Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/296

Rh 1511 he took part as an actor before James and Margaret Tudor at Holyrood, and 3l. 4s. was paid for his ‘play coat of blue and yellow taffeties.’ James V was born on 12 April 1512, and Lyndsay himself relates that he became an usher (hostiarius) to the young prince, an office he continued to hold till June 1522, with a yearly salary of 40l. In some of the entries in the treasurer's books he is styled ‘Keeper of the kingis gracis person.’ When the weird apparition of an old man appeared in St. Michael's Church, Linlithgow, and warned the king against the campaign which ended at Flodden, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie [q. v.] refers to Lyndsay and John Inglis (the king's marshal), then young men, and special servants to the king, as ‘being present beside the king, who thought they might have speired [asked] further tidings of the man.’ The historian must have known Lyndsay, but he does not name him as his authority. Buchanan goes further, and says: ‘Amongst those who stood next the king was David Lyndsay of the Mount, a man of unsuspected probity and veracity, attached to literature, and during life invariably opposed to falsehood; from whom, unless I had received the story as narrated, vouched of truth, I had omitted to notice it as one of the commonly reported fables.’ Few ghost stories have had better vouchers. The duties of Lyndsay as attendant on the infant king are described in more than one poem. He carried the prince in his arms, sang and played to him, and amused him by disguising himself as ‘the greislie gaist of Gye,’ or told fairy tales of ‘Red Etin’ and ‘Gyre Carlyng,’ the romances of Tyre, Thebes, and Troy, the deeds of Arthur, and ‘the stories of leal lovers.’ At a later date, in the ‘Complaint of the Papyngo,’ he describes the ideal of the instruction of a prince, which he attempted to realise as James grew from boy to manhood. But Gavin Dunbar, afterwards archbishop of Glasgow, and not Lyndsay, is described as the king's master, or chief tutor, with John Bellenden, archdeacon of Moray, as his assistant. Lyndsay was only his playfellow.

In 1522 Lyndsay married Janet Douglas, already like himself in the royal service, and described in the records after her marriage as the king's seamstress, receiving 10l. a year. Neither Lyndsay's position nor that of his wife indicates that they belonged to the highest rank of the landed gentry. Lyndsay's sympathies were from the first with the people, and his writings show that, while taking part in the life of the court, he did not hesitate to rebuke its vices. He was a personal favourite of the young king, but protested against his immorality and the flattery of his false friends. In June 1526 a revolution placed Angus at the head of the government, nominally carried on in the name of the young king, who was treated as a cipher by the contending parties [see under ]. The royal tutors, Dunbar and Bellenden, as well as Lyndsay, were dismissed. Lyndsay alludes in ‘The Complaint’ to the ‘new rewlaris,’ taking

When in July 1528 James escaped from the domination of Angus, he promoted the guides of his boyhood, and not later than 1529 Lyndsay was appointed Lyon king of arms, with an annual grant out of the lands of Luthrie in Fife, as his fee, and the honour of knighthood. Henceforth he discharged the double office of head of the College of Heralds and poet laureate of the Scottish court. In the former capacity he took part in several embassies of the reign, while in the latter he expressed with the greatest freedom his views on the reformation of church and state, and became the poet of the Scottish Reformation, as Dunbar had been of the Scottish Renaissance.

The literary production of Lyndsay, like that of Knox, began late. He was already a man of thirty-seven when he wrote, according to Chalmers towards the end of 1528, his first poem ‘The Dreme,’ but as this was not printed till after his death, by Samuel Jascuy, in Paris, in 1558, the date of composition depends on internal evidence. It cannot have been circulated before the overthrow of Angus in 1528. The reference to the king seems to imply that his boyhood was already past, while the poet says of himself that his youth was now ‘nere over blawin.’ Laing suggests an emendation to ‘lang ower blawin,’ which would harmonise better with Lyndsay's own age, but is against the rules of textual criticism. ‘The Dreme,’ a common form of mediæval poetry, is introduced by an epistle to King James, and a prologue, which represents the poet overcome by Morpheus on a wintry and stormy night, when ‘Dame Remembrance’ conducts him, like Dante, through earth to the lowest hell, from hell to purgatory, thence to earth, and finally to heaven. His request that he might remain in heaven is refused, and the vision takes a rapid survey of the kingdoms of the earth, closing with a description of Scotland. A reply to the poet's question whence the poverty of Scotland arises is given by ‘John the Commounweill,’ who attributes it to the robbery and oppres-