Born 1394. Captured by the English in time of peace 1405, and kept a prisoner in the Tower, in Nottingham Castle, at Croydon, and at Windsor, till 1424, when he was released. In that year he married Lady Jane Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset, and granddaughter of John of Gaunt. She was the heroine of his principal poem, “The King’s Quair.” In 1437, after reigning thirteen years in Scotland, the king was assassinated at Perth. Besides “The King’s Quair,” he is commonly supposed to have written one or two other poems, notably the humorous ballad “Christ’s Kirk on the Green.”

Personal

  Our James was, if we may trust the chroniclers, short of stature but robust and stout of body…. He was a man of the finest natural gifts, and of a very lofty spirit. He took, in all manly exercises, a foremost part: farther than any he could put the large stone or throw the heavy hammer; swift he was of foot; a well-skilled musician; as a singer second to none. With the harp like another Orpheus he surpassed the Irish or the Wild Scots who are in that art pre-eminent. It was in the time of his long captivity in France and England that he learned all these accomplishments.

  Yit be benevolence of King Hary, war chosin sa wise and expert praeceptouris to instruk him in virtew and science; that he was na les resolute in every science, then he had bene perpetually eccupyit bot in ane: for he wes weill leirnit to fecht with the swerd, to just, to turnay, to worsill, to sing and dance: and was ane expert medicinar: richt crafty in playing baith of lute and harp and sindry othir instrumentis of musik. He was expert in gramer oratry and poetry: and maid sa flowand and sententious versis that appeirit weill he was ane naturall borne poete. He was als ane cunning theolog. For he lernit all his science during the time of his captivite.

  Was of midway stature, brade schoudert, and the rest of his memberis equal with this forme. When Aeneas Sylvius wald expreme the conjunction of his memberis with the majestie of his persoune, he calls him squair; as he wald say, his memberis war of sik equalitie that Nature culde forme nathing mare decent to the decore of a king, ather mair perfyt til a Kingis majestie…. Althoch he obteynet throuch benifite of nature sum commend of thir vertues, yit speciallie throuch the discipline of the zeris quhen he was captive in Ingland, throuch the kingis favour and gud wil, he was sa weil instructed, and diligent kair of his maistir; and in all sciences was sa scientive and cunning that in quhat science he was cunningest culd na man tel. In al kynde of musik he was excellent, upon the cythar mervellous, in oratrie nane mare artificious: in poetrie that he usit nocht only throuch arte to compound verse, but naturallie in a maner to speik verses. This will testifie the dyverse kyndes quhilkes he maid in Scotis metre, sa cunninglie, sa artificiouslie, and sa prudentlie that he was thocht verilie equal in quiknes, gravitie, and prudencie to the alde poetes of antiquite. Appeiris wonduerful heir quhat we speik and sik diligence far to excel the diligence of kings in our aige and skairs possible to believe. But quhen it was verilie trew and confirmit be thame quha spak with him, war familiar with him and quha perfytlie knew him, suld be writne to his perpetual prayse.

  He was popular among the people, who appreciated the advantages and the effects of his Government. He struggled hard to redress the oppression and to reform the intolerable evils which Norman feudalism had generated in Scotland. He clearly understood and thoroughly realised in his mind that which all his predecessors had failed to see, namely, that Norman feudalism contained in itself the essence of anarchy and injustice. He had a true conception of the form of government which the people of Scotland needed; though, unhappily, his ideas were too far in advance of his time. No historian who has studied his legislation can fail to admire his grasp of the fundamental principles of effective government, and the efficient administration of justice. Still the historian may not justify all his proceedings, and it seems to me that James I. sometimes pushed his depression of the nobles beyond the limits of justice and political wisdom.

  Unable to rule it, he dreaded the inherited spirit of the Stuarts.

Lat wisedome ay to thy will be iunyt,

had been the timely warning given him by the Goddess Minerva. But James was not the master of his own will. He did not see his goal as it was, but he saw it surrounded with such a halo that he became blind to all dangers. No prince evinced more cruelty in his vengeance than the poet of the gold-lattered gillyflowers; it seems as if the hatreds of Rimini or Ferrara had been transplanted to northern climes.

The King’s Quair, 1423?

	Go litill tretise, nakit of eloquence,
	Causing simplese and pouertee to wit;
	And pray the reder to haue pacience
	Of thy defaute, and to supporten it,
	Of his gudnese thy brukilnese to knytt,
	And his tong for to reule and to stere,
	That thy defautis helit may bene here.

