The consideration of material culture remains a fruitful element in the study of the lives and mentalities of the Catholics of Early Modern Britain. It is axiomatic that the Catholic community acted as preservers of the past, carrying relics, textiles and the other elements which made up the tissue of the memory of their community ‘beyond the seas under colore of safe custodie’Footnote 1 , but they were also active in commissioning new objects of memory from the artists and craftsmen of baroque Europe to take their places alongside salvaged objects, such as the cope at Saint-Omer from the chapel of Henry VII and ‘found emblems’ such as the statue of the Virgin vandalised by the Earl of Essex’s expedition to Cadiz, subsequently venerated at Valladolid.Footnote 2 By the later sixteenth century British Catholics were themselves existing within a new, Tridentine, order, so that the objects which furnished their lives, libraries, and altars reflect continually and inevitably a process of adaptation and negotiation of identity through the fabrication, collection and arrangement of the tangible world.
There is much scope for further investigation in these questions of material preservation and re-invention, and the probability remains that the reformation constituted in itself a major stimulus (perhaps the major stimulus) to the collection of the material past of Britain and, subsequently, to the beginnings of archaeology in the British Isles. It is of particular interest to look at material culture in the context of Scotland, in that it is still widely believed that almost nothing survived Presbyterian iconoclasm, and that the post-reformation climate would have been so hostile to any attempts at Catholic revival that nothing would have been created by or for the Catholic community. This was demonstrably not the case, particularly in the northern counties of Aberdeen, Banff and Moray. One indication of the mentality of the Catholic community there is given by the pattern of post-reformation preservation of Scotland’s first printed book, the ambitious Breviarium Aberdonense.
After the Reformation, of five surviving copies, two were in the possession of Catholic gentry in Aberdeenshire: the ‘Strathmore’ copy (now National Library of Scotland) belonged to Francis Hay of Delgaty (fl. 1676), the ‘Ker’ copy (also in NLS) belonged to a George Arbuthnot. The Compassio Beatae Mariae pamphlet now bound with the Strathmore copy, belonged to John Lesley of Lesley. Copies now lost belonged to the Scots College in Paris and the controversialist Thomas Dempster of Muiresk in Bologna.Footnote 3 While the interest of Dempster can be assumed to be primarily rooted in the study of history as a weapon of religious controversy, and while the use later made of the Paris copy by the Abbé Thomas Innes was historical and scholarly, the value of a pre-Tridentine prayer book (and one which had not even been a particular success within Scotland at the time of its publication) to Catholic laymen in Aberdeenshire in the seventeenth century poses worthwhile questions. It cannot have been of contemporary devotional use, so its preservation of necessity implies a degree of awareness of the present and the past states of Scottish Catholicism (even if it was as simple a desire as to preserve the commemorations of local saints contained in the text) and thus some consciousness of a community and its history, as recorded by the Breviarium, must have constituted an element of personal identity.
Alexander Seton, his library and education
Within a few miles of Muiresk and the castle of the Hays at Delgaty, is Fyvie Castle, owned and extensively remodelled from 1596 by Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie, later first Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622). Seton himself was a preserver of the past: he is now known to have owned and preserved one of the manuscripts of the Scottichronicon from Scone Abbey in Perthshire, the Liber Sconensis or ‘Black Book of Scone’.Footnote 4 He may also have acted as preserver, possibly even at one point repairer, of the Abbey of Pluscarden in Morayshire, whose revenues had been bestowed on him as a christening gift by his godmother, Mary Queen of Scots. His work at Fyvie has to a considerable degree been overlaid by later building campaignsFootnote 5 , but his works at Pinkie House in East Lothian survive with the iconographically-rich ceiling of the magnificent long gallery intactFootnote 6 .
Seton is in every respect a figure worthy of study, a ‘Church Papist’ of continental education, who contrived to hold high government office in Scotland through the violence of the Calvinist reformation and even to act as guardian of the infant Charles I, ending his career as Earl of Dunfermline and Chancellor of Scotland.Footnote 7 Our knowledge of him is considerably deepened by the discovery, in the last year, of a document which sheds considerable new light on his education, his mentality, and his world. This is a partial library list, found amongst the papers of the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres on deposit in the National Library of Scotland ‘Inventair of som of the Earill of Dunfermline his buiks in Pinkie, 1625’.Footnote 8 It would appear to be in the hand of David Lindsay, Lord Lindsay of Balcarres (1587–1642, created Lord Lindsay 1633), who married Seton’s daughter Sophia in 1612, and who may possibly have received his education in Seton’s household. This document would appear to be a listing of books in a private or semi-private bookroom: it seems to be a shelf by shelf listing, in that the books appear more or less in order of size; there are such notable absences, for example there are only five book in total for the Greek and Latin classics, that another library can be assumed elsewhere in the house. It also seems possible that the presence of explicitly Catholic works of religious controversy might argue that these books were kept in a space at least to some degree private.
