New Poems by James I/The Manuscript

by James I

THE MANUSCRIPT

The source from which the poems in the present volume are taken is a MS. now in the British Museum (Add. 24195), and acquired, as an inserted note indicates, "at the sale of Archbishop Tenison's MSS., 1 July 1861." A second inscription, perhaps in the hand of the Archbishop, reads, "Dec. 15, [16] 89. The Gift of Mr. Wright to T. Tenison for his library." Evidently, therefore, the MS. was preserved in the free library, the first of its kind in London, established in the parish of St. Martin-in-the-Fields by the Rev. Thomas Tenison, later Archbishop of Canterbury, not far from the time when the book was given. The donor was presumably Abraham Wright (1611-1690), clergyman and antiquary, whose death, it will be seen, occurred in the following year. The only later reference to the collection, so far as the writer is aware, is the following note in Dr. David Irving's Lives of the Scotish Poets (Edinburgh, 1804, Vol. II, p. 259): "Mr. Ritson informs us that in the library of St. Martins parish, Westminster, is a MS. volume, containing 'all the kings short poems that are not printed.'" Ritson died in 1804, but may have communicated with Irving when the latter was at work on his Lives; I have been unable to discover the information among his published writings. Dr. Irving presumably did not gain access to the poems, or he would have spoken of them in his criticism of the King's works.

The MS. itself consists of eighty-five folios, in the original white vellum binding, with ornate cover designs in gold inclosing the motto, "Domine salvum fac regem." Sixty-one of the folios are occupied by the poems, and a part of the remainder by tables of contents at the beginning and the end, specimens of the King's correspondence with foreign scholars, and other short prose pieces.^[1] On the inside of the back cover the name Charles is twice written; and on the fly-leaves are scraps of verse and the signatures of Thomas Cary,^[2] James Leviston,^[3] and Doctor John Craig.^[4] The tables of contents, some of the headings of poems, numerous corrections, and five of the sonnets are written by Prince Charles, and Carey's hand appears frequently in corrections and in the sonnets now numbered XLVI and XLVII.^[5] The fact that some of the changes are in the hand of the King indicates that he also went over the copy.^[6] The greater portion of the MS. is in a neat print-like hand, the same as that of the Museum MS. (Old Royal, 18 B XIV) of the King's Paraphrase of the Psalms. The copyist of the latter was a Scotchman, as is indicated by the dialect of his marginal notes; and it is in any case more likely that the task of transcribing the King's verse and turning it into English would be given to one familiar with the Scottish dialect, for example, either John or Thomas Murray, secretaries respectively to the King and the Prince.

A possible theory regarding the formation of the collection, based on the signatures and the handwritings, is that it was prepared in the King's household, corrected by James, and again revised — whether before or after James's death is not certain — by Charles and Carey. In 1626, Sir William Alexander was delegated to "consider and review the meeter and poesie" of the King's psalms,^[7] with a view to publication, and an edition the text quite different, however, from that of the Museum MS. appeared in 1631. Charles may have also planned an edition of the poems, but decided afterward not to expose them thus to the attacks of Puritan critics. The corrections by the King, and the proper placing (in a MS. which now contains no blank pages) of the poems copied by Charles and Carey, suggest a date somewhere between 1616 and 1625. The care with which the collection is arranged, revised, and the pieces which had already appeared in print crossed through, makes it altogether probable that James himself planned to have it published; it may at least be accepted as a correct and final text for the poems which it contains.

Of these, the pieces hitherto printed (from other MS. sources) have already been roughly indicated in the Preface, and it remains merely to give a fuller account of the two collections in which most of them appear.

Nine sonnets — corresponding, in the order in which they are printed, to XV, V, VI, II, X, VIII, XI, XII, and IX of the Amatoria are found in the Publications of the Percy Society, 1844, Vol. XV, pp. 32-37. They are arranged as a single poem, and form a part of a series of extracts, entitled Poetical Miscellanies, selected and edited by J. C. Halliwell from a much larger collection in a MS. volume, 12mo., owned at the time by Andrews, a Bristol bookseller.^[8] At the end of the sonnets is the colophon, "Finis, Sir Thomas Areskine of Gogar, Knighte" a signature which has served completely to conceal their actual authorship. Sir Thomas Areskine, or Erskine, was either the King's friend and boyhood companion of that name, who became Earl of Kelley in 1619, or his grandson and namesake, who became the second earl in i639.^[9] The variants in the Percy Society text, though frequent, consist wholly of obvious errors in transcription or printing, and it is altogether probable, therefore, that Erskine's MS. was merely a copy of the one now in the Museum.

A more important collection of James's poems is the one entitled Lusus Regius,^[10] edited by R. S. Rait in 1901 from two MSS. in the Bodleian Library (MS. Bodl. 165-166). These MSS. are in the Scottish dialect, almost entirely in the King's handwriting, and contain many of his compositions in prose and verse. From corrections and marginal notes it seems probable that they were among the first drafts from which the Museum collection was prepared. Nine of the twelve pieces published by Mr. Rait, or all save the psalms and the prose, appear in the Museum MS. and are now printed. His table of contents follows, with references to the corresponding poems in the present volume.