  The design, or theme, of this work is the royal poet’s love for his beautiful mistress, Jane Beaufort, of whom he became enamoured whilst a prisoner at the castle of Windsor. The recollection of the misfortunes of his youth, his early and long captivity, the incident which gave rise to his love, its purity, constancy, and happy issue, are all set forth by way of allegorical vision, according to the reigning taste of the age, as we find in the poems of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, his contemporaries.

  It would, perhaps, be difficult to select even from Chaucer’s most finished works a long specimen of descriptive poetry so uniformly elegant as this: indeed some of the verses are so highly finished, that they would not disfigure the compositions of Dryden, Pope, or Gray.

	Amid the bards whom Scotia holds to fame,
	She boasts, nor vainly boasts, her James’s name;
	And less, sweet bard! a crown thy glory shows,
	Than the fair laurels that adorn thy brows.

  James had learnt to be a poet before he was a king: he was schooled in adversity, and reared in the company of his own thoughts. Monarchs have seldom time to parley with their hearts, or to meditate their minds into poetry; and had James been brought up amidst the adulation and gayety of a court, we should never, in all probability, have had such a poem as the Quair…. As an amatory poem, it is edifying in these days of coarser thinking, to notice the nature, refinement, and exquisite delicacy which pervade it; banishing every gross thought or immodest expression, and presenting female loveliness, clothed in all its chivalrous attributes of almost supernatural purity and grace.

  Though its subject and purpose did not give much room for much fertility of invention, it is full of delicacy, grace and feeling, smooth and artistic in versification, and, in general poetic merit, superior to any other English verse of the fifteenth or even the first half of the sixteenth century.

  Though he has no title to the rank of original poet, which some of his admirers claim for him, his “King’s Quhair” (Quire or Book) is justly the most celebrated English poem of the fifteenth century…. It must be owned that, while the “King’s Quhair” seems deficient in richness and delicacy of colouring when placed side by side with the work of the master, it reads remarkably well when removed from damaging comparison, and is infinitely the best composition produced in the school of Chaucer. There is real passion in it, and a real sense of beauty, though the expression fails to strike through and rise above the embarrassing self-criticism that cramps so many Scotch attempts at eloquence and poetry. The proportions are good, but the surface is dry and hard.

  It is most undoubtedly true that neither Chaucer nor any contemporary poet of either England or Scotland is characterized by that delicacy which distinguishes the productions of King James. Considering the rude age in which he wrote, and that Chaucer and Gower, with whose writings he was well acquainted, and whom indeed he acknowledges in one of his stanzas for his masters, were so distinguished, as well as Dunbar, for an opposite character, it is certainly one of the greatest phenomena in the annals of poetry.

  Full of the fragrance of a most sweet, romantic, innocent, and at last, as we are glad for once to know, a happy and rewarded love.

	the nightingale through his prison wall
	Taught him both lore and love.
	For once, when the bird’s song drew him close
	To the opened window-pane,
	In her bower beneath a lady stood,
	A light of life to his sorrowful mood,
	Like a lily amid the rain.
	And for her sake, to the sweet bird’s note,
	He framed a sweeter Song,
	More sweet than ever a poet’s heart
	Gave yet to the English tongue.

  If rather deficient in originality—for it is impossible to believe that the “King’s Quhair” would ever have been written if the works of Chaucer had not been already in existence—James I. had a fine poetical spirit, and were it not for the many difficulties of dialect which it presents, his poem would be much more generally read than it is.

  The “Kingis Quhair” marks a new epoch in the history of Scottish poetry. The plain, unadorned, semi-prosaic style of the metrical chronicles gave place to a delicacy and refinement of imaginative feeling, a richness and elegance of diction, and an artistic melody of verse hitherto unknown. The revolution in the national literature was as great as the revolution in the national policy, but it was more benign in its operation and more lasting in its effects. Henceforth Scotland has a share in the culture of western Christendom.

  Few poems deserving permanence in literature, yet almost unread, are better known by repute than that in which this captive king sang of his love in the year 1423. He sang according to the fashion of the day, and with so much honour to himself that the seven-lined Chaucer stanza which he followed—a familiar and favourite one with Lydgate, Occleve, and all other poets of the generation after Chaucer—was thenceforth, because enamoured majesty had used it, called rhyme royal. Such royal patronage might be left now to the buttermen. In Literature Chaucer was the king, and James his liegeman.