What this list offers (as well as some surprises and illuminations, such as the presence of a copy of Palladio’s Quatro Libri) is a real insight into an individual, a circle, and the mind of that circle. It might, without exaggeration, be claimed as a key document in the history of the later renaissance in Scotland. It also offers evidence of the transmission of key texts and ideas from the international world of the counter-reformation baroque. Here is concrete evidence for the aspiration, at least amongst the elite of Scotland at the turn of the seventeenth century, to live in a way which participated in the international civilisation of Europe. Here also is a document which enables us, to a considerable degree, to attain a degree of certainty about the sometimes-elusive nature of Catholic culture under penalty.
Seton’s biography explains much about his cosmopolitan and comprehensive library. After his death, Archibald Symson, Minister of Dalkieth, wrote in his Hieroglyphica Animalium, which is dedicated to Seton’s son Charles, a sequence of elegiac verses on the death of the Chancellor, ‘Musarum Lachrymae de obitu Cancellarii’.Footnote 9 Dalkeith is in East Lothian at no great distance from Seton’s Pinkie House at Musselburgh, and there are suggestion of a patronage relationship in the verses (‘hoc igitur solo iam Mecoenate sepulto’), all of which would tend to suggest that Symson may have known about Seton’s career in some detail. Thus his statements should be accorded a degree of credence, extraordinary as the curriculum vitae, which they outline, might appear for the Chancellor of Scotland in the years between the reformation and the Covenant. These were the years which included the conversion of Queen Anne in the late 1590sFootnote 10 and the martyrdom of S. John Ogilvie in 1615.
Scotland first gave him the light, France, the rudiments of grammar, Padua taught him the laws, and Rome, rhetoric, where [lived] that well-known Tullius, to know the words of the fathers, thus Salamanca taught him. Scotia first gave him the light, and took it away at the last; she was thus both his parent and his stepmother.Footnote 11
Given the political and religious position of Seton’s father, as described by a hostile witness, it is unsurprising that he chose to educate a promising younger son in elite universities and colleges on the continent:
George Seton ; an auncicnt baron, and of reasonable lyuinge, which lyeth all in Lothian, within 6 or 7 miles of Edenburgh. His power is not greate, nor his frendis or followers many. He hath ben alwayes Frenche in affection, and is in harte a Papiste, thoughe he dare not aduowe it. Of a nature busye and curyous; of more speche than iudgement ; a principall instrument [of the] Sc. Quene and a harbourer of Jesuitis, and fugitiues of a countrye, and enemye to a peace.Footnote 12
It seems unproblematic that Seton should have received his first education in France, but his Roman education needs an element of explanation. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms that ‘In 1571, when he was about fifteen, he became a student at the Jesuit-run German College in Rome.’ This fact co-exists with persistent assertions that he was a student of the Jesuit Collegio Romano which has given rise to speculation that he might have studied for the priesthood.Footnote 13 The facts are less complex. The Collegium Germanicum functioned as a school for the sons of the nobility of many countries in Europe, and it was perhaps because of the status of the pupils that a student of the College had the privilege of making an oration to the Pope annually, Seton amongst them:
He declaimed, not being 16 years of age, ane learned oration of his own composing, De Ascensione Domini, on that festival day publickly befoe the Pope, Gregory the 13th, the cardinall, and other prelats present, in the pope’s chapel in the Vatican, with great applause.Footnote 14
The older pupils had the opportunity of studying philosophy at the Collegio Romano, without being students for the priesthood themselves. Seton clearly stayed in Rome for long enough to undertake this senior study, probably until about 1576. From Italy he went to France, where he studied law. It is also perfectly possible that he spent some time in Padua: short periods of study at a celebrated college were very much a part of the early modern academic life. Symson’s statement that Seton studied theology at Salamanca seems, however, to be unique, although the sometimes inaccurate account in the continuation of Richard Maitland’s The History of the House of Seytoun to 1559 does assert that Sir John Seton of Barnes was in Spain and at the Court of Philip II there, where he was awarded a golden key,Footnote 15 perplexingly like the one worn at Alexander Seton’s wrist in the portrait of him by Gheerarts now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
According to his kinsman Alexander Seton, Viscount Kingston (d. 1691), the results of his education were that he became ‘a great humanist in prose and poesie, Greek and Latine; well versed in the mathematics and great skill in architecture and herauldrie’.Footnote 16 At last, the discovery of the library list enables some estimate to be made of this learning and cultivation, and it would seem that his consistent application of the examples of high renaissance design and ideas of civility to his own environments indeed vindicates this estimate of him. His inscription on his house and garden at Pinkie is well-known: in a polity where the possession of a fortified house was perhaps the prime signifier of gentry status, he makes a point that his is an unfortified ‘villa suburbana’ dedicated to the Horatian virtues of friendship and temperate hospitality.Footnote 17
