Abstract
The six years following the overthrow of Mary Queen of Scots were marked by civil war in Scotland and an outpouring of political propaganda lambasting the queen and her supporters. Much of this propaganda survives as broadside poetry, written by Robert Sempill and printed by Robert Lekpreuik. Adapting literary forms to make political arguments, the poems are exhortatory and caustic, yet the softer tones of lamentation and complaint also reflect on the hardships suffered by Scottish citizens during this period of strife. Interestingly—given the misogynistic bent of this propaganda—women, particularly Scottish wives, often appear as politically aware and engaged, lamenting the state of the commonweal or even calling for action. This chapter examines the strategy and efficacy of co-opting women’s voices in the form of complaint and for specific political objectives, as well as correlating this material with evidence from the State Papers that suggest the presence of real, if indistinct, women engaged with Scottish affairs.
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Notes
- 1.
Rosalind Smith, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Sarah C. E. Ross, “Complaint,” in A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, ed. Catherine Bates (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 339.
- 2.
Sempill’s work is most fully represented in James Cranstoun, ed., Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation (Scottish Text Society, 1891). Cranstoun’s poems will be noted by Roman numeral, with lines numbers cited parenthetically. I am currently preparing a new edition of this corpus, also for the Scottish Text Society.
- 3.
About 22 satirical poems can be attributed to Sempill, and evidence suggests that he was patronized by Mary’s opponents. For a summary of his canon, see Priscilla Bawcutt, “A New Poem by Robert Sempill: A Warning to the Lordis,” Scottish Literary Review 1, no. 1 (2009): 17–49, especially 20. Jenny Wormald provides an excellent overview of the period in Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland, 1470–1625 (Edinburgh: Edward Arnold, 1981); and, more recently, see Jane A. E. Dawson, Scotland Re-formed, 1488–1587 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).
- 4.
As Roderick Lyall has observed, Sempill employs “many of the devices of the medieval satirist, but to new purposes and through a new medium” (57). “Complaint, Satire and Invective in Middle Scots Literature,” in Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929, ed. Norman Macdougall (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1983), 44–64.
- 5.
Smith et al.’s suggestion that the number of complaints in Elizabethan anthologies manages to create “a polyphony in which diverse speakers engage in conversations and appeals” also applies neatly to this corpus of Scottish propaganda (342).
- 6.
Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, 1424–1707, ed. T. Thomson and C. Innes, 12 vols. (Edinburgh: Record Commission, 1814–75), 2:552. Such bill-posting for propagandistic purposes has its historical analogues. The 1534 “Affair of Placards” in France, in which Protestant placards and broadsheets denigrating the Mass were anonymously posted across the city of Paris, is one possibility. See Mark Greengrass, The French Reformation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 24–7. An English example would be the political poems of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, written to shape or sway public opinion during the Wars of the Roses. See Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). A more recent and fascinating analysis of such bill-posting as a weapon of propaganda can be found in Wendy Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), especially chapter 4.
- 7.
The Hamiltons were aligned with the ousted Queen Mary and inveterate opponents of those who supported the infant King James. Useful for tracking allegiances during the civil war is Gordon Donaldson, All the Queen’s Men: Power and Politics in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (London: Batsford, 1983). Also see Ian B. Cowan, “The Marian Civil War, 1567–1573,” in Scotland and War AD 79–1918, ed. Norman Macdougall, 95–112 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1991). A valuable discussion of this period is Claire L. Webb, The “Gude Regent?” A Diplomatic Perspective Upon the Earl of Moray, Mary, Queen of Scots and the Scottish Regency 1567–1570 (PhD diss., University of St. Andrews, 2008).
- 8.
The best discussions of flyting as a Scottish genre are Priscilla Bawcutt, “The Art of Flyting,” Scottish Literary Journal 10, no. 2 (1983): 5–24; and Sally Mapstone, “Invective as Poetic: The Cultural Contexts of Polwarth and Montgomerie’s Flyting,” Scottish Literary Journal 26, no. 2 (1999): 18–40.
- 9.
See Lyall, “Complaint, Satire and Invective,” 47.
- 10.
Scase, op. cit.
- 11.
As Emily Wingfield notes, even though medieval Scottish witnesses of Chaucer’s poetry are not bountiful, “verbal echoes and stylistic and thematic parallels” suggest strongly that Scottish poets knew his work (The Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014], 121). A striking example would be William Dunbar’s poem The Goldyn Targe: see Priscilla Bawcutt, “Introduction” to William Dunbar: Selected Poems (London and New York: Longman, 1996), 5–7, and her notes to poem #47. Also see Gregory Kratzmann, Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 1430–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Douglas Gray, “Some Chaucerian Themes in Scottish Writers,” in Chaucer Traditions, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 81–90; and A. A. MacDonald, “Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations: Problems and Possibilities,” Studies in Scottish Literature 26 (1991): 172–84.
- 12.