  No poet has ever painted love-longing and the dawn of love more delicately or with subtler artistic touch; no poet has given a more exquisite impression of the sweet awe and loveliness of womanhood. As it stands, “The Kingis Quair” places James in the gallery of the world’s immortal lovers. Beside Petrarch penning his sonnets to Laura, and the pale Dante gazing on his dead Beatrice, must remain the picture of the captive prince looking forth from his lattice in the tower of Windsor, while below in the garden alleys there lingers for a space, half-consciously, the maid of “beautee eneuch to mak a world to dote.”

  The poem ends, as was customary, with an envoy, and a reference to the “superlative poets,” Gower and Chaucer, whose soul its royal author commends to the bliss of heaven in a line that haunts the ear with a fine, far-off, aeolian melody such as distinguishes mediaeval poetry at its best; he who has never caught it has missed an exquisite satisfaction, a pure and humanizing pleasure.

  If we suppose our standpoint to be that of an editor coming now to weigh the evidence for the first time, is there anyone so bold as to assert that James would be named as the author? The Bodleian manuscript—half a century at least later than the reign of James—breaks down altogether under fair and ordinary tests, its false ascriptions numbering at least one half of the whole. John Major—a sixteenth century historian, writing eighty-four years after the death of the king—is found in the very passage in which the “Kingis Quair” is attributed to James, to be indisputably untrustworthy about the other vernacular poems. But the historical evidence must also take account of Walter Bower, William Dunbar, and Sir David Lindsay. Bower, the sole contemporary, and for that reason, in a strict sense, the only competent witness, must be held to be against James. In the minutely particular description, he has attributed to the king more “virtues” than any one man ever possessed—many of them insignificant enough taken alone—yet, although taking care to preserve a specimen of Latin versification, he nowhere suggests that James wrote vernacular poetry. So too, Dunbar, in a deliberate survey of the whole field of Scottish poetry, omits all mention of the ancestor of his patron, James the Fourth: while Lindsay—who had lauded James V. as a poet—in a poem that certainly gave him the opportunity of naming James the First in company with the eight makars singled our for praise, is also silent. The plain inference surely is that Bower, Dunbar, and Lindsay were not aware that James the First had written vernacular poetry. They are to be regarded as witnesses—qualified to speak with authority—who in giving evidence have significantly testified against the king by omitting all mention of his name as a Scottish makar.

  In spite of this state of pupilage, and in spite of his employment of the old French machinery of a dream, allegorical personages and supernatural conventions, the poem of James I. is a delicious one. His use of metre was highly intelligent; he neither deviated back towards the older national prosody, like Lydgate, nor stumbled aimlessly on, like Occleve; he perceived what it was that Chaucer had been doing, and he pursued it with great firmness, so that, in the fifty or sixty years which divided the latest of the “Canterbury Tales” from “The Flower and the Leaf,” the “King’s Quair” is really the only English poem in which a modern ear can take genuine pleasure.

Christ’s Kirk (?)

	One likes no language but the Faery Queen;
	A Scot will fight for Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green.

	For James the Muses tuned their sportive lays,
	And bound the monarch’s brow with Chaucer’s bays:
	Arch Humour smiled to hear his mimic strain,
	And plausive Laughter thrill’d through every vein.

  A ludicrous poem, describing low manners with no less propriety than sprightliness.

  Christis Kirk of the Grene, to whatever author it may be referred, must undoubtedly be regarded as an exquisite specimen of ancient humour.

  “Peblis to the Play” and “Christis Kirk on the Green” are poems full of the very breath of rural life and the rude yet joyous meetings of the country folk at kirk and market, which with wonderfully little difference of sentiment and movement also inspired Burns. He must have had a mind full of variety and wide human sympathy almost Shakspearian, who could step from the musings of Windsor and the beautiful heroine, all romance and ethereal splendour, to the lasses in their gay kirtles, and Hob and Raaf with their rustic “daffing,” as true to the life as the Ayrshire clowns of Burns, and all the clumsy yet genial gambols of the village festival. It is one of the most curious and least to be expected transformations of poetic versatility—for it is even amazing how he could know the life into which he thus plunged joyous, as if he had been familiar with it from his childhood.