Seton’s religious position and public career
In February 1588, Seton’s religious position was forced to a crisis when the King named him an ordinary Lord of Session; his colleagues were understandably suspicious about his religious views, given his personal and family background, and insisted that he commit himself to the established church by taking communion and making its confession of faithFootnote 18 . He did so, and for the rest of his life apparently conformed, although he continually maintained contact with proscribed Catholics, especially Jesuits. His success as a civil servant in a time when able government ministers were crucial to the survival and governance of the Scottish kingdom, seems in practise to have bought him a very considerable latitude to practise, and indeed promote, his religion in private, albeit at no great distance from the capital. To two Scottish Jesuits who visited him clandestinely in 1605 Seton professed his loyalty to the ancient faith, but explained that the time for an attempt to restore it had not yet come. ‘He is now all-powerful in Scotland, but he will attempt nothing until he sees a solid foundation of hope’, they concluded. ‘Meanwhile he takes his portion in this life, though at the risk of that which is eternal.’Footnote 19
The original of the opinion summarised by Forbes-Leith would seem to be a letter dated 30 September, 1605 from William Crichton SJ to the General Claudio Acquaviva in Rome, in which he expresses his conclusion that while Seton is a ‘Church Papist’ he fosters Catholicism at home in the context of a wholly Catholic family.
For the present several times he went with the others to confession and communion, with his mother, brother, sister and nephews who are more resolute Catholics.Footnote 20
Seton’s religious status is also brought into a letter expressing Jesuit wishful thinking about the conversion of James VI:
Alexander Seton was created Chancellor of the Realm of Scotland, by command of the King, he [Seton] being an alumnus of the College [re-] founded by Gregory 13 of happy memory. He studied Philosophy and Theology in the Seminarium Romanum, but to a considerable extent, and to his own great harm, pretends to agree to the religion of the Heretics, however the King in truth knows him to be a Catholic.Footnote 21
Perhaps it is only now, in possession of an indication of the contents of Seton’s private library, that it is possible to know the extent to which he remained Catholic in private. As a ‘Church Papist’ (if the phrase is wholly applicable to Scotland) he contrived to elude serious public trouble on account of his religion, perhaps with the exceptions of his early indiscretion in 1583 in corresponding with the Collegio Romano using a Jesuit courier, and the more serious religious riot in Edinburgh mostly directed at him in 1597. Perhaps it is worth remembering that those who governed Scotland throughout the reign of James VI were in many cases pragmatically suspicious of the extreme forms of Calvinism, simply in that they rendered governance so problematic.Footnote 22 The retrospective, the Victorian narrative of a united Calvinist nation is far from the truth, especially in that the north-eastern counties of Scotland, where Seton held the castle and lands of Fyvie as well as the former Priory of Pluscarden. In Aberdeenshire and Moray mutual toleration between an Episcopalian majority and an influential Catholic minority seems to have co-existed with widespread suspicion of the more extreme manifestations of Presbyterianism. At Fyvie, there is some archaeological evidence for a building standing in Seton’s time which may well have been a Catholic ChapelFootnote 23 : certainly post-reformation oratories survive to this day at the neighbouring castles of Towie Barclay and Delgaty, and the neighbouring gentry families of Dempster of Muiresk and Conn of Auchry both produced notable Catholic writers and apologists in the early-modern period.
Even at Pinkie House at Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, which Seton remodelled extensively, the style of architecture is to a notable extent that of the contemporary continent. The remarkable painted gallery there is a learned room, most certainly an evocation or re-creation of classical antiquity, but, in its series of emblem paintings and related inscriptions, it is also redolent of contemporary Jesuit cultures of emblemata and the affixiones. Indeed, the ranks of emblems on the unified theme of the wise conduct of a life, recalls the visual culture of festal days in a Jesuit College.Footnote 24 Certainly the gallery’s emblems and inscriptions convey a message of stoicism, self-control and wariness as well as praising the merits of friendship, hospitality and retirement. It also seems wholly possible that Seton fostered an explicitly counter-reformation educational culture there, while on his lands in Moray he seems to have gone to some lengths to preserve his control over what remained of the Priory of Pluscarden. All of Seton’s known activities, cultural and religious, can to some degree be related to the books listed as being in his private library, so the remainder of this article will look first at the composition of the library as recorded and then at some key works in it, considering their relation to Seton’s house and world.
