Conclusion: Making Stories, Making Memories

By 1542, relations between Henry and James had completely broken down and, at this point, Henry issued his Declaration, in which he carefully raised the spectre of past Anglo-Scottish relations through his deployment of the Galfridian myth of Brutus. In seeking to bring the mythic past to bear on contemporary diplomatic relations, Henry followed Edward I in arguing that Scotland, rather than being a sovereign nation, was a vassal of the English king.4The full title of Henry’s text is A Declaration, conteyning the iust causes and consyderations of this present warre with the Scottis, wherin also appereth the trewe and right title, that the kinges most royall maiesty hath to the souerayntie of Scotland. London, 1542. In November of that year, Henry launched a major raid into south-west Scotland, defeating the Scots at the Battle of Solway Moss. By December 1542, Scotland once again faced an all-too-familiar situation; two weeks after Solway Moss, James V died, leaving his seven-day-old daughter, Mary – his only heir – now Queen of Scots. The prospect of having such a young successor to the Scottish crown must have struck a chord with those able to remember the succession of Mary’s father in 1513, and, as Joanna Martin has noted, by the early sixteenth century, the ‘succession of infant, child and adolescent Stewart kings, all of whom had to be carefully raised to the duties of government, stretched back over a century and seems to have had a strong hold on the cultural memory’.5Martin, Kingship and Love, p. 177. John Knox would remark in his anti-Marian History of the Reformation in Scotland (1586–87) that, following the death of James V, ‘all men lamented that the realm was left without a male to succeed’, although, as Jenny Wormald reminds us, ‘the mid-sixteenth century saw an astonishing rash of women rulers’ that shows Knox’s propaganda for what it is.6John Knox, The history of the reformation of religion within the realm of Scotland … Together with the life of the author, and several curious pieces wrote by him … By the Reverend Mr. John Knnox … To which is added I. An Admonition to England and Scotland … by Antoni Gilby II. The first and second books of discipline (Glasgow, 1761), Bk 1, p. 75. Jenny Wormald, Mary, Queen of Scots: A Study in Failure (1988; repr. Edinburgh: John Donald, 2017), p. 35. Alongside the youthfulness of James’s heir, the added issue of a female ruler might also have carried echoes of the death of Alexander III in 1286 and the ill-fated succession of the Maid of Norway, whose death precipitated the Great Cause and had, in part, led to the beginning of the first Scottish War of Independence. But history did not repeat itself. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Stewart hold on the Scottish throne meant that there were no immediate internal rivals to Mary’s succession. Yet, as Roger Mason notes, the young Mary’s status ‘opened up opportunities for other royal families to further their dynastic interests through the promise of Mary’s hand in marriage’.7Roger Mason, ‘Dame Scotia and the Commonweal: Vernacular Humanism in The Complaynt of Scotland (1550)’, The Mediaeval Journal, 10.1 (2020), 129–50 (131).

The Battle of Solway Moss precipitated almost a decade of what Lorna Hutson has described as an ‘explicitly punitive, deliberately brutal’ English campaign to conquer and subdue Scotland.8Lorna Hutson, England’s Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), p. 8. Hutson’s book appeared after this book was completed and I have not been able to engage with its arguments as fully as it deserves. During the early years of Mary’s minority, a series of conflicts known as the ‘Rough Wooings’ (1544–50) saw Henry VIII and, at one point, Francis I of France seek to absorb Scotland into their respective dynastic empires. In a campaign that has been equated to Edward I’s invasions of Scotland in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Henry VIII sought to coerce the Scottish administration into a betrothal between Henry’s son, Edward Prince of Wales (who became King Edward VI in January 1547), and the young Scottish queen. Marcus Merriman notes that this war took place in two stages: the first phase, from November 1543 to June 1546, under Henry VIII, and then a second phase, directed by Edward’s Protector, the duke of Somerset, from September 1547 to March 1550.9Marcus Merriman, The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542–1551 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), p. 6. Merriman’s account provides the fullest discussion of the Rough Wooings. As Edward was Henry’s only male heir, the significance of this match cannot be underestimated. Mirroring the short reign of the Maid of Norway, during which Margaret had been betrothed to the then Prince of Wales, the future Edward II, a union of this kind would have meant that any children of the marriage would inherit both kingdoms, presumably with Scotland subordinate to its larger and more aggressive English partner. Henry’s campaigns, followed by those of Somerset, devastated Scotland; for example, English reports attest to the violence that saw the inhabitants of Dunbar burnt while they slept, and abbeys and villages ‘brent, raced, and cast downe’.10A collection of state papers, relating to affairs in the reigns of King Henry VIII. King Edward VI. Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Samuel Haynes (London, 1740), pp. 52–4. See Hutson’s discussion of Edward Seymour’s invasion of Scotland; England’s Insular Imagining, pp. 22–4. William Patten’s The Expedicion into Scotlande recounts that along the sands of the Firth of Forth following Pinkie, ‘the dead bodyes lay as thik as a man may note cattel grasing in a full replenished pasture. The Ryuer ran al red with blood.’11William Patten, The Expedicion into Scotla[n]de of the most Woorthely Fortunate Prince Edward, Duke of Soomerset, Vncle Vnto our most Noble Souereign Lord Ye Ki[n]ges Maiestie Edvvard the. VI. Goouernour of Hys Hyghnes Persone, and Protectour of Hys Graces Realmes, Dominions [and] Subiectes made in the First Yere of His Maiesties most Prosperous Reign, and Set Out by Way of Diarie, by W. Patten Londoner (London, 1548), n.p.

