Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/299

Rh when it was printed from the Advocates' Library MS., acquired with the other collections of Sir James Balfour, and was reprinted in 1878. It was submitted by Balfour on 9 Dec. 1630 to the privy council, was recognised as an authentic register, and is the best source for early Scottish heraldry. The manuscript contains a few additions by later Lyon kings, but their blazonry is very inferior to Lyndsay's.

James V died on 16 Dec. 1542, and two years later Lyndsay was sent to the court of Henry VIII to restore, as was customary, the insignia of the Garter. A letter of Henry VIII, dated Hampton Court, 24 May 1544, acknowledges to the Earl of Arran the receipt of the statutes of the order, along with the collar and garter, brought to him by the Lyon king. On 29 May 1546 Beaton was killed at his castle of St. Andrews, and Lyndsay, whose sympathies were with Norman Leslie [q. v.] and the other perpetrators of the deed, composed a poem, ‘The Tragedy of the Cardinal,’ shortly after January 1547, in which year it was printed in London, though without date, by John Daye. The tragedy is supposed to be spoken by the cardinal himself, who appears in a vision to the poet. He recounts his life, lamenting his fate, and exhorts both temporal princes and his brethren, the bishops, to be warned by it. The often-quoted lines,

commonly attributed to Lyndsay, do not occur in this or any of his known poems. The statement that Lyndsay was one of the protestant party who, like Knox, took refuge in the castle of St. Andrews after the murder, is disproved by the record of parliament, which shows that he sat as commissioner for Cupar on 4 Aug. 1546, and on 14 Aug. he was sent to summon the party in the castle for treason, which he did on 17 Dec.; but receiving no answer he departed and told ‘the governor he could have no speaking of us’ (State Papers, Henry VIII, v. 581). In the following spring he took part in the conference in the great kirk of St. Andrews with Henry Balnaves and John Rough, which ended in the call to Knox to preach in public. This is the act in his life which most clearly demonstrated his sympathy with the protestant party; and, taken along with the tendency of his poems, especially those of later date, it renders the elaborate essay of Lord Lindsay (Lives of the Lindsays, i. 252–62), to prove he retained a considerable part of the old Roman doctrine, a hopeless attempt. In 1548 he was sent on an embassy to Christian III of Denmark, to ask for ships to protect the coasts of Scotland against the English, and to secure free trade with Denmark for Scottish merchants. He succeeded in the latter, but not in the former object. When at Copenhagen, Lyndsay met John Macalpine, called Machabeus, formerly prior of the Dominicans of Perth, but who embraced the reformed doctrines and became professor of theology in the Danish university. It is a singular fact that Lyndsay's next work, ‘Ane Dialog betuix Experience and ane Courteour,’ the first edition or form of ‘The Monarchy,’ claims to have been printed ‘at the command and expensis of Doctor Machabeus, in Copenhaven in 1552.’ Laing and other bibliographers suppose this to be a fictitious name and place for its publication, and assign it to a well-known printer, John Scot of St. Andrews. It is not, however, impossible that Machabeus may have been at the expense of printing the ‘Dialogue,’ whose title-page does not state that it was printed, but only that Machabeus lived, at Copenhagen. The remaining works of Lyndsay are ‘The Historie and Testament of Squyer Meldrum’ (1550?)—the laird of a small estate, Cleish in Fife, who after various adventures in love and war, in the reigns of James IV and James V, became a tainer of Lord Lindsay, and lived in his house at Struthers till his death, when he entrusted the order of his funeral procession to his friend, Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount—and ‘The Monarchy’ (1554), dedicated to ‘James, earl of Arran, our prince and protector,’ and his brother, John Hamilton, archbishop of St. Andrews. This work also claims to have been printed at the expense of Dr. Machabeus. It is a long poem, of 6,333 lines, with a secondary title, ‘A Dialogue of the Miserabill Estait of this World,’ and contains a narrative of the four empires, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, which last was succeeded by the papacy. It recalls Knox's sermon on the same subject. The basis of both was a prophetical exposition of Daniel, by Melanchthon, published in German in 1532 under the name of ‘John Carion's Chronicle,’ which was translated into Latin, and into English in 1550, and became a popular manual of universal history. The papal power was represented as Antichrist, and the temporal power as distracted by war. So that both sun and moon, the pope and the emperor, according to a common similitude of the middle ages, were ‘denude of light.’ In this work, though tedious from its length, some of Lyndsay's most far-sighted views appear. He advocates the use of the vulgar tongue, not merely for poetry, but for religious services and legal procedure (l. 650 et seq.). He attacks the worship of images (l. 2279 et