Seton’s Library
First, it must be emphasised that this list cannot encompass all of the books which can be conjectured to have been in Seton’s possession: not only are the Greek and Latin classics almost absent, with only three classical Latin works and two Greek (as well as, possibly, the Corpus Poetarum a title widely used and therefore hard to identify) but there are also several works used in the composition of the gallery ceiling which can be identified but are not in the book list. Even so, the document is rich in its implications: perhaps the first thing to strike a historian of the book in Scotland is the ease with which Seton would have appeared to obtain continental editions. Many of the books which he owned can be identified with works published mostly in northern Europe in the 1580s and 1590s, there are continental printings from the first two decades of the seventeenth century, there would seem to be a small group of early seventeenth century London printings. If Seton did indeed own the whole of the Annales Ecclesiastici, which appeared at Rome volume by volume from 1588–1607, beginning eight years after Seton’s own return to Scotland, and it is of some significance that he did own such a current and distinguished contribution to the debate on contemporary religious confessions and ecclesiastical history, then he must have obtained it directly from the continent, perhaps through those Jesuit contacts which he appears to have maintained for all his outward religious conformity. Compared to the library of Seton’s friend and fellow-‘Octavian’ in the governance of Scotland, John Lindsay Lord Menmuir, in so far as research currently in progress has been able to reconstruct it mostly from copies now at Balcarres House, Seton would appear to have greater funds to lay out on recent editions, many of them expensive illustrated folios, and he seems also to have access to continental books far beyond that afforded by the comparatively modest book trade of Scotland in his time.
The first reflection prompted by this list of some eighty five volumes, is that Seton owned a remarkable number of illustrated books concerned with art and architecture. His copy of Palladio is certainly the first recorded in Scotland, but it appears amongst ten works on related subjects, including ‘Architectura de Marchii folio’; ‘Architectura di Sebastiano Serlio folio’ and ‘Leçons de perspective positive folio’, altogether an exceptional number. Seton’s interest in current debates and controversies between religious confessions, particularly those drawing on ecclesiastical and secular history is attested not only by his ownership of Baronius, and by his considerable holdings of works by Greek fathers of the Church, some eight volumes. (His holdings of Latin fathers are considerably more modest at four volumes.) Most notably in this context, he owns ten works of pro-Catholic controversy and apologetics, including the profoundly counter-reformation Bellarmine. His ownership of the works of S. Thomas More may have been as much prompted by an interest in More as martyr as by an interest in More as humanist. There is a group of six works on clocks, chronography and the reckoning of time, an interest unsurprising in a modernising statesman who also had mathematical and technical interests attested by three and four books respectively. These interests were evidently known to contemporary Scottish scientists, since he was the dedicatee of John Napier’s celebrated book on logarithms, Rhabdologia (1617). Another mathematician, Robert Pont (father of the famous cartographer, Timothy Pont), dedicated A Newe Treatise of the Right Reckoning of Year and Ages of the World (1599) to him, describing him as foremost of the ‘rare Maecenases of this land’.
Overall it might be observed that there are an exceptional number of books in Greek and in French. The influence of Seton’s continental education is everywhere apparent, and the library-list indicates a man and a circle of exceptional cultivation, perhaps the single household in Scotland most in tune with the later continental renaissance and the emerging baroque of the counter-reformation.
Seton’s building and decoration at Pinkie House
Perhaps the manifestation of Seton’s reading and learning which is most easily traced is his interest in architecture. As well as his works at Fyvie, which have now been to a considerable degree overlaid and obscured by later building campaigns, he made extensive alteration to Pinkie House, which can still be seen, although his gardens are now represented only by their walls and inscriptions. When Seton inherited Pinkie in 1600, the massive central tower erected by the Abbots of Dunfermline in the early sixteenth century and the rooms immediately to the north of it, added later in the century, were in place, but the present state of the house is almost all the result of Seton’s building campaign, which ended about 1613.Footnote 25
The east facade facing the garden is reminiscent of some of the more advanced work in renaissance Scotland, such as the gallery at Dunottar Castle with its evenly-spaced chimney stacks. Three storeys of windows in a series of nine regulated bays, articulated by two string courses and a central ground-floor arch with flanking square openings in the configuration of a Serlian or Venetian window all point to the Italian origins and aspirations of the design. The overall effect might be compared to the facade of Donato Bramante’s Palazzo Cancellaria in Rome, finished in the mid sixteenth century, which Seton would have seen when he was studying in Rome. The proportions of Seton’s east block indeed draw on Renaissance principles of order and space, as expounded in the architectural treatises in the library.