In his Declaration, Henry claimed that the ‘present warre hath not proceded of any demaund’ of the English ‘right of superioritie, which the kings of Scottes haue alwais knowledged by homage and fealtie’ but, rather, the current situation ‘hath ben prouoked and occasioned vpon present matier of displeasure, present iniury, present wrong mynistred by the Nephieu to the Vncle most vnnaturally’ (n.p.). This insistence on the present appears to downplay the appeal to history that characterised much earlier historiography and documentary duelling in Anglo-Scottish relations. However, the Declaration then proceeds to comment at length on the ‘fact’ of English superiority and Scottish fealty as demonstrated ‘fyrst by historie, written […] as for confirmation of the trueth in memory’, second, by ‘instrumentes of homage made by the kynges of Scottes, and dyuers notable personages of Scotlande’ and, third, ‘by regesters and recordes iudicially and autentiquely made’ (n.p.). What follows is a detailed exposition of the centuries-old English claim to sovereignty over Scotland, which essentially rehashes Edward I’s argument that Scotland was a dependency of the English crown, proven by the Brutus origin myth but fleshed out with multiple examples of Scottish kings allegedly paying homage to their English superiors. The general tone of the Declaration rests on the familial links between the English and Scottish crowns, with Henry making repeated references to James V as his ‘Nephieu’. Here Henry appears to exploit the uncle–nephew motif of heroic literature and medieval romance, whereby a special and reciprocal relationship existed: an uncle’s duty to love, protect and avenge the nephew was to be mirrored by the nephew’s responsibilities to his uncle. This relationship, as presented in medieval romance, usually rested on maternal lineage, whereby the uncle was the mother’s brother and the nephew the sister’s son.13On this motif, see Thomas J. Garbáty, ‘The Uncle–Nephew Motif: New Light into Its Origins and Development’, Folklore, 88.2 (1977), 220–3. Such was the case between Henry and James.

The Complaynt of Scotland was the single piece of Scottish counter-propaganda to be printed contemporaneously with the situation it addresses. It has been described by its most recent editor, A.M. Stewart, as a ‘political propaganda pamphlet in a literary framework’ that functions simultaneously as ‘a nationalist document and social criticism’.14Compl. xxxiii. Extant in four printed copies, all survive without a title page that might provide evidence of authorship and place of publication. Stewart identified Robert Wedderburn at the most likely author and suggests that the text was most likely printed in Paris in 1550, and I follow Stewart’s assessment of this in my discussion in this chapter.15See Compl. viii–xi. Written in the early years of Mary Stewart’s minority and dedicated to her mother, Mary of Guise, who, in 1554, replaced James Hamilton, second earl of Arran, as regent for the young queen, the Complaynt uses the literary dream vision to comment on Scotland’s relations with England, the failings of the three estates and the need for strong, effective governance within Scotland. The familial aspect that Henry VIII deployed in his dealings with Scotland is one that Wedderburn’s Complaynt makes distinct use of in depicting Scotland as the mother of her people, something which I will discuss further in this chapter. However, Wedderburn also draws on the recollective power of genealogy in his dedication of the Complaynt to Mary of Guise. Although Mary was the queen mother, at the point of Wedderburn’s dedication, she was not regent or governor – that privilege belonged to Arran – and the queen had recently been dispatched to France. In choosing to dedicate his text to Mary of Guise, Wedderburn seeks to emphasise the genealogical – or dynastic – concerns of the Complaynt. In this way, the dedication shores up Franco-Scottish alliances as much as the text thinks through the shared suffering of France and Scotland at the hands of the English. For those familiar with its source – Chartier’s text – the drawing together of collective French and Scottish experiences and memories could not be coincidental.

The opening sentence of the dedication immediately sets the tone and focus of Wedderburn’s subsequent text, as he refers to ‘the precius germe of [Mary’s] nobilite’ that generates not only ‘tendir leyuis of vertu’ but also ‘hoilsum frute of honour quhilk is ane immortal ande supernatural medicyne’ to the kingdom (Compl. 1). Here, Wedderburn emphasises the importance of nobility of blood; Mary is ‘nobil’ not only as a result of her ‘verteous verkis’ but also through being ‘nobil of genolligie, be rason that [she is] discendit of the maist vailȝeant princis that ar vndir the cape of hauyn’ (Compl. 2–3). To consolidate this, Wedderburn spends part of the dedication detailing the virtues of her relatives, including her descent from Godfrey de Bouillon (the pre-eminent leader of the First Crusade) before finally ‘rehers[ing]’ the ‘memor’ of Mary’s ‘nobil ande vailȝeant fadir’ (Compl. 4). He concludes that the ‘vailȝeant actis of [her] predecessours and [Mary’s own] grit prudens’ reveal that she is ‘ane rycht nobil, baytht of vertu and of genoligie’ (Compl. 5). Wedderburn thus undertakes the memory work of connecting past and present while intimately connecting Scottish future security to Scottish links with France, whose perceived nobility sits in stark contrast with the ‘rauisant volfis of ingland’ (Compl. 2). Wedderburn states that fervent devotion compels him to present Mary with ‘ane tracteit of the fyrst laubir of [his] pen’ (Compl. 5), and it is at this point that he refers to his own recollective project, which is the writing of the Complaynt. Wedderburn describes how he

Exploring the divisions within the three estates and the threat to Scotland from its English neighbour, the Complaynt suggests a simultaneous consideration of insular and broad ways of promoting national identity, which come both from the representation of Scotland as a community with a sense of self and from its wider relations with other countries. The literary models to which Wedderburn is indebted are particularly interesting here, as his text incorporates elements of dream vision, allegory and complaint. Rebecca Marsland has noted in her study of the literary complaint in medieval Scotland that Wedderburn’s Complaynt must be considered a central text in the sixteenth-century revival of the complaint genre necessitated by the complicated political situation from James IV’s death at Flodden through to James VI’s majority in 1583. Marsland also notes that Wedderburn’s text ‘appears to reject the [Scottish] models for complaint established over the fifteenth century’; rather, she suggests, the Complaynt is indebted to English ‘clamour’ literature that became increasingly popular through the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and relied on the topics, forms and language of judicial plaint for its validity.18Rebecca Marsland, ‘Complaint in Scotland, c. 1424–c. 1500’ (Unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2014), p. 57. The term ‘literature of clamour’ is Wendy Scase’s; Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 3.