John Durkan and Anthony Ross provide two entries for Ovid’s Heroides, one owned by an unidentified John Brown and another by a David Guthrie. Early Scottish Libraries (Glasgow: John S. Burns & Sons, 1961), 173 and 178.
- 13.
To name only a few instances, George Bannatyne compiled his manuscript anthology of Scottish verse in the final years of Mary’s reign; Henry Charteris commissioned a new printing of Hary’s Wallace in 1570 and John Barbour’s Bruce the following year; and Lekpreuik himself reprinted Robert Henryson’s Morall Fabillis in 1570. See A. A. MacDonald, “Scottish Poetry of the Reign of Mary Stewart,” in The European Sun, ed. Graham Caie, Roderick J. Lyall, Sally Mapstone, and Kenneth Simpson (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001), 58.
- 14.
Joanna Martin, Kingship and Love in Scottish Poetry, 1424–1540 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 32. Her first chapter addresses The Quare of Jelusy at length. Anne McKim provides an earlier and useful overview of complaint in Scots: ‘“Makand hir mone’: Masculine Constructions of the Feminine Voice in Middle Scots Complaints,” Scotlands 2 (1994): 32–46.
- 15.
Wingfield, The Trojan Legend, 142. Wingfield’s Chapter 4 is devoted to the interplay of Chaucer’s Criseyde and Henryson’s Cresseid.
- 16.
The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
- 17.
Lyall, “Complaint, Satire and Invective,” 52. Lyall’s essay delineates the modes of complaint, satire, and invective in Middle Scots poetry, particularly in texts that address or allude to historical and political realities. Also see Tricia A. McElroy and Nicole Meier, “Satire,” in The International Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. Nicola Royan (Glasgow: Association of Scottish Literary Studies, 2018), 200–16. McKim discusses Henryson’s fable “The Lion and the Mouse” as an instance of gendered complaint, 40–2.
- 18.
See, for example, in Bawcutt’s edition of Dunbar, “As yung Awrora with cristall haile” (A Ballat of the Abbot of Tungland, #4), “The wardraipper of Venus boure” (#60), and “Apon the midsummer evin, merriest of nichtis” (The Tretis of the Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, #3).
- 19.
Bawcutt, Dunbar, #44.
- 20.
Lyall, “Complaint, Satire and Invective,” 48–9. Poem #42 in Bawcutt’s edition.
- 21.
Lyall, “Complaint, Satire and Invective,” 46.
- 22.
Line citations from Sir David Lyndsay: Selected Poems, ed. Janet Hadley Williams (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2000).
- 23.
Boccaccio’s influence, likely through Lydgate, may be seen in a number of Sempill’s poems as well. See A. S. G. Edwards, “The Influence of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes c. 1440–1559: A Survey,” Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977): 424–39; and W. H. E. Sweet, “Lydgate Manuscripts and Prints in Late Medieval Scotland,” in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, ed. Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 141–59.
- 24.
The most accessible modern edition, with an excellent introduction, is Roderick Lyall, ed., Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 1989).
- 25.
One other poet deserves to be mentioned in this context: Sir Richard Maitland. Maitland wrote a number of complaints about the fractiousness of the Scottish civil war and provides an interesting perspective on writers like Sempill. In “Aganis Sklanderous Tungis,” for example, Maitland criticizes “bissie branit bodies” who “bakbyt” and “misknaw their crafte” (Cranstoun XXXVII.1, 9) For other of Maitland’s complaints on the time, see The Maitland Quarto, ed. Joanna M. Martin (Scottish Text Society, 2015), as well as Martin’s chapter “The Border, England, and the English in Some Older Scots Lyric and Occasional Poems,” in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, ed. Mark P. Bruce and Katherine H. Terrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 87–102.
- 26.
The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. A. M. Stewart (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1979), xxix. Chartier’s text, which provides the framework and some contents for the Complaynt, dates from 1422, when the French suffered an analogous political situation after Agincourt. Another Scots contribution to the counter-campaign against the English is William Lamb’s Ane resonyng of ane Scottis and Inglis merchand (1549). Roger Mason addresses Somerset’s campaign and the Scottish response in Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1998), 251. For further discussion of the Complaynt, also see L. A. J. R. Houwen, “Cacophonous Catalogues: The Complaynt of Scotland and the ‘Monologue Recreative’,” The Journal of the Northern Renaissance 4 (2012). http://www.northernrenaissance.org/cacophonous-catalogues-the-complaynt-of-scotland-and-the-monologue-recreative/
- 27.
Amy Blakeway’s essay on the reaction to Moray’s murder is indispensable: “The Response to the Regent Moray’s Assassination,” The Scottish Historical Review 88.1 (April 2009): 9–33.
- 28.
It is, of course, possible that the title of this broadside explicitly recalls the earlier Complaynt of Scotland.
- 29.
For more on the legend of Fergus I and his descendants who ruled Scotland for seven centuries, see Mason, 43 and 46–7.