The painted gallery at Pinkie has been so extensively described by Michael Bath, that it is necessary here only to observe that analysis of its inscriptions adds three works to the list of books which can be conjectured to have been easily available to Seton as he devised the emblematic decoration. The chief work on which he draws is the Emblemata Horatiana by Otto van Veen, published at Antwerp in 1607, but it is possible that the feigned architecture of the whole ceiling, with its one principal and two subsidiary domes, is derived from the frontispiece engraving of Blaise de Vigenère’s Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux Philostrates Sophistes, which was published at Paris in 1614 with illustrations by Jaspar Isaac. He certainly attempts one recreation of an ancient image drawn directly from this edition of Philostratus, in the emblem of the infant Pindar on the ceiling.Footnote 26
Figure 1 Pinkie House, Musselburgh, Garden Front, c. 1613, Copyright-free; Creative Commons.
Figure 2 Donato Bramante, Palazzo Cancelleria, Rome, Finished c. 1555. Public Domain.
Figure 3 Ceiling of the Long Gallery, Pinkie House, Musselburgh, 1613. The panel with the emblem NIHIL AMPILIUS OPTO has a likeness of Seton as the temperate philosopher of the emblem. Photograph by courtesy of Professor Michael Bath
Figure 4 Tabernacle (Aumbry), Pluscarden Abbey, Moray. Photograph by courtesy of Dr Stephen Holmes
Figure 5 Tabernacle, Balcarres Chapel, Balcarres House, Fife. Photograph by kind permission of The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Crawford and Balcarres.
The ceiling functions in a complex way: as allusion to Philostratus and Horace, as a subtle and systained exercise in applied emblematics, as a recollection of Jesuit festal affixiones, as treatise on restraint, stoicism and governance, even as self-portrait. It is perhaps most urgently, in the context of Seton’s Christian humanist education, a place of solace, retreat, consolation. The discreet statesman who owned de Vigenère’s Traicté des chiffres, ou Secrètes manières d’escrire Footnote 27 also placed the impresa of the watchful, wakeful crane as guardian of the oriel window at the end of the gallery which faces towards Edinburgh.
His ownership of a book on cryptography is interesting given how much Seton may have needed to conceal: it also raises the possibility that he was engaged in clandestine correspondence with Catholics either within or beyond Scotland. He narrowly avoided serious trouble in 1583 when a Jesuit, William Holt, who had been staying at the family house at Seton in East Lothian, was seized as he was about to depart for France. Holt was carrying a letter from Seton to his old schoolmaster in Rome expressing the hope that the true faith might be restored. Although Seton was questioned he managed to avoid further consequences when the hard-line protestant regime of the ‘Ruthven raiders’ fell from power in the summer of that year.
Education in Seton’s household
One use of Seton’s library may have been for the purpose of education: there are several indications that there was sustained educational activity within his household, and that the instruction offered was distinctly Catholic. There is reason to think that the son of Seton’s colleague Lord Menmuir, David Lindsay, later Lord Balcarres and husband of Seton’s daughter Sophia, may possibly have received his education with Seton. Marion Guthrie, his mother, in her last letter to her husband, requested that his brother Lord Edzell, along with Edzell and Menmuir’s nephew-by-marriage, Alexander Seton, be asked to extend their protection to the Balcarres children.Footnote 28
A notebook of 1603 belonging to the young David Lindsay survives in the Crawford papers in the National Library of ScotlandFootnote 29 : in the last months of that year, at the age of sixteen, he was engaged in serious and intensive study of the Latin classics. The notebook records a thorough study of each text, excerpting vocabulary and ‘sententiae’, interesting, pithy phrases which might in future ornament a speech or an essay. When he finished with a work, he noted the date—in Latin form—on which he did so, which shows that he was reading with some intensity: in September, he read Terence, Sallust, the third book of Cicero’s De Officiis, Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, Tibullus, Catullus, Cicero on Sallust, Juvenal, Cicero’s Ad Familiares, and Propertius. On the one hand, this shows he was already well able to comprehend long and complex works of Latin literature. On the other, unless he was an exceptional sixteen-year-old, it also strongly suggests that he was reading under direction: the dates suggest as much, as does the assiduity with which the notebook is maintained.
