169), the Papyngo bewails her ambition, recognising that she should never have frequented the court. She then dictates two epistles to be sent to James V. In the first letter, she urges James to learn to become a good king and to be cognisant of the whims of Lady Fortune. In the second, James is told about the evil to be found in courts and that court life is never governed by constancy or continuity. In the ‘Commonyng’ between the Papyngo ‘and hir Holye Executoris’, three wicked birds – magpie, kite and raven – come to offer absolution to the Papyngo in exchange for her worldly goods (geir; Papyngo, 651). The Papyngo denounces these intruders, bequeathing her possessions to the poor, her heart to the king, her spirit to the queen of faerie and her tripe to the would-be confessors who, in fact, devour her.
The prologue of the Papyngo situates Lyndsay’s work within a familiar modesty topos. The speaker begins: ‘Suppose I had ingyne angelicall, / With sapience more than Salamonicall, / I not quhat mater put in memorie’ (Papyngo, 1–3). Striving to imitate the divinely inspired wisdom of Solomon, the earthly poet experiences a crisis of confidence and does not know what to commit to memory. These opening lines entice the reader to consider what is worthy of remembering and connect this ability with imagination and knowledge (understanding). The language and tone act as a memorial cue and the reader is directed to expect that the subject matter of the poem will be something worthy of recollecting. In order to get to that subject, the speaker creates a catena (chain) of imaginative prowess that stretches from the ‘poetis auld’ (Papyngo, 4) through ‘Chawceir, Gowerir, and Lidgate’, all of whom mastered the ‘bell of rethorick’ (Papyngo, 11–12), the inimitable works of Scottish writers such as ‘Kennedie […] Dunbar […] Rowle […] Holland’ (Papyngo, 16–21) and ‘Gawane Dowglas’ (Papyngo, 27) to the current court of James in which ‘schir James Inglis’ is known for ‘ballatts, farses’ and ‘plesand playis’ (Papyngo, 40–1) and where ‘Stewart of Lorne wyll carpe rycht curiouslie’ (Papyngo, 46). In this cacophony of poetic talent, the speaker suggests that ‘[s]o thocht I had ingyne (as I have none), / I watt nocht quhat to wryt’ (Papyngo, 55–6); the field seems saturated, such that there is ‘no thing left bot barrane stok and stone’ (Papyngo, 58). All that is left, then, is to present the ‘complaynt of ane woundit papyngo’ (Papyngo, 63). Such an image, memorable in its bathos, provides the imaginative impetus for the poem’s concern with national interests.
In the complaint section of the Papyngo, the narrator seeks to establish some of the key concerns of the poem, one of which is the idea of the literary example, or mirror. Telling the reader that he ‘refuse[d]’ ‘Prudent counsell’ contrary to ‘reassoun’ (Papyngo, 199–200), the narrator suggests that ‘Poetis, of me, haith mater to indyte’ (Papyngo, 203). The narrator recognises the potential for his commemoration as a figure of ‘Ambitioun’ (Papyngo, 201), whose legacy in verse becomes a ‘remembrance’ by which the reader can ‘yow defende frome sic unhappy chance’ (Papyngo, 218–19). As the narrator recognises his own memorial function, he immediately recalls the failings of his own capacity for memory as represented by prudent behaviour:
Quhydder that I wes stricken in extasie,
Or throuch one stark imagynatioun,
Bot it apperit in myne fantasie
I hard this dolent lamentatioun. (Papyngo, 220–3)
Here Lyndsay accentuates the ways in which emotional – or visionary – states interact with the composition of poetry by invoking the threefold model of the brain as it was conceptualised in medieval faculty psychology. I have discussed this model in relation to Bower’s commemoration of Fordun’s historiographical enterprise, showing how imaginativa facilitated reason and memory. However, here Lyndsay’s narrator pinpoints that either ‘extasie’ or ‘one stark imaginatioun’ acts as the catalyst for the poetical composition (fanastie) of the Papyngo’s lament. Drawing on the commonplace of the power of striking visual images, the sight of the ‘blude’ rushing out of the Papyngo whose ‘breist’ has ‘lychtit’ on ‘ane stob’ (Papyngo, 169) has proved potent enough to have an effect on the front cell of the brain (the phantasia or imaginative). In a process of reworking this image in the service of instruction, the narrator then imagines that ‘this bird did breve … / Hir counsale to the kyng’ (Papyngo, 225–6). Death therefore becomes a moment of counsel.
