Buchanan, George c.1506-1582
Scottish scholar and humanist

Born near Killearn in Stirlingshire, at the age of 14 he was sent by an uncle to study Latin at the University of Paris. He returned to Scotland in 1523 and studied at St Andrews University, then returned to Paris to teach. In 1537, King James V appointed him tutor to one of his illegitimate sons, the future Earl of Moray, but he was soon charged with heresy at St Andrews after writing a satirical poem about friars, Franciscanus, which offended Cardinal Beaton. He fled to France, where he taught at Bordeaux (1539-42) with Montaigne as one of his pupils, and wrote two tragedies in Latin, Jeptha and Baptistes. In 1547 he went to teach at Coimbra in Portugal, where he was arrested by the Inquisition as a suspected heretic. During his confinement (1547-53) he made a Latin paraphrase of the Psalms, which was published in 1566 with a dedication to Mary, Queen of Scots. He returned to Scotland in 1561 and was appointed Classical tutor to the 19-yearold queen, despite his acknowledged leanings towards Protestantism. He abandoned the queen's cause after the murder of Lord Darnley in 1567, and charged her with complicity in a scurrilous pamphlet, Ane Detectioun of the Duings of Mary Quene (1571). In 1567 he was elected Moderator of the newly-formed General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and later was appointed Keeper of the Privy Seal of Scotland, and tutor to the four-year-old King James VI of Scotland (1570-78). His main works were De juri regni apud Scotos (1579, an attack on the divine right of monarchs and a justification for the depositionof Mary), and a monumental but unreliable history of Scotland, Rerum scoticarum historia (20 vols), which he completed shortly before his death.

Bibliography: I D McFarlane, Buchanan (1981)