One specific indication that the studies represented by David Lindsay’s notebook of 1603 may have taken place at Pinkie is an unusual inclusion. Along with the standard authors, Lindsay was reading Cassander on rhetoric, by which he presumably means Tabulæ præceptionum dialecticarum, quæ quam breuissimè & planissimè artis methodum complectuntur printed by Wechel in Paris in 1548. George Cassander (1513–1566) was an eirenist who attempted to reconcile the Catholic and Protestant churches. He did so from genuine knowledge of the theologies of both, thus constituting himself precisely the kind of writer to interest Seton, whose private library is heavily inclined to questions of religious controversy.
There is certainly clear evidence for educational activity late in the sixteenth century: in 1593, Lord Seton’s children were being tutored by Steine Ballantyne, a Catholic who had been forbidden to teach in schools on account of his religion.Footnote 30 Balcarres evidently knew Seton’s library at Pinkie House well, since he made the list of books at Pinkie which is the focus of this article,Footnote 31 and he was close to the household, since he chose Seton’s daughter Sophia as his wife.
Thomas Seget/Segetius (1569–1627) was a wandering scholar and distinguished Latin poet who came from Seton in East Lothian, he was also associated with Seton’s household. Seget was in the Lothians, making a living as a schoolmaster in the 1590s: in the summer of 1594, Alexander Seton ignored the presbytery of Haddington’s warning against employing Seget (a Catholic, probably a convert) to compose a funeral oration on one of his brothers.Footnote 32 A few months after this defiance of the Kirk, Seget was in Catholic Antwerp, and never again returned to Scotland.Footnote 33 Thereafter, he travelled widely, wrote admired verse and met many of the leading scholars of his day. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) records Seget and himself looking for the moons of Jupiter together in the autumn of 1610 and confirming Galileo’s epoch-making discovery of satellites which did not go round the earth.Footnote 34
There is no evidence that Seget stayed in touch with Alexander Seton, although it is worth noting that Seton owned the complete works of Justus Lipsius, Seget’s friend and patron in the years immediately after he first left Scotland. However, he met both a William Seton, possibly Alexander’s brother, and David Lindsay of Balcarres’s Catholic uncle Walter Lindsay in Louvain in 1597.Footnote 35
Seton and Pluscarden Priory
Seton’s ownership of Baronius, and the interest in ecclesiastical history demonstrated by the library list, both serve to focus attention on his relationship with the one ecclesiastical building (if we except the probable chapel at Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire) which was, to a considerable extent, under his control: Pluscaden Priory, near Elgin in Moray. Seton’s relationship with Pluscarden lasted throughout his life and offers at least one possible piece of evidence for a limited survival of monasticism in Scotland, as well as a striking instance of the degree to which the Catholic magnates of the north-eastern counties could, with discretion, continue to practise and advance their religion. Seton was given the title and office of Prior of Pluscarden as a baptismal gift by his Godmother, Mary Queen of Scots in 1556 and, after the reformation, he continued to hold the temporalities of Pluscarden, controlling the lands and revenues of a monastic house which had (at least in theory) been dissolved. Between 1571 and 1580, when Seton was absent on the continent, he was deprived of Pluscarden for his failure to conform to the established Protestant church in 1577. However, he recovered the temporalities of the Abbey in 1581, with the fall of the Regent Morton. In 1587, an exception was made in Seton’s favour (he had just played a considerable part in implementing James VI’s legislative programme) when all other church lands came into the possession of the crownFootnote 36 . He received the lands of Pluscarden as a baronyFootnote 37 later in the same year, thus obtaining a considerable degree of autonomy and control over monastery buildings and lands on the edges of the area where there was most support for the survival of Catholicism.
The reticence of the dissident areas in the northern counties complicates any certainty about the state of Pluscarden under Seton’s protection, but there are possibilities that some form of monastic life continued there after the reformation, although considerable caution is in order in advancing the idea as anything more than a conjectureFootnote 38 . Certainly, Stephen Holmes’s ‘Sixteenth Century Pluscarden Priory and its World’Footnote 39 reminds us that Pluscarden was unusual ‘in that none of the monks were known to have served the new Kirk and Dom Thomas Ross . . . certainly remained loyal to the old Kirk’Footnote 40 to the extent of annotating his BibleFootnote 41 as though preparing to compose a work of religious controversy, distinctly hostile to Protestantism. It seems that Dom Thomas was the only monk left at Pluscarden by 1587, but the records of the Kirk Session of Elgin, note that ‘the monk of Pluscarden’ baptised children in April and May 1599.Footnote 42
Although Pluscarden was subjected to iconoclastic vandalism at the reformation, the presence there of a tabernacle or aumbry which looks as though it is made up of two distinct pieces which do not quite match, raises the possibility, but it must remain no more than that, of a repair sponsored by Seton in the shadowy period of the 1580s or 1590s, as part of some kind of continuance as suggested by the activities of Dom Thomas Ross.Footnote 43 Given the degree to which the Catholics of the north managed both to practise their religion and to cover their tracks, it remains within the realm of the possible.
