sion rife on the borders, in the highlands, and the isles, and the want of justice and policy, which will not be supplied till Scotland is ‘gydit’
Be wysedome of ane gude auld prudent kyng.
For the proverb is ‘full trew:’
Wo to the realme that hes ower young ane king.
In this poem Lyndsay still expresses his belief in purgatory, and adores the Virgin, while he trusts to the king when he comes of age for the needed reforms in church and state. Next year, 1529, in ‘The Complaynt to the King,’ he rejoices that he has lived to see the day when the new regent, Angus, and his party have ‘trotted over Tweed,’ and ‘thou [i.e. James V] to no man art subjected.’
In 1530, under cover of ‘The Testament and Complaynt of our Soverane Lordis Papyngo,’ he denounces with greater boldness the abuses of the court, prelates, and nobles. The ‘envoi’ indicates that this piece, like his other early poems, was privately circulated, probably in manuscript. In a shorter poem he answers the king's ‘Flyting,’ in which, under a thin disguise of imitating the coarseness of the royal verses, he rebukes the licentiousness of his master, and exhorts him to a virtuous marriage with ‘ane buckler furth of France.’ The confession of his own immorality in early life, and regret for its consequences, may have been a rhetorical artifice to enable him to deal the more plainly with the king. In ‘The Complaynt of Bagsche, the Kingis auld Hound, to Bawtie, the Kingis best belovit Dog, and his Companions,’ composed a few years later, his satire is turned against the courtiers, who during their term of royal favour indulged in violence. Probably under the name of ‘Lanceman Lyndsay's Dog,’ he praises himself as a loyal and peaceable subject.
In June 1531 Lyndsay went on his first embassy as Lyon king, with Sir John Campbell of Lundy, and David Panter, the king's secretary, to the court of the Emperor Charles V. The embassy, which was appointed by the parliament in the preceding April, obtained a renewal of the alliance between Scotland and the Netherlands for a second term of 100 years. According to the only extant letter of Lyndsay (written from Antwerp on 23 Aug., when he was returning home), the emperor and his sister Margaret, queen of Hungary, then governess of the Netherlands, admitted the envoys to an audience at Brussels on the 6th. He remained in Brussels over seven weeks, to negotiate matters relating to the Scottish merchants, and was able to deny rumours of James V's death which came from England. He drew up a memoir for the king, unfortunately lost, of ‘the gret tournament’ given in honour of the queen of Hungary's confirmation as regent. During his absence a writ passed the seals in favour of his wife in certain lands on the Mill Hill of Cupar, and as she was confirmed in the conjunct fee of both his estates of Garmylton and the Mount in the same year, and again in 1538 and 1542, the conjecture that their marriage was not happy appears ill founded. Lyndsay was doubtless engaged on embassies in connection with the early projects for the king's marriage. It is certain that in the spring of 1536, when the choice had fallen on Marie de Bourbon, Lyndsay accompanied the Duke of Albany and other envoys, although his name does not appear among the signatories of the treaty of marriage concluded at Cremieux in Dauphiné on 6 March 1536. Probably he remained in France till the arrival of James in person, and took part in the amusements with which his marriage to Madeline, the daughter of the French king, was celebrated in Notre-Dame on 1 Jan. 1537. The lively account of them by Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie was perhaps dictated by his clansman, the Lyon king.
When the fragile Madeline died, within forty days of her landing in Scotland, Lyndsay wrote ‘The Deploration of the Death of Queen Magdalene,’ in which he describes the pageants he had prepared for her reception in Edinburgh. Lyndsay took an active share in the festivities that celebrated, in May 1538, the marriage of James to his second wife, Mary of Guise. When James met her at St. Andrews, at the east end of the gate of the new abbey, there was made for her a high ‘triumphand arch be Sir David Lyndsay quha causit ane greyt cloud to cum out of the hevins down aboue the zeit [gate], out of the quhilk cloude cam downe ane fair lady most lyk ane angell, having the keyis of Scotland in hir hand, and delyverit thayme to the queenis grace in signe and taikin that all the harts of Scotlande were opin for receiving of the queen's grace.’ He also composed verses for the occasion, ‘desyring hir to feir God and to serve him, and to reverence and obey hir husband.’ These verses are not preserved, but his ‘Justing betwixt James Watson and John Barbour,’ two physicians in the king's service, which he composed about the same time, has survived, though it is the poorest of his poems. To the same period probably belongs one of the cleverest of his short satires, ‘Ane Supplication directit to the Kingis Grace in contemptioun of Syde Taillis.’ Lyndsay, like Knox, was moved to