Continuing the emphasis on memory’s role in good counsel, at the beginning of the first epistle, which follows, the Papyngo commends the king’s own ‘marciall dedis’ as being ‘dyng of memorie’ (Papyngo, 230). Immediately following this, she leaves the king her ‘trew unfenyeit hart / To gydder with this cedull subsequent’. In her dealings with the ‘gled’ (the kite), the Papyngo once again reminds the reader of her ‘trew unfenyeit hart’ that ‘lyis in my memoryall’ (Papyngo, 767–8) and towards the end of her exchange with ‘hir Holye Executouris’, she repeats the gift of her heart, asking her executors to ‘speid … to the court, but tareyng, / And tak my hart, of perfyte portraiture, / And it present onto my soverane kyng’ (Papyngo, 1117–19). The Papyngo imagines that the king ‘wyll clois [her heart] in to one ryng’ (Papyngo, 1120). Drawing together the written document and the metaphorical seat of memoria, the Papyngo situates herself as an object of memory for the king that, so long as he pays attention to her remains, he will be able to ‘cancillat out of thy memorie’ the ‘offciairis’ who seek to guide the king in injustice (Papyngo, 249–52). Should the king ‘excers [his] office prudentlie’, the Papyngo suggests, then ‘poetis perpetuallie’ will ‘mak mentioun’ of his ‘vertew’ (Papyngo, 263–5). The Papyngo’s message is clear: the king is already worthy of memory, but he needs to govern well in order to be commemorated in perpetuity. The image of the prudent king wearing the memory of ambition and pride is particularly striking and it demonstrates James V’s own potential as an object of memory work. Not only does the ring symbolise the fate of the Papyngo, but the object on James’s person requires cognitive effort by those who view it and who must recall its significance.
The important remembrance for James and the
Papyngo’s readers is the prudence and good governance that should be enacted in the administration of the kingdom. This is reinforced in the
Papyngo through the Papyngo’s epistle to ‘hir Brether of Courte’ that they should ‘Imprent [her] fall in [their] memoriall’ (
Papyngo, 348). As he had done in the
Dreme, Lyndsay reuses the idea of stamping memory within the body such that ‘preterit tyme may be experience’ (
Papyngo, 364). This recognition that the past operates as a mode of instruction is then treated specifically in lines 409–611, in which the Papyngo highlights the theme of mutability specifically in relation to the court as she imagines that the ‘courte cheangeith, sumtyme with sic outrage, / That few or none may making resistance, / And sparis nocht the prince more than the paige, / As weill apperith be experience’ (
Papyngo, 409–12). That ‘experience’ is then set out as a series of stanzas that comment on the relatively recent history of the Stewart kings and their courts. James I is lauded as the ‘patroun of prudence / Gem of ingyne’ whose ‘vertew doith transcende [the Papyngo’s] fantasie’; yet he ‘wes pietouslie put down’ by false conspirators (
Papyngo, 430–6). The Papyngo describes how her ‘hart is peirst with panes for to pance’ on James III’s court in which ‘prudent lordis counsall wes refusit’, through which ‘Cochrame, with his companye’ held James ‘quyet, as he had bene inclusit’ (
Papyngo, 449, 455). Thomas Cochrane was a royal favourite of James III who succeeded in turning the king against his brothers Albany and Mar, but who ‘clam so heych’ that he was ‘stranglit to deith’ over ‘Lawder bryge’ by his enemies (
Papyngo, 468–70).
53See Noman Macdougall, ‘Thomas [Robert] Cochrane’, ODNB [accessed 25 October 2022]. That these distressing memories generate an emotional response that sorely wounds the Papyngo reminds the reader of the typical use of emotion to stimulate recollection, although here it is memory that evokes the pain that pierces the metaphorical seat of memory.
The problems of James III’s reign seem to give the Papyngo the most trouble as she laments, ‘Tyll putt in forme that fait infortunat, / And mortall change, perturbith myne ingyne’ (
Papyngo, 472–3). In outlining the disruption to her intellectual faculty (
ingyne) through writing the past, the Papyngo draws a direct comparison with Scotland’s poet-king, James I, whom she has described as the ‘Gem of ingyne’. James’s
Kingis Quair (
c. 1424) had concerned itself with the role of trained memory in the delineation of model kingship, but, where James’s intellect and deployment of the
ars memoria had resulted in a reputation for the exercise of prudent kingship, the Papyngo expresses an anxiety about her own abilities, which appear diminished by literary endeavour.