Written in the aftermath of ‘Black Sunday’ – the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, 10 September 1547 – and during the most intense period of Anglo-Scottish warfare of the sixteenth century, the Complaynt laments the ‘grite affliction quhilk occurit on oure realme in September.m. v.xlvii ȝeris on the feildis beside mussilburgh’ (Compl. 17). Little more than three decades since Flodden, Pinkie Cleugh was another humiliating defeat for the Scots, which left thousands dead and saw fifteen hundred Scots taken prisoner.19See Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1991; repr. 1992), pp. 206–7. In the dedicatory epistle to the ‘excellent, ande illustir Marie queen of Scotlande, the margareit and perle of princessis’ (Compl. 1), the Complaynt’s author makes reference to ‘our mortal ald enemeis’ – the English – who

There are five separate references to the ‘barns of Ayr’ in the Complaynt, suggesting this particular incident invented by Hary had become fixed in cultural memory, or, at least, certainly in Wedderburn’s. All five references appear in Chapter XI, in which Dame Scotia focuses on refuting the claim of English overlordship of Scotland. In the first mention, Dame Scotia states that any Scot who

In between these two lengthier references to English duplicity working against the Scots, Dame Scotia reminds her three sons (and the reader) of this episode in relation to discussions of other examples of violent conquest that are contained in the ‘croniklis of al cuntreis’ (Compl. 73), whereby the destruction that ‘kyng eduard did at the bernis of ayre’ (Compl. 73) becomes the touchstone. The two other references occur when Dame Scotia describes how ‘sextus tarquinus vsit his father counsel for he distroyit and sleu al the principal lordis of gabine as kyng eduard did to the lordis of scotland at the bernis of ayre’ (Compl. 74), and when she comments on how Henry VIII’s cruelty to the Irish and the Welsh should act as an example to Scotland because Henry employed the same approach towards Ireland and Wales as ‘sextus tarquinus exsecut on the cite of gabine, and as kyng eduard exsecutit on the barrons of scotland at the bernis of ayre’ (Compl. 74). There are two particularly notable aspects to Wedderburn’s use of the Barns of Ayr episode here. The first is that the linguistic parallels between Wedderburn and Hary strongly suggest that the former directly used the latter and that he assumed that his readers would be familiar enough with the Wallace, or at least the Barns story, to call to mind the older text.23Wedderburn’s image of cords aligned ‘tua and tua’ is strongly reminiscent of Hary’s description that I discussed in Chapter 4; see p. 000. The second is that Wedderburn relies on verbal repetition throughout his own text, with little variance in the description of the Barns of Ayr episode. This duplication is a broader feature of Wedderburn’s Complaynt, and throughout it acts as a memory aid for the reader, forcing them to repeatedly think back and learn by encountering the same text or event multiple times.

As with Hary’s Wallace and Bower’s Coupar Angus prologue, though, the danger posed by the English may not only be a military one. Despite his statement that realms are not conquered by words but by blood, Wedderburn uses the Complaynt to consider the importance of textual memory. As mentioned above, the martial violence meted out by the English on the battlefields of Scotland was supported by a programme of ideological warfare, and the early sixteenth century saw numerous English pamphlets arguing for the union of the English and Scottish crowns (under an English ruler, of course). This campaign, as noted in Chapter 2, had been going on since Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittaniae and throughout the fourteenth-century Wars of Independence, but under Henry VIII, and then the duke of Somerset, it seemed as if this ideological warfare was, once again, gaining ground. The Complayner responds directly to some of these arguments and is quick to counteract any claims by the English to suzerainty; for example, in Chapter 10 he harshly refutes the ‘prophesies of merlyne’ to which ‘the inglismen gifis vane credens’ (Compl. 64). In noting that the English ‘gifis ferme credit’ to these prophecies, the Complayner argues that the ‘oratours of Ingland […] hes set furtht ane buik quhair be thai intende to preue that Scotland vas ane colone of ingland quhen it vas first inhabit’ (Compl. 64). According to the Complayner, these divinations are not the predictive visions of ‘ysaye Eechiel, Ieremie’ or ‘the euangel’ but, rather, the ‘prophane prophesies’ of a mythical figure and ‘vthir ald corruppit vaticinaris’ (Compl. 65). Wedderburn sought to malign Geoffrey’s history at the same time that the writer’s legacy and veracity were being debated in England, most notably by Polydore Vergil (1470–1555). However, Wedderburn is also careful not to discredit visions and prophecies per se, and, in attempting to discredit the divinations of Merlin, the Actor ‘rehers[es]’ the prophecy found in Higden’s Polychronicon which indicates that England shall conquered by the Danes, Saxons and Normans before finally being ‘conquest be the scottis’ (Compl. 67). Clearly, some visions were more dubious than others, and Wedderburn is cognisant of the memorial possibility of the dream vision throughout the Complaynt, where the main structural dream exists almost as an imagistic premonition that enables a reimagining of Scottish identity.