Sophia Seton and the Balcarres Chapel
This article finds a conclusion in the next generation, with another composite tabernacle in a secluded chapel. During Seton’s lifetime, David Lindsay, later first Lord Balcarres, married Seton’s daughter Sophia in 1612. There survives at Balcarres, near the house, a freestanding chapel, which bears a datestone for 1635 and the initials of David Lord Balcarres and Sophia Lady Balcarres.Footnote 44 This also contains what appears to be a composite aumbry or tabernacle, one of two niches,
Two late-gothic aumbries set in the eastern ends of the side walls. They are similar in character but the southern one has a garland issuing from a cartouche carved on either jamb.Footnote 45
While of course it is possible that the late gothic niche was united at some subsequent date with the stylistically mid seventeenth century garlands which flank it, but if it was part of the original scheme of 1635, as seems probable then, as the Buildings of Scotland entry for Balcarres phrases it, ‘if in situ it is a surprising feature for a protestant chapel of this date’.Footnote 46 It certainly bears today the appearance of a tabernacle and the strong possibility exists that Seton’s daughter was responsible for building of one of the very first freestanding post-reformation Catholic churches in Britain.
Appendix I
[Diplomatic transcription of Crawford Papers, NLS Acc. 9769/14/2/2]
Inventair of som of the Earill of Dunfermline his buiks in Pinkie (1625)
Cosmographie de Belle
Sabellini aeneados
Raphaelis Volatenani
Polidori Vergili
Holinshed
Pulus Jovius
D Basillii magni opera
Theatrum genealogicon
Geneologica Romanorum Imperatorum
Codex Sconensis folio
Annales Baronii 5 vol folio
Photii bibliotheca
Icones animarum
Philojudaeus in libros Mosis
Eiusdem lucubrationes
Stobornus folio
Biblia Regia 5 volcum apparatu 3 vol
Bibliothetca patru[m] 7 vol folio
Chrisostomi opera 5 vol
Cyrillus folio
Originus folio
Clemens Alexandrinus gra: colatinus [?] folio
Historia Patrum
Summa Thomae
Abrosii opera
Bellarmini opera folio
Chronographia Genebrandi fol.
Tertuliani opera
Les tableaux de plate peinture de Philostrate par viginere folio [Vigenère, ?1637]
Theatrum vitae humanae
Philostrati opera
Athanaeus folio
Scaliger de emendatione temporu[m] folio
Clavis de horologus
Osorius 3 vol folio
Rodolphus Hispanianus de origine temploru[m], folio
Angeli Politiani opera folio
Antiquitatu [?] ronvinabium Lib 3 folio
Thomae Mori opera folio
Clavii Astrolabium 4o
Orontius horologis 4o
Theodosii [?]Thopitae sphaeri:corum lib 3 4o
Algebra Clavii
Mechanicorum liber folio
Apollonii Pergaei Conicorum lib 4 folio
Euclides candallo folio
Architectura di Palladio folio
Alberti Dureri de orbibus folio
Architectura di Sebastiano Serlio folio
Leçons de perspective positive folio
Antiquitates Romanae Italicae folio
Architectura de Marchii folio
Tableaux de tous les arts libraux folio
Theoriae planetarum Purbachii 8o
Le Grand Epidaure 12o
Blundevils Thoretis 4o
Corpus Po[e]tarum 2 vol 4o
Baronii opera folio
Praxis politica 4o
Monstrorum historia
Discours sur les medaile[s] 4o
La fauconnerie de plusieurs 4o
Opera omnia Lypsii
Traites de ciphres de vigininere 4o
Onosander par viginere 4o
Remonstrances de Mesire Jacques a la g[r]osle 4o
Bodini Daemonomania 4o
Baifrius de re navali et vestiaria
Commentaires de Caesar par vignere 4o
Theatrus honoris clari Bonarsii, v.
