'Thrie Truear Hairts': Alexander Montgomerie, Henry Constable, Henry Keir and cultural politics in renaissance Britain

Abstract

Among the least-considered aspects of late sixteenth-century British culture we may certainly count the relations between England and Scotland. They are almost ruled out of discussion, indeed, by the currency of the periodising terms 'Elizabethan' and 'Jacobean' with their implication that Jacobean culture begins in 1603 with the accession of James, already King of Scotland for 36 years, to the English throne. Most studies by Anglicists of the literature of James' reign barely take account of his Scottish period: even Jonathan Goldberg's James I and the Politics ofLiterature, an honourable partexception, gives twelve pages to James' 'possible misreading' of Book V of The Faerie Queene and only ten to the King's very extensive writings in both verse and prose.' Similarly, Linda Levy Peck's important collection of essays, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, pays only token attention to James' reign in Scotland.2 Yet not only is it true that the Scottish court in the 1580s and 1590s was a lively and significant cultural centre; but there are also strong grounds for believing that parallel with the undoubted political preoccupation of Elizabeth and her government with the position of their northern neighbour there was a real interest in the literary aspirations of a young king whose mother was an English prisoner until her execution in 1587 and who thereafter became increasingly likely to inherit Elizabeth's own crown. Two important recent essays by Priscilla Bawcutt have begun to redress this imbalance, but there remains a great deal to be done.3