I. Fragment of a Masque . . . An Epithalamion upon the Marques of Huntlies Mariage, pp. 47-52. The sonnet on p. 49 is not in Rait.

II. 'Ane Admonition to the Maister Poete to leave of greit crakking.' . . . An admonition, etc., pp. 40-44. The final stanza, following the sonnet, is not in Rait.

III. Sonnet to Bacchus . . . The sonnet referring to the death of Montgomerie, p. 37.

IV. On Wornen . . . A Satire against Woemen, pp. 19-21.

V. 'Bot be the Contraire I Reiose.' . . . This, with the stanzas properly arranged, is Song I, pp. 22-23.

VI. ' If Mourning micht Amende.' . . . A Dier at her M^ties Desyr, pp. 7-9.

VII. 'Gif all the Floudis amangis Thaime walde Concluid.' . . . Ex Lucano libro quinto, pp. 44-45. Mr. Rait does not call attention to the fact that this appears in The Essayes of a Prentise.

VIII. 'This Lairgeness and this Breadth so Long' . . . A Pairt of Du Bartas First Day, pp. 54-56.

IX. On his own Destiny . . . The Beginning of his M^ties Jurnei, pp. 52-53.

X. The CI Psalm . . . Not in the Museum MS.

XI. 'His Maiesties Letter unto Mr. Du Bartas' ... A letter in French inviting the poet to Scotland. Cf. App. I, IV, p. 60.

XII. Supplement to the Preface of the Βασιλικὸν Δῶρον. . . A paragraph explaining his attacks on the Puritans. Not in the Museum MS.

It will be seen that the titles in the Museum MS. frequently indicate the occasions or sources of the poems. Obscurities and breaks in the Bodleian MS. are also at times remedied in the Museum copy. The Bodleian, it is true, presents the poems in the dialect in which they were originally written; but it was the King's intention and it will be the preference of many readers that his verse, like his prose, should appear in the more familiar, not to say less uncouth, Southern language and spelling. The change is made without seriously affecting either the meter or the sense. Aside from the relative merits of the texts, it is desirable to have together in convenient form all the verse of the King not in The Essayes of a Prentise or the Exercises at vacant houres.

In printing the poems it has seemed advisable, even in the cases of the half dozen or more poems published in the King's lifetime, to follow carefully the punctuation of the MS. This, though scanty, is not seriously misleading, if one remembers that the pauses at the ends of lines are usually unmarked. In spelling, the long s has been discarded, and the scribal interchange of u, v, and w, and of i and j, brought into conformity with modern usage. In other respects, both spelling and capitalization (save in the titles) follow the original exactly, and have been verified by collation of the proof with the MS. Changes in handwriting are as a rule recorded, since they indicate the King's supervision, the authenticity of titles and corrections, and the extent of the alterations made by Charles and Carey. Corrections are in all cases followed in the text, with the original phrasing, if decipherable, indicated in footnotes; variant readings from printed sources are also given when they are of the slightest importance or when the difference is not merely in spelling or dialect. Comment other than textual is reserved for the notes at the end.

1. Cf. App. I.
2. Thomas Cary, or Carey (1597-1634), not to be confused with the poet of the same name, was a younger son of Sir Robert Carey, who was guardian of Prince Charles and head of his household until he came to the throne. Thomas was made a groom of the chamber to the Prince on his creation (Memoirs of Sir Robert Carey, ed. 1808, p. 105), and retained the position after Charles became king. On the latter's accession he was granted a pension of 500 a year (Col. S. P. Dom., May 25, 1625).
3. James Leviston, William Murray, and Endymion Porter, all grooms of the chamber to Charles, received pensions of 500 at the same time as Carey (ibid.). Leviston, or Livingstone, was knighted before 1629 and made Earl of Callander in 1641.
4. John Craig (d. 1654) was physician to James and afterward to Charles. He succeeded his father, of thesame name, who died in 1620.
5. This description is in accord with the one given in the Museum Catalogue.
6. Cf. footnotes, pp. 5, 10, 19, 25, 43, 53, etc.
7. Letter of Charles to the Archbishop of St. Andrews, Earl of Stirling's Reg. Royal Letters, Edinburgh, 1885, Vol. I, p. 73.
8. Halliwell's preface to the Miscellanies.
9. It is possibly of significance that a complication of marriages placed the younger Erskine in the relationship of grandson to James Leviston, though the two were not far from the same age. (Cf. D.N.B.)
10. Lusus Regius, being Poems and Other Pieces by King James Ye First. Now first set forth and Edited by R. S. Rait, Constable & Co., 1901. This is an expensive edition limited to 275 copies.