To an extent the Complaynt’s view of Scottish nationhood is determined by the inflammatory anti-English invective that appears in texts such as the Wallace, but the text also highlights the perceived need for unity (tempered with godliness) among the people of Scotland in order to deflect English aspirations to the Scottish throne, a union of which would be like a marriage between ‘scheip and voluis’ (Compl. 84). Unlike Hary’s vehement attack on the English in the Wallace and rather more like Lyndsay’s Dreme, the Complaynt makes a case for a self-reflexive resolution to the question of Scottish nationhood, or what A.M. Stewart describes as an ‘understanding of patriotism in a Ciceronian moral sense’.24Compl. xxxiv. In this regard, the Actor understands Scottishness as loyalty to a concordia ordinum, a need for unselfishness, concord and unity in defence of the commonweal; such a stance marks the development of a concern about good governance that has a long tradition in medieval Scottish literature.25Roger Mason’s article on the Complaynt examines the debate that the text significantly contributed to ‘a vigorous Scottish response to contemporary British unionist propaganda’. But Mason also draws attention to the Ciceronian elements of the text and the use that Wedderburn makes of humanist learning in support of the Scottish patriotic cause; ‘Dame Scotia and the Commonweal’, 129–50. This self-reflexive framework comes to the fore in the framing of the English threat to the Scots and in the anti-unionist stance of Wedderburn’s text; the threat of English invasion is not the principal cause of Dame Scotia’s plight but, rather, a direct consequence of Scotland’s failure to defend and sustain itself. There is no denying that the English have colonial designs on Scotland, as Wedderburn repeatedly reminds his reader, but, according to the Complaynt, it is the lack of unity among Scotland’s own people that renders the kingdom vulnerable to the power of its ‘ald enemies’ (Compl. 1). Where Lyndsay’s Dreme focused on the king as the country’s primary stabilising force and the one responsible for the governance of the realm, the Complaynt emphasises the responsibilities of the three estates – and by extension the common weal, in the sense of being a synonym for all the monarch’s subjects – in providing for, and ensuring, Scotland’s health and prosperity (its common weal) alongside its liberty.26I am grateful to Roger Mason for discussion of this and for providing me with a copy of his plenary paper: ‘The Idea of the Common Weal in Sixteenth-century Scotland’, 16th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 2021). See also Roger A. Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998). In this way, the common weal becomes a key organising idea in the Complaynt and Wedderburn uses its varied senses as part of a project of creating common understanding among his readers. We might find parallels to this in Lyndsay’s political ideas in his later drama, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, which was performed first in 1540 and then in a significantly revised form in 1552. In Ane Satyre, the figure of John the Common Weal – also found in Lyndsay’s Dreme – once again appears in want of ‘warme clais’.27Sir David Lyndsay, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, in Medieval Drama: An Anthology, ed. by Greg Walker (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), pp. 534–623, line 2463. John also threatens that, unless the Three Estates put themselves ‘in ordour, / … John the Common-weil man beg on the bordour’.28Lyndsay, Ane Satyre, lines 2464–5. At the end of the play, John has been welcomed into the Parliament; divested of his ragged clothes, he is provided with ‘ane gay garmoun’ and assumes his place participating in the production of legislation regarded as essential to the reform of the common weal.29Lyndsay, Ane Satyre, line 3794.

This focus, alongside other mid sixteenth-century texts that address the same concerns, suggests shifting ways in which Scotland might identify itself as a nation and differing perspectives on who was involved in determining and preserving that identity. Dame Scotia is explicit in her final exhortation to her ‘thre sonnis’, urging them to

From this discord and lack of good governance, the Actor deduces that the ‘diuyne indignation, hed decretit ane extreme ruuyne on oure realme’ (Compl. 18). For the Actor, the only way to return to good governance and repel the English, who now occupy a position akin to a plague, is to ‘retere fra oure vice, and alse to be cum vigilant to seik haisty remeide & medycyne at hym quha gyffis al grace and comfort, to them that ar maist destitute of mennis supple’ (Compl. 18). In ways similar to Hary’s presentation of William Wallace as Scotland’s ‘ramede’, the Actor situates God as the ultimate salvation for a sixteenth-century Scotland in need of reform. The spiritual sickness afflicting the three estates (Dame Scotia’s sons) has resulted in a secular punishment of a plague of potential English dominance. The chapters that precede the Actor’s dream of Dame Scotia chastising her sons present a sermon-like call to repentance and national self-fashioning through a return to godliness. In particular, Chapter 4 ‘conferris the passages of the third cheptour of ysaye, vitht the affliction of Scotland’ (Compl. 22) and highlights passages from Deuteronomy and Leviticus in which God punishes the Children of Israel who turn away from him. The Actor laments that Scotland has ‘sauen oure feildis to the behufe of oure enemies, ve haue fled fast fra oure enemies […] ande alse ve maye persaue that ve haue beene scurgit vitht the plagis that ar contenit in the third cheptour of esaye’ (Compl. 23). This equation of Scotland with Jerusalem and Judea is to be taken quite literally; the Actor argues that the ‘passage of the text nedis nocht ane allegoric exposition, for the experiens of that passage is ouer manifest in oure cuntre’ (Compl. 23).

In Chapter 6 of the Complaynt, the chapter known as the ‘Monologue recreatyue’, the Actor comments that writing the first five chapters has the effect of making his body ‘be cum imbecille and verye’ (Compl. 29). Here the Actor demonstrates the physical effects of excessive ‘mind-work’: the Actor’s ‘rason’ becomes ‘fatigat’ and ‘al [his] membris be cum impotent’ (Compl. 29). The impotence of the ‘membris’ directly notes how excessive cognition induces tiredness, which has direct repercussions on that same cognitive function. Here the Actor demonstrates familiarity with the general model of cognition, which understood the second cell of the brain (the vis cogitativa) as the rational component, which interpreted and made judgements about information received by the first cell (the sensus communis).32See, for example, Anthony J. Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Perception: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). If tiredness meant that the ‘membris’ could not receive sense perception correctly (they are ‘impotent’), and the ‘rason’ was so fatigued that it could not process perception, the consequence is that the third cell of the brain – memory – could not function correctly either, because there was nothing to be stored, or that the material to be stored was in some way deficient. This feeling of tiredness exists separate from the condition of sleep, during which it was thought that the five senses were shut off completely and the only active part of the brain was imagination. There is also a moral quality to this tiredness, because not only does the body become weary but also too much writing has the effect of producing an emotional response; the Actor comments that his ‘spreit be cum sopit in sadnes’, understood as sorrowfulness or, possibly, melancholy (Compl. 29). This response is partly connected to the broad considerations of the ethics of sleep in the Middle Ages, which viewed untimely sleep as bad for both physical and spiritual health, and the health of the community.33See Megan G. Leitch, Sleep and Its Spaces in Middle English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), esp. pp. 91–150. On the relationship between melancholy and sloth in Scottish literature, see Ash-Irisarri, ‘Mnemonic Frameworks in The Buke of the Chess’, pp. 41–60, and pp. 000–00 in this book.

