Gavin Douglas (c. 1474 – September, 1522), Scottish poet and bishop, third son of Archibald, 5th Earl of Angus (called the "great Earl of Angus" and "Bell-the-Cat"),
was born c. 1474, at Tantallon Castle, East
Lothian.
Early life
He was a student at St Andrews, 1489-1494, and thereafter, it is supposed,
at Paris. In 1496 he obtained the living of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, and later he became parson of Lynton (mod. East
Linton) and rector of Hauch (mod. Prestonkirk), in East
Lothian; and about 1501 was preferred to the deanery or provostship of the
collegiate church of St Giles,
Edinburgh, which he held with his parochial charges. From this date until the Battle of Flodden, in September 1513, he appears to have been occupied with his ecclesiastical duties and literary work. Indeed all the extant writings by which he has earned his place as
a poet and translator belong to this period. After the disaster at Flodden he was completely absorbed in public business.
Three weeks after the Battle of Flodden he, still Provost of St Giles, was
admitted a burgess of Edinburgh. His father, the "Great Earl," was then the
civil provost of the capital. The latter dying soon
afterwards (January 1514) in Wigtownshire, where he had gone as justiciar, and his son having been killed at Flodden, the succession fell to Gavin's nephew Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus.
Gavin nephew's marriage
The marriage of this youth to James IV's widow on August 6, 1514 did much to identify the Douglases with the English party in
Scotland, as against the French party led by the Duke of Albany, and
incidentally to determine the political career of his uncle Gavin. During the first weeks of the queen's sorrow after the battle,
Gavin, with one or two colleagues of the council, acted as personal adviser, and it may be taken for granted that he supported
the pretensions of the young earl. His own hopes of preferment had been strengthened by the death of many of the higher clergy at
Flodden.
Gavin benefits from nephew's marriage
The first outcome of the new connection was his appointment to the Abbacy of
Aberbrothwick by the queen regent, before her marriage, probably in June 1514. Soon after the marriage (of Gavin's nephew)
she nominated him Archbishop of St Andrews, in succession to William Elphinstone, archbishop-designate. But John Hepburn,
prior of St Andrews, having obtained the vote of the chapter, expelled him, and was himself in turn expelled by Andrew Forman, Bishop of Moray, who had been nominated by the
pope. In the interval, Douglas's rights in Aberbrothwick had been transferred to James
Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, and he was now without title or temporality.
The breach between the Queen's party and Albany's had widened, and the queen's advisers had begun an intrigue with England, to
the end that the royal widow and her young son should be removed to Henry's court.
In those deliberations Gavin Douglas took an active part, and for this reason stimulated the opposition which successfully
thwarted his preferment.
Bishop of Dunkeld
In January 1515 on the death of George Brown, Bishop of Dunkeld, Douglas's hopes revived. The queen nominated him to the now vacant seat, which he
ultimately obtained, though not without trouble. For John Stewart, 2nd Earl of Atholl had forced
his brother, Andrew Stewart, prebendary of Craig, upon the chapter, and had put
him in possession of the bishop's palace. The queen appealed to the pope and was seconded by her brother of England, with the
result that the pope's sanction was obtained on February 18, 1515. Some of the correspondence of Douglas and his friends incident to this transaction was intercepted. When
Albany came from France and assumed the regency, these documents and the "purchase" of the bishopric from Rome contrary to
statute were made the basis of an attack on Douglas, who was imprisoned in Edinburgh
Castle, thereafter in St Andrews Castle (under the charge of his old opponent,
Prior Hepburn), and later in Dunbar Castle, and again in Edinburgh. The pope's
intervention procured his release, after nearly a year's imprisonment. The queen meanwhile had retired to England. After July
1516 Douglas appears to have been in possession of his see, and to have patched up a diplomatic peace with Albany.
On May 17, 1517 the Bishop of Dunkeld proceeded with Albany to
France to conduct the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of Rouen. He was back in Scotland towards the end of June. Albany's longer absence in France
permitted the partyfaction of the nobles to come to a head in a plot by James
Hamilton, 1st Earl of Arran to seize the Earl of Angus, the Queen's husband. The issue of this plot was the well-known
fight of Cleanse the Causeway, in which Gavin Douglas's part stands out in
picturesque relief. The triumph over the Hamiltons had an unsettling effect upon the Earl of Angus. He made free of the queen's
rents and abducted Lord Traquair's daughter. The Queen set about to obtain a divorce, and used her influence for the return of
Albany as a means of undoing her husband's power. Albany's arrival in November 1521, with a large body of French men-at-arms,
compelled Angus, with the bishop and others, to flee to the Borders. From this retreat
Gavin Douglas was sent by the earl to the English court, to ask for aid against the French party and against the queen, who was
reported to be the mistress of the regent. Meanwhile he was deprived of his bishopric, and forced, for safety, to remain in
England, where he effected nothing in the interests of his nephew. The declaration of war by England against Scotland, in answer
to the recent Franco-Scottish negotiations, prevented his return. His case was further complicated by the libellous animosity of
James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow (whose
life he had saved in the "Cleanse the Causeway" incident), who was anxious to put himself forward and thwart Douglas in
theelection to the archbishopric of St Andrews, left vacant by the death of Forman.