54See Elliott, Remembering Boethius, pp. 123–43. The effects are physical and intellectual as she struggles to reconcile the desire for James to have ‘bene … confortit / With sapience of the prudent Salomone’ and the recognition that, in this case, the past cannot be reshaped:
Quhat suld I wys, remedie was thare none:
At morne, ane king, with sceptour, sweird and croun,
Att evin, ane dede, deformit carioun. (Papyngo, 483–5)
This resignation leads the Papyngo to her final example from James V’s family, that of his father, James IV, the ‘potent prince’ and ‘gentyll king’ (Papyngo, 487). James IV is lauded in the Papyngo’s Epistle as the ‘myrrour of humylitie, / Lode sterne, and lampe of libiralytie’ under whom ‘justice did prevaill’ (Papyngo, 491–3). In eulogising James IV, the Papyngo not only recollects the cultivation of a particular kind of courtly culture that cemented Scotland’s ‘fame’ throughout Europe, but she also thinks about the ways in which the consolidation of monarchical power within Scotland’s own borders was achieved, notably through the bringing to heel of the ‘savage Iles’ who ‘Durste nocht rebell’ against this king (Papyngo, 500, 494, 496). Yet, it is through James’s ‘awin wylfull mysgovernance’, rather than ‘the vertew of Inglis ordinance’ (Papyngo, 512–13), that this golden age is ‘Distroyit’ on ‘Flodoun feilde’ (Papyngo, 511, 507). The Papyngo refuses ‘at lenth it put in memorie’ (Papyngo, 517), presumably because the proximity of the event to her composition rendered that redundant; the Papyngo could assume that this was in living memory for at least some of her audience. Yet, it is also possible that the event was still too emotionally distressing to be filtered through reason to memory and poetic arrangement. It is at this point that the Parrot demands that her ‘brether, marke, in your remembrance, / Ane myrrour of those mutabiliteis’ (Papyngo, 521–2). Despite having been regarded as a mere parrot at the opening of the poem, the Papyngo’s rhetorical skill has reshaped recent Stewart history as a series of vignettes that demonstrate the necessity of good counsel to guide James V’s exercise of prudent governance. One of the Papyngo’s final exhortations to her fellow courtiers is to ‘serve [their] prince with enteir hart trewlie’ (Papyngo, 602), recalling much earlier writers’ commendations of those members of the nobility who were able to set aside personal ambition in service of the best interests of the kingdom.
The Tetsament of the Papyngo is clearly a text in which Lyndsay demonstrates an interest in national memory and which draws on Scotland’s recent past to envisage its future stability. The first half of the poem very much thinks about the usefulness of reshaping that past for a courtly audience who were responsible for the governance of the kingdom, although the second half of the poem, which imagines the discussion between the Papyngo and her ‘Holye Executouris’ directs its attention to the calls for religious reforms that would loom large through the sixteenth century. In this, there are clear parallels with the Dreme in which James V’s ability to govern well is directly linked to the ability of those in positions of institutional power more broadly – the court and the church – to act in service to the kingdom rather than fall prey to their own desires and ambitions. These discussions of nation, then, are concerned less with Anglo-Scottish relations of the fourteenth century and more with the internal politics of Scotland as a locus of collective identity, although they are tempered by the recent memory of Flodden. The change in thinking, and understanding, the nation in Lyndsay’s early poems seems to move from a memory of violent resistance to the power of moral force, narrated through the body of the monarch and the objects of memory associated with it.
Where the texts that I have examined in previous chapters look back to the Wars of Independence and rely on anti-English feeling as a way of establishing common identity among Scottish audiences, Lyndsay’s early poetry seeks to locate Scotland’s sense of itself directly in the figure of the king. Through personal address and the exploitation of personal memory, Lyndsay reimagines the recent past as a way of drawing together Scottish history and literary heritage. Through the literary forms of the dream and the complaint, Lyndsay’s
Dreme and
Papyngo demonstrate the relationship between memory and creativity; both forms offer exaggerated and distorted representations of the past that become powerful memorial images through their vivid recollections. Deploying Remembrance as a guide in the
Dreme enables Lyndsay to impress the importance of memory to his poetics of prudence, while the legal and epistolary modes of the
Papyngo signal Lyndsay’s own confidence in the young king’s abilities to respond to, and learn from, diplomatic practice. For Lyndsay, then, in contrast to the desire for continuity shown by other writers in this study, the pressing practice of national memory is one of change. Sir David Lyndsay’s poetry from the 1520s and 1530s was, as Janet Hadley Williams has argued, ‘an important influence on the young James V’s development and on the ways in which the king was perceived by his realm’.
55Hadley Williams, ‘David Lyndsay and the Making of James V’, p. 202. Through works such as the
Dreme and the
Papyngo, Lyndsay sought to furnish his readers with a constructed memory that imagined the king as a specific locus of communal identity. In the next chapter, my focus shifts to consider
The Complaynt of Scotland, a translation and reworking of Alain Chartier’s early fifteenth-century text,
Le Quadrilogue Invectif. Written
c. 1548 and printed in Paris in 1550, the
Complaynt specifically draws on the craft of memory to express an increased concern with the dangers of forgetting at a point where Scotland’s security was once again under threat, not only from the English but also from members of the Scottish community itself.