This untimely sleep occupies the Actor’s mind at the point when he recognises the effects of his ‘solist and attentiue laubirs’ (Compl. 29). He seeks to avoid ‘the euyl accidentis that succedis fra the onnatural dais sleip’ by choosing to get some fresh air, walking to the ‘greene hoilsum feildis’ to ‘resaue the sueit fragrant smel’ (Compl. 29). This ‘glaidful recreatione’ (Compl. 29) results in the Actor’s meeting with the shepherds, who provide a lengthy description of the planetary spheres and then proceed to a story-telling and musical interlude. At the end of this restorative experience, the Actor purposes to ‘returne to the toune […] to proceed in the compiling of [his] beuk’ (Compl. 53). As he does so, however, ‘morpheus that slepye gode, assailȝeit al [his] membris, ande oppressit [his] dul melancolius nature […] quhar for on neid forse i was constrenȝeit to be his sodiour’ (Compl. 53).34The linguistic parallels to Lyndsay’s Dreme here are striking: ‘Constranit I was to sleip withouttin more’ (Dreme, 145). The Actor then, rather comically, ‘purposit to preue ane prettic, i closet my een, to see gyf i culd leuk throucht my ee liddis’, but his ‘experiens vas sune expirit for tua houris lang’, during which time he has a ‘hauy melancolius dreyme’ which ‘perturbit the foure quartaris’ of his ‘dullit brane’ (Compl. 53–4). At the beginning of the dream itself, a ‘lady of excellent extracione ande of ancient genolygie’ appears ‘makkand ane melancolius cheir’ for the ‘grite violens, that sche hed sustenit & indurit’ (Compl. 54). It is immediately clear that this visionary woman is not a guide like the figures encountered by Gray in the prologue to Scalacronica, Wallace in Book 7 of Hary’s poem, or Dame Remembrance in Lyndsay’s Dreme. The Actor’s description here suggests something altogether more despairing and the strong emotion of the Actor occasions the visionary sleep in which the afflictions of Scotland that the Actor has been writing about – and which have prompted his weariness – are made manifest in the ‘melancolius cheir’ of the lady.

The lady’s hair might be the ‘cullour of fine gold’, reminiscent of the women in Hary’s Wallace and Lyndsay’s Dreme, but it is ‘feltrit & trachlit out of ordour’ (Compl. 54). Her crown, likewise, is ‘hingand & brangland’ (shaking) so that it ‘vas lyik to fal doune fra hyr hede to the cald eird’ (Compl. 54). Her shield is engraved with ‘ane rede rampand lyon in ane feild of gold, bordryt about viht doubil floure delicis’ (Compl. 54). If the reader had been in any doubt as to the identity of this figure, the description of the Royal Standard of the king of Scots ensures that the lady is to be understood as a personification of the Scottish kingdom.35Since the time of Alexander II (1198–1249), the royal shield had contained ‘a ruddy lion ramping in his field of tressured gold’; Charles J. Burnett, ‘Outward Signs of Majesty, 1535–1540’, in Stewart Style, pp. 289–302 (294). The lion on the shield, however, is not the one that might be recalled as the victorious symbol used to denote the Scottish kingdom but is described as being ‘hurt in mony placis of his body’ (Compl. 54). Like the lady who is subsequently identified as the ‘affligit lady, dame scotia’ (Compl. 56), this injured lion suggests all is not well with Scotland. It pre-empts the description of Scotia’s appearance in greater detail. Scotia’s ‘mantil’ is of a ‘meruelouse ingenius fassoune’ and the Dreamer describes it in some detail:

The clothing of Dame Scotia is thus a very literal representation of the three estates who are personified later in the Complaynt as Scotia’s three sons. As I have suggested is the case with the description of the planetary spheres in Lyndsay’s Dreme, the sense here is that the ordered mantle depicts the harmonious ‘natural’ state of an idealised Scottish politics. This is reinforced not only by the shepherd’s descriptions of the planetary spheres in the earlier ‘Monologue Recreatyue’ but also by the Dreamer’s account that the ‘mantil’ had ‘bene maid & vrocht in ald tymys, be the prudent predecessours of this foyr said lady’ (Compl. 55). The recollection of the predecessors of Dame Scotia invites the reader to perform memory work and successfully remember the past prosperity of Scotland by reconstructing a mental image of an intact and clean mantle. This recollection requires a journey into the past intimated by Wedderburn in the Complaynt but remains decisively at the general level, such that the text deals in the tropes of memory but never quite articulates specificity beyond the suggestion of Scotland’s prosperous sovereignty that can be determined by the powerful tie of the lineage of the Scottish monarchy. The Complaynt reminds the reader of the importance of heritage and lineage, and the importance of the moral character of prudence in the good governance of a kingdom. Scotia’s mantle is marked not only as a map or a diagram of a social system, but it is also ‘grauit’ with Scotland’s memories, which are the very fabric of her appearance. The implication is that the audience should be able to read Scotland’s collective identity on Dame Scotia’s clothing, just as it might read its past through chronicles and other texts. This metaphor is distinctly linked to medieval memoria; as Mary Carruthers notes, memorial images were often grouped together, linked by a catena or chain. Even the texta itself, she suggests, with its literal meaning of ‘something woven’, demonstrates the connection between these embroidered images’ representations of the past and their present significances.36Carruthers, Book of Memory, p. 78.