- 30.
These drawings are housed in the National Archives, London, shelfmark MPF 1/366. For another discussion of the use of this phrase, see Jamie Reid Baxter, ‘“Judge and revenge my cause’: The Earl of Morton, Andro Blackhall, Robert Sempill, and the Fall of the House of Hamilton in 1579,” in Older Scots Literature, ed. Sally Mapstone (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2005), 467–92.
- 31.
“My grandfather driven out incontinent,” referring to Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, father of Lord Darnley.
- 32.
See, for example, Richard Bannatyne, Memorials of Transactions in Scotland, MDLXIX-MDLXXIII, ed. R. Pitcairn (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1836), 27, where he cites “Madie” as the source of local rumour.
- 33.
Lyall, “Complaint, Satire and Invective,” 57.
- 34.
Addressed to John Erskine of Dun, this poem’s heading concludes with “P.R. his humbill Servant S.” It was printed by Lekpreuik in March 1572, and one copy survives in the National Library of Scotland (H.29.f28). I have not been able to determine the author of the poem, but its tone and style do not resemble Sempill’s.
- 35.
For a fuller discussion of the Dialogue, see my “The Uses of Genre and Gender in ‘The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis’,” in Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance, 1420–1587, ed. Joanna Martin and Emily Wingfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 198–210. In this essay, I discuss the likely influence of Dunbar’s Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo as well as his poem “Richt arely one Ask Wedinsday,” familiarly known as The Twa Cummaris.
- 36.
British Library, Additional MS. 33531, art. 13. In “The Art of Flyting,” Bawcutt locates in town and church records evidence of real-world flyting, indicating that public quarrels were considered a social problem. She also cites lines from Montgomerie and Polwart’s Flyting that claim “madding wives” can “out-roare their men” (7–10). In addition, Dunbar’s poem criticizing the merchants of Edinburgh complains about the “cryis of carlingis [old women]” and “feusum [foul] flyttingis” in the streets (10–11, poem #42 in Bawcutt, Dunbar). More recently, for historical evidence of women’s flyting, see Elizabeth Ewan, ‘“Many Injurious Words’: Defamation and Gender in Late Medieval Scotland,” in History, Literature, and Music in Scotland, 700–1560, ed. R. Andrew McDonald (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 163–86. Ewan has also written about women and physical violence, in “Disorderly Damsels? Women and Interpersonal Violence in Pre-Reformation Scotland,” The Scottish Historical Review 89, no. 2 (October 2010): 153–71. Of course Barbara Martine’s calling out to men she believed were engaged in criminal behaviour is not quite the same as the incidents examined by Bawcutt and Ewan.
- 37.
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth, ed. Joseph Stevenson et al., 23 vols. (London: Longman, Roberts and Green, 1863–1950): years 1566–8, item 1199.
- 38.
George Buchanan, Ane Detectioun of the duinges of Marie Quene of Scottes, n.p., n.d. (London: John Day, 1571), Niir.
- 39.
Calendar of State Papers Relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots, 1547–1603, ed. Joseph Bain et al., 13 vols. (Edinburgh: H. M. General Register House, 1898–1969): years 1563–9, item 560.
- 40.
British Library, Additional MS. 37977. The poem is printed in the Bannatyne Club edition, Memoirs of His Own Life, ed. T. Thomson (Edinburgh, 1827), 268–74. The poem’s lines are not numbered.
- 41.
Memoirs of His Own Life, 268.
- 42.
For evidence of Pliny in Scotland, see Durkan and Ross, Early Scottish Libraries. Noteworthy owners of the Naturalis Historia include John Leslie, Bishop of Ross; John Sinclair, Bishop of Brechin; and James Stewart, Earl of Moray.
- 43.
Drawing from Pliny, medieval bestiaries describe the mating habits of the viper. See, for example, the Aberdeen Bestiary (abdn.ac.uk/bestiary, Special Collections, MS 24), fols. 67r–68r, which typically moralizes the natural world by warning of the dangers of lust, adultery, and female disobedience. The “mery cheir” with which the lamprey greets the viper in the Melville poem is absent from medieval bestiaries and is characterized only as eager lust.
- 44.
A defence of the honour of the right highe, mightye and noble Princesse Marie Queene of Scotland [Rheims: John Foigny], 1569, Diiv.
- 45.
The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (dsl.ac.uk) cites Melville’s Memoirs, elsewhere, for this phrase: “Bot a wyse king skattereth the wicked, and causeth the whell to wholme ouer them” (223). Its meaning is to roll the wheel over someone, to overwhelm and destroy.
- 46.
Smith et al., “Complaint,” 339.
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McElroy, T.A. (2020). “Ane Wyfis Quarrel”: Complaining Women in Scottish Reformation Satire. In: Ross, S., Smith, R. (eds) Early Modern Women's Complaint. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42946-1_4
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