Death
In 1522 Douglas was stricken by the plague which raged in London, and died at the
house of his friend Lord Dacre. During the closing years of exile he was
on intimate terms with the historian Polydore Virgil, and one of his last acts was to
arrange to give Polydore a corrected version of Major's account of Scottish affairs. Douglas
was buried in the church of the Savoy, where a monumental brass (removed from its proper
site after the fire in 1864) still records his death and interment.
Literary work
Douglas's literary work, now his chief claim to be remembered, belongs, as has been stated, to the period 1501-1513, when he
was provost of St Giles. He left four poem manuscripts:
- The Palice of Honour, his earliest work, is a piece of the later type of dream-allegory, extending to over 2000 lines
in ninelined stanzas. In its descriptions of the various courts on their way to the palace, and of the poet's adventures--first,
when he incautiously slanders the court of Venus, and later when after his pardon he joins in the procession and passes to see
the glories of the palace—the poem carries on the literary traditions of the courts of
love, as shown especially in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and "The Hous of Fame." The poem is dedicated to James IV, not
without some lesson in commendation of virtue and honour. No manuscript of the poem is extant. The earliest known edition (c.
1553) was printed at London by William Copland; an Edinburgh edition, from the press of Henry Charteris, followed in 1579. From
certain indications in the latter and the evidence of some odd leaves discovered by David Laing, it has been concluded that there
was an earlier Edinburgh edition, which has been ascribed to Thomas Davidson, printer, and dated c. 1540.
- King Hart is another example of the later allegory, and, as such, of higher literary merit. Its subject is human life
told in the allegory of King Heart in his castle, surrounded by his five servitors (the senses), Queen. Plesance, Foresight and
other courtiers. The poem runs to over 900 lines and is written in eight-lined stanzas. The text is preserved in the Maitland
folio manuscript in the Pepysian library, Cambridge. It is not known to have been printed before 1786, when it appeared in
Pinkerton's Ancient Scottish Poemanuscript
- Conscience is in four seven-lined stanzas. Its subject is the "conceit" that men first clipped away the "con" from
"conscience" and left "science" and "na mair." Then they lost, "sci," and had nothing but "ens" ("that schrew, Riches and
geir").
- Douglas's longest, last, and in some respects most important work is his Scots
translation of the Aeneid, the first version of a great classic poet in any
Anglic dialect. The work includes the thirteenth book by Mapheus Vegius; and each of the thirteen books is introduced by a prologue. The subjects and styles of
these prologues show great variety: some appear to be literary exercises with little or no connexion with the books which they
introduce, and were perhaps written earlier and for other purposes. In the first, or general, prologue, Douglas claims a higher
position for Virgil than for his master Chaucer, and attacks Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of
the Aeneid. That Douglas undertook this work and that he makes a plea for more accurate scholarship in the translation have been
the basis of a prevalent notion that he is a Humanist in spirit and the first exponent of
Renaissance doctrine in Scottish literature. Careful study of the text will not support this
view. Douglas is in all important respects even more of a medievalist than his contemporaries; and, like Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, strictly a member of the
allegorical school and a follower, in the most generous way, of Chaucer's art. There are several early manuscripts of the
Aeneid extant: (a) in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, c.
1525, (b) the Elphynstoun manuscript in the library of the University of
Edinburgh, c. 1525, (c) the Ruthven manuscript in the same collection, c. 1535, (d) in the library of Lambeth Palace, 1545-1546. The first printed edition appeared in London in 1553. An Edinburgh edition was
issued from the press of Thomas Ruddiman in 1710.
Douglas's reputation among modern readers was bolstered somewhat in 1934 when Ezra Pound
included several passages of Douglas's Aeneid in his ABC of Reading. Comparing
Douglas to Chaucer, Pound wrote that "the texture of Gavin's verse is stronger, the resilience greater than Chaucer's" (Pound,
ABC, 115).
For Douglas's career see, in addition to the public records and general histories, Bishop Sage's Life in Ruddiman's
edition, and that by John Small in the first volume of his edition The Poetical Works of Gavin Douglas.
See also
References
Notes
Primary Sources
- Maxwell, Sir Herbert. A History of the House of Douglas. II Vols. Freemantle.
London, 1902
- Nicholson, Ranald. Scotland, the Later Middle Ages. Oliver and Boyd. Edinburgh 1978
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Gavin Douglas |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Bishop of Dunkeld |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Scottish Churchman, Scholar, Poet |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
1474 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
Tantallon Castle, East Lothian |
| DATE OF DEATH |
1522 |
| PLACE OF DEATH |
London |
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