Having established this idealised view of Dame Scotia’s intricately constructed mantle, with its representations of social structures and Scotland’s heritage, Wedderburn immediately shifts the reader’s perspective to the present condition of this social fabric, demonstrating the passage of time which makes remembering the past meaningful. Like the ‘rayment’ of Lyndsay’s Iohn the Common Weill in both the Dreme and Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Dame Scotia’s cloth is ‘reuyn & raggit in mony placis’, so that the Dreamer can only ‘skantly […] persaue the stories ande figures that hed bene grauit vrocht ande brodrut in ald tymmis’ (Compl. 55). Concluding his description of Dame Scotia’s apparel, the Actor writes:

While the description of Dame Scotia (Compl. 54–5) is closely modelled on Chartier’s depiction of France, the image of her mantle also recalls Boethius’ vision of Lady Philosophy, whose gown is embroidered top and bottom.37For Chartier’s description of France, see Alain Chartier, Le Quadrilogue Invectif, ed, by Florence Bouchet (Paris: Champion, 2011), pp. 10–14. Twomey describes Dame Scotia as ‘a nationalist version of Beothius’s Lady Philosophy’; ‘Pastoral Encyclopedism’, p. 97. Unlike Philosophy’s clothing, however, Dame Scotia’s vestments are quite clearly perishable and she exists as an admonishing, as opposed to a consolatory, figure. Finally allowed to speak, Dame Scotia, with ‘lamentabil regrettis’ and ‘mony salt teyris’, contemplates the ‘vidthrid barran feildis, quhilkis in vther tymis hed bene fertile in al prosperiteis’ (Compl. 55). She observes her three sons:

Seeing her three sons in this ‘langorius stait’, Dame Scotia reproaches them ‘inuectyuely of ther neclegens couuardeis ande ingratitude vsit contrar hyr’ (Compl. 55–6). Reinforcing the damning indictment of the chapters before the ‘monologue recreatyuve’ and the dream, Dame Scotia expounds that the reason why her clothing is unreadable and ineffective is that its fabric has been abandoned by those who should maintain it: Scotia’s three sons. The neglected text of Scotia’s mantle comes to symbolise the mistreated land of Scotland and the occlusion of memory through the passage of time and negligence of duty. Dame Scotia recalls how she was in ‘maist fortunate prosperite’, but is now ‘inuadit ande affligit be my ald mortal enemies’, by the ‘maist extreme assaltis that her pouuer can exsecute’ (Compl. 56). These sons, however, have ‘schauen them self ingrate dissymilit ande couuardis in the iust deffens of my veil fayr’ (Compl. 56) and, in doing so, they have allowed Scotland to become an easy target for the English. The Scots need not worry about the English trying to ‘scour out’ (Wall. 7. 16) or ‘extinct’ (Compl. 2) their people and their memories, the Complaynt argues: by not taking care of the mantle, the Scots are guilty of this themselves. As Dame Scotia says to her sons: ‘ȝe ar the aduerse party of my prosperite’ (Compl. 58).

That the three estates are represented as Scotia’s sons draws parallels with the Scota foundation myth and also with the vision of Margaret of Scotland in Bower’s Scotichronicon that I discussed in Chapter 3. It suggests a continued tradition of thinking about legitimacy and sovereignty in Scotland that is tied to origins, antiquity and, importantly, family and memory. Moreover, rather than the more usual image of the body politic, here the Complaynt presents its readers with a ‘family politic’ – a mother and her sons as constituent parts of a kingdom – and an image of the social fabric of Scotland. Dame Scotia asks why her sons ‘haue […] no pytie of me ȝour natural mother or quhy haue ȝe no pytie of ȝour selfis?’ (Compl. 57). She also reminds them that they ‘ar sa diuidit amang’ themselves that they ensure their ‘auen distructione’ and the ‘miserabil subiectione’ of their mother (Compl. 58). While Henry VIII’s rhetoric employed the uncle–nephew trope to admonish James V, Wedderburn stresses the child’s remembering its responsibilities to both its parents and its siblings; the reader is encouraged to extrapolate the domestic image’s applicability to the kingdom, whereby Scotland is understood as the mother and the commonweal as the children. Where Lyndsay’s Dreme had emphasised the good education and counsel of the king as the prerequisite for a stable, prosperous nation, the Complaynt prescribes vigilance and hard work for all Scots for the preservation of the community, something to which Lyndsay would turn in the second act of his Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. The Complaynt is not an advisory piece as such; rather, it is a clear invective on the failings of its readers, who must necessarily identify themselves as one of Scotia’s three sons. Addressed to all Scots, whatever their societal position, the Complaynt demonstrates their responsibilities to each other as a national community, a social fabric. In her reproach to her sons, Scotia specifically highlights the importance of memory. She asks: ‘quhy remember ȝe nocht, that nature hes oblist ȝou, til auance the salute, and deffens of ȝour public veil?’ (Compl. 57). The emphasis on obligation here demonstrates both a legal and a moral duty to play an active part in working for the prosperity of the realm. That this ‘natural loue’ and responsibility to one’s ‘natiue cuntre’ should be ‘inseperablye rutit in [their] hartis’ is further confirmed by Scotia’s argument that the subject is reliant on the kingdom, just as a child is reliant on its mother:

