David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Angus (review)

Poet, historian, religious controversialist, political theorist, David Hume of Godscroft (1558-1630?) was one of the leading intellects of Jacobean Scotland. A close associate of Andrew Melville, Godscroft long served as the most articulate apologist for the Presbyterian cause and was recognized by contemporaries as its most formidable mind. After his death, Godscroft's reputation constricted precipitously. He has remained a familiar figure, however, for since the eighteenth century his vernacular writings of have been continuously mined for the documents and descriptions of the events that they contain. Except for his De familia Humia, published without translation in 1839, his extensive Latin writings have been ignored—as, indeed, has his vernacular correspondence. Only within the past thirty years, as the deeply Calvinist Renaissance in Scotland has started to receive serious attention, has Godscroft become less a source than a subject in his own right.

Accordingly, Godscroft's works have begun to appear in modern scholarly editions. David Reid led the way with the publication of a variorum edition of The History of the House of Douglas (1996). Paul McGinnis and I subsequently published a Latin-English edition of the De unione insulae Britannicae (2002). Now Reid has followed up with the second part of Godscroft's great history of the Douglas family, The History of the House of Angus. Based on the 1643/46 edition and helpfully keyed to it, Reid has produced another authoritative volume whose replacement is simply impossible to imagine. The history recounts the House of Angus from the first earl in the fourteenth century to the death of the Godcroft's patron, the eighth earl, in 1588. Reid has provided exceedingly close and detailed notes explicating the individuals and events in Godscroft's text. The notes effectively unravel an extraordinary range of tangled kin relations, political manoeuvring, and ideological commitment. If they mainly offer a narrative rather than an analytical focus, that surely must be the first concern. Nevertheless, Reid also notes the revisions subsequently made by the eleventh earl, preserved in manuscript at Hamilton House—and whose entire purpose was to subvert Godscroft's Presbyterian and radical reading of the Douglas (and Scottish) past. In addition Reid has also included two appendices from the Hamilton MS revision describing the lives of the ninth and tenth earls. The result is an edition of exceptional richness.

As Reid has indicated, Godscroft's Douglas-Angus narrative had a tortured history. At least from the early 1580s Godscroft had served as the amanuensis, adviser, and teacher to Archibald Douglas, the eighth earl of Angus, the most powerful and most committed of the Presbyterian lords. Angus' untimely death in 1588 was a major setback for Presbyterian cause. For Godscroft it was disaster. He would long search in vain for another such patron. Godscroft's magnificent Latin poem to the chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane, written between 1588 and 1592, must be one of the most elegant job applications on record. It is in this context that he undertook what would become his great Douglas history. But, most unfortunately, the Douglases of Glenbenie who succeeded the childless eighth earl were Catholic or crypto-Catholic reactionaries—less than ideal patrons, to say the least. Still, the history forms part of Godscroft's larger struggle for Presbyterianism and the civic ideals he saw as inherent within it. Towards the end of his life he apparently became ever more concerned to publish the history and promote values he saw as in decline. In the event, his daughter Anna succeeded in having a truncated and bowdlerized version published in 1633. Only a decade later at the height of the covenanting movement would she finally get the full work to press, and even then the eleventh earl managed to delay its publication.

As Reid observes, Godscroft self-consciously wrote the history in Scots rather than English...