All that is left for the Scots if they choose not to remember their responsibilities is misery and subjection to the English, and their only hope of remedy is to return to the law of God. In Chapter 9 of the Complaynt, Dame Scota exhorts her sons to ‘praye to relief ȝou of ȝour afflictione’ (Compl. 59), but this turn to God must be tempered with putting ‘ȝour handis to verk to help ȝour selfis’ in order that God ‘sal be mersyful to ȝou’ (Compl. 59). In true Scottish fashion, the Complaynt draws on the story of the Maccabees as a chosen people, positing them as an example for the Scots. At this juncture, the use of this particular image is telling. Considering how much nationalist writing in late medieval Scotland aligns the Scots with the Maccabees, it is likely that the parallel would have been familiar to the Complaynt’s readers, but Wedderburn inverts the story to suggest that the Scots could be like the Maccabees but, to do so, they need to reform. The way to do this, Wedderburn explicates, is for the three estates to ‘expel discentione discord, and ald fede that ringis amang ȝout […] and then ȝe sal triumphe contrar ȝour enemeis’ (Compl. 137). Here the Maccabees do not encode a tradition of violent resistance as they had in the texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; rather, they act as a memory of national solidarity as a mode of triumph. Dame Scotia thus asks her sons to remember the examples she has given them of ‘nobil romans’ and how they ‘concurrit to giddir in accord for defens of there natyue cuntre’ (Compl.140), hoping that this memory will

The dream vision in Wedderburn’s Complaynt never finishes; the last words are with Dame Scotia and her continuing plea to the Scots to see themselves as a community and to act morally in such a way that Scotland is able to defend itself against its old enemies. Like Lyndsay’s vision of Scotland, the land can be fertile and Scotland can sustain itself if the Scots govern it well. For the Actor, however, good governance is not just the responsibility of the monarch but is the legal and moral duty of every Scot. Moreover, as Wedderburn’s repeated allusions to lineage, family and the chains linking past, present and future indicate, the health of the nation depends on memory. In this way, remembering the past not only assumes meaning in the present but also becomes the therapeutic potential that can direct the future.

The preceding six chapters have explored a range of texts, from Gray’s Scalacronica to Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland. All of these works demonstrate that, between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, memory informed, permeated and enhanced textual articulations of Scottish identity at specific moments in the history of the nation. They draw together several modes of memory – genealogy, historiography, invented memory, enforced forgetting, dream vision – to construct a framework of collective national imagining. The memorial modes reach across both Latin and vernacular texts and indicate a sustained engagement with remembering and rewriting the past throughout late medieval Scotland. For texts such as Gray’s Scalacronica, Holland’s Buke of the Howlat and Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle, borders – physical and psychological – provide a focus for the cultural production of national memory; a border’s presence, and permeability, becomes a distinctive feature of the literary imagination. In quite different ways, Gray and Holland see the Anglo-Scottish border as a dominant marker of identity. For Gray, the possibility of a Marcher identity – complementary to, but never quite more significant than his status as ‘English’ – prompts a reimagining of personal and literary identity. Gray’s negotiations rely on deploying mnemonic games for an audience who must use their own memory to make sense of the literary puzzles Gray foregrounds in his prologue. For Holland, the symbolism of the Anglo-Scottish border becomes a strategy for commemorating his patron’s family at a point in time when their favour with the Stewart king, James II, was very much on the wane, if not obliterated. Writing at both temporal and geographic distance from the Douglas domination of the Borders, time and space become productive sites of memory for Holland, who also uses the opportunity to look towards contemporary Scottish divisions – primarily linguistic – to interrogate the intersection of personal, local and regnal affiliations. Holland was not the only writer of early to mid-fifteenth-century Scotland to take an interest in articulating the multiple communal identities at play in the kingdom. Andrew of Wyntoun’s accounts of tensions among Scottish regions demonstrate that representing a nation assumed a complex negotiation of identities in which the historian’s definitions of the linguistic marker ‘Scottis’ occasionally slips from referring to those who spoke Gaelic to those who would commonly refer to their language as ‘Inglis’. Yet, the ideological sense of who can be classed as ‘Scottis’ has a broader geographical reach when Wyntoun refers to the completeness of Scottish territories at the end of Robert II’s reign. Here the sense of ‘Scottis’ is more capacious than categorising people by linguistic distinction. While the definitive shift from ‘Inglis’ to ‘Scottis’ in lowland conceptions of the language is usually tied to Gavin Douglas’s quite conscious distinction between the ‘langage of the Scottis natioun’ and that of ‘Inglys’, the antecedents of this can be seen in texts such as the Original Chronicle, written almost a century before Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, where they signal the many communities that constituted the realm.39Douglas, Eneados, I. Prol. 103, 109.

Family and national identity are bridged in narratives of national origin, linking the present Scotland with a historical and mythical past as memorial repetition is shaped by different writers to varying political ends. Both king lists and their embellished versions found in Scottish chronicles throughout the medieval period attest to an understanding of genealogy as a form and component of memory. But it is a form that is dynamic; while these familial lines assume continuity, they recognise that malleability of narrative is fundamental to memory’s success. In this respect, the varied narratives that are composed in late medieval Scotland demonstrate the rich memorial processes at work in textual productions that seek both to remember and to forget. As a case study in reimagining the Scottish past, Chapter 3 looked at the prologue to the Coupar Angus recension of Bower’s Scotichronicon, in which an invented memory enacts mnemonic processes as well as being about historical remembering. Drawing on the affective component of memory – the concept that unusual or highly emotive images were more easily stored and remembered – Bower explains the paucity of Scottish historical writing and the reason for Fordun’s compilation of the Chronica Gentis Scotorum by distilling English aggression into a destruction of written national memory. The act of burning books is, simultaneously, a striking image for Bower’s audience and a past event that prompted Fordun’s actions to recover memory. In this way, the moral dimension of the faculty of memory assumes centrality in memorial creativity. The ideological use of memory that came to the fore in the previous three chapters becomes a fundamental feature of Hary’s late fifteenth-century poem The Wallace, a text that shapes its audience’s perceptions of the social amnesia of James III’s reign. As in Bower’s prologue to the Coupar Angus Scotichronicon, Hary betrays a concern with poetic truth – imagined events as a way of narrating the past – that draws specifically on the affective potential of memory to prompt present and future action. For Hary, the craft of memory is not conceptual but the principle of how the Wallace works to train his audience’s recollective processes.

The literature of the first half of the sixteenth century continues to imagine the relationship between literary history, cultural memory and the articulation of Scottishness. While attention shifts away from the Wars of Independence in the early poetry of David Lyndsay, focus on the king and the common weal endures. Lyndsay’s Dreme and the Testament of the Papyngo are inflected with the Advice to Princes genre that marks much late medieval Scottish literature and, in seeking to educate the young James V, Lyndsay sustains a commentary on prudence as a virtue and memory’s role in the successful execution of that virtue. The Complaynt of Scotland not only reimagines the ragged country of Scotland shown to the dreamer by Dame Remembrance in Lyndsay’s Dreme, it also returns to the concern with forgetting that characterised Bower’s Coupar Angus recension of Scotichronicon and Hary’s Wallace. In doing so, it serves as a textual reminder of the dangers of failing to remember what it meant to be a member of the Scottish national community. It is clear that texts produced during the Stewart dynasty are deeply concerned with memory, it uses and the ends to which it can deployed in rewriting the Scottish past. The literary productions discussed throughout this book demonstrate how the practice of memory – as a process of selective and inventive reconstruction – works to reimagine Scotland and its past in the articulation of communal identity.

At the end of this book, I return to its beginning. In Scalacronica, Sir Thomas Gray writes that, following the death of Alexander III in 1286, the lords of Scotland, ‘sensing the beginnings of an eventual contest for the realm’, agreed a strategy with Edward I’s council that Edward’s son, Edward of Caernarvon, should marry Alexander’s granddaughter Margaret, ‘so as to have peace’ (Scal. 13). According to Gray, the English and Scottish councils agreed that prince Edward should

Of course, in 1603 this union of one king and two parliaments became a reality when James VI (1566–1625) succeeded Elizabeth I and became James I of England. The literature of the early union years brings together many of the ideas I have discussed in this study. Beyond 1550, the links between memory and nation continue in the Scottish literary tradition. The union of the kingdoms necessarily raised questions about literary expressions of Scottishness and, while Britain might have taken shape under a Scottish – and a Stewart – monarch, for Scotland, the figurehead of the centre of power became more remote. After thirty-six years of rule in Scotland, James VI ‘decamped’ to London. James, himself, sought to de-emphasise his Scottishness in England, recollecting his English heritage and reshaping his personal history to focus on what the Scots and the English had in common. In doing so, he looked to create (or recreate) a greater kingdom of Britain. In a commission written at Hampton Court in February 1604, and read to the Scottish parliament in April of the same year, James took pains to insist that the ‘singular mercy and benevolence’ of God towards the ‘old and ancient kingdom of Scotland’ had resulted in a union with ‘the realm of England, with great joy and applause on the part of all the inhabitants of the entire island of Britain, separated as it is from the rest of the world’.40RPS, 1604/4/6 [accessed 9 September 2021]. Representing himself as both a ‘dutiful father and shepherd’, James reminded the Scots that God had ‘included the realms of Scotland and England within the ambit of one island, by language, custom, consent and unity of religion, and mutual harmony’, conjoining ‘these realms into one dominion’.41RPS, 1604/4/6. Here James reshapes the memory of the union of the crowns as a ‘conscious coupling’ destined by God. How successful it was as a project is an entirely different matter, as this act of imagining met with resistance both north and south of the border.

A number of English poems concerned with James’s accession seek to establish the legitimacy of his inheritance, representing his succession as a new beginning, a ‘returne’ of comfort after the long rule of Elizabeth.42Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratvlatorie delivered to the kings most excellent maiestie at Bvrleigh Harrington in Rvtlanshire (London, 1603), lines 31–4. For example, Samuel Daniel’s A Panegyrike Congratvlatorie (1603) sees the emergence of ‘great Brittaine’ (st. 2. 3) out of the union. For Daniel there is:

The Scots poets, therefore, are not always so celebratory, and voice an ambivalence about Scotland’s fate in this union. Rather than expressing feelings of joy, desire or passion, Scottish writers emphasise feelings of loss and abandonment. In his poem ‘Scotland’s Teares’, Alexander Craig (c. 1567–1627) laments that in losing its monarch to London, Scotland loses its identity:

The Union of the Crowns under James VI did not mark the end of Scottish concerns with thinking the nation, but it did prompt discussions about the relationship between James and his Scottish realm, and the relationship between England and Scotland. As Sarah Dunnigan argues, at the Union, poetry in Scotland renewed political purpose, assuming a ‘subtle, skillfully manipulated means of quiet dissent’.47Sarah Dunnigan, ‘Reformation and Renaissance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. by Gerard Carruthers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 41–55 (51). The literature of the early union years raises questions about the literary articulations of identities that we might term national. As Scotland’s focus of power became more remote, the works of Ayton and Craig, among others, seems to reflect this sense of loss and distance, despite the fact that they also moved to London. Whereas James sought to imagine a union of England and Scotland in a bond that was always inevitable, both English and Scottish writers remain more ambivalent about this project of rewriting the past. The immediate Scottish responses to James’s accession look back to late medieval Anglo-Scottish relations as a way of the present. In doing so, they return to Scottish models of shaping the memory of the past. What I have shown through this study is that Scottish writers from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century demonstrate a sophisticated engagement with medieval memorial practices, adapting formal memory-training techniques within Latin and vernacular literature as a medium through which their audiences might begin to see, or remember, themselves as members of a national community. The texts examined here show how memoria takes on various forms; in doing so, they reveal a complex relationship between memory and the past in articulating what it meant to be Scottish and, importantly, in how the nation wrote itself.