The Institutions of the Order of the Garter
A [?compendium] of the statuts of Ingland
Rosinus Dempsteri 4o
K. James VI his works ff
Theorik and pratique of varr 4o
[?]Nenhensius de fratribus roseae crucis
Raguaglie di Parnasso 2vol 8o
Aretini opera vol 8
Illustrorum imagines 4o
Pontifiico[rum] Romanum effigies 8o
Paradini symbola heroica 8o
Aurum potabile
Appendix II
[NLS Acc. 9769/14/2/2Acc. 9769/14/2/2, partially annotated and expanded].
Alberti Dureri de orbibus folio
[?Messahalah, De Scientia Motus Orbibus (Nurmberg: Iohannes Veissenburger, 1504), title woodcut by Durer]
Algebra Clavii
Clavius, Christoph Schlüssel, dit Christophorus Algebra Christophori Clavii... (Genevae: excudebat S. Gamonetus, 1609)
Ambrosii opera
Angeli Politiani opera folio
Annales Baronii 5 vol folio
Cesare Baronius, Annales Ecclesiastici (Rome, ex typographia Vaticana, 1588–1607)
Antiquitates Romanae Italicae folio
[Either Dionysius of Halicarnassus or Girolamo Francini, Antiquitates Romanae
(Rome, Francini, 1599) illustrated with woodcuts.]
Antiquitatu [?] ronvinabium Lib 3 folio
*Apollonii Pergaei Conicorum lib 4 folio
Conicorvm Lib. IV. cvm Commentariis R. P. Clavdii Richardi (Antverpiae, 1655).
Architectura de Marchii folio [most probably Vitruvius, but possibly Francesco de Marchi, Della Architettura Militare (Brescia, 1599)
Architectura di Palladio folio
Architectura di Sebastiano Serlio folio
Aretini opera vol 8
Athanaeus folio
Aurum potabile
Anthony, Francis The Apologie or defence of a verity heretofore published, concerning a medicine called “Aurum potabile”... by Francis Anthonie,... (London: printed by J. Legatt, 1616)
Bellarmini opera folio
Baifrius de re navali et vestiaria [Lazare de Baif]
Baronii opera folio—cf Annales Baronii
D Basillii magni opera
St Basil the Great, Basilius Magnus Opera, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, Hier. Froben et Nic. Episcopius, 1532)
Biblia Regia 5 vol cum apparatu 3 vol
Biblia Regia, more usually known as the Antwerp Polyglot (Antwerp: Christopher Plantijn, 1569–72)
Bibliotheca patru[m] 7 vol folio
Blundevils Thoretis 4°
Thomas Blundeville, The theoriques of the seuen planets, shewing all their diuerse motions ... Whereunto is added ... a breefe extract ... of Maginus his theoriques, for the better vnderstanding of the Prutenicall tables ... There is also hereto added, The making, description, and vse, of two ... instruments for sea-men ... First inuented by M. Doctor Gilbert, etc. (London :Adam Islip, 1602)
Bodini Daemonomania 4°
Io. Bodini Andegavensis De magorum daemonomania libri IV.
Chrisostomi opera 5 vol
Chrysostom, Opera, ed. Henry Savile (Eton, 1610–12)
Chronographia Genebrandi fol.
Chronographia: In Dvos Libros Distincta; Prior est de Rebus veteris Populi, Auctore GILB. Genebrardo ... Posterior recentes historias, praesertimque Ecclesiasticas complectitur, Auctore Ar. Pontaco ... Paris, 1584
Clavii Astrolabium 4° cf. Clavius Algebra
Clavius, Christoph Schlüssel, dit Christophorus (Le P.) Christophori Clavii,... Astrolabium (Romae: B. Grassi, 1593)
Codex Sconensis folio
[Possibly identical with present Scottish Record Office MS GD 45/26/48.]
Clavis de horologus (horologiis?)
Clavius, Christoph Schlüssel, dit Christophorus (Le P.) Compendium brevissimum describendorum horologiorum horizontalium ac declinantium, auctore Christophoro Clavio,... (Romae: A. Zannettum, 1603). Also the author of Eight Books on Sundials (Rome, 1581).
Clemens Alexandrinus gra: colatinus [?] folio
Clementis Alexandrini Omnia quae quidem extant opera, nunc primum e tenebris eruta latinitateque donata, Gentiano Herveto Aurelio interprete. (Florence: Torrentinus excudebat, 1551)
Commentaires de Caesar par vignere 4o
A [?compendium] of the statuts of Ingland
Corpus Poetarum 2 vol 4o
Cosmographie de Belle
Cyrillus folio
Discours sur les medaile[s] 4o
[Emblemata Horatiana may be conjectured to have been present from the extensive use made of it on the long gallery ceiling]
Euclides candallo folio
Evclidis Megarensis mathematici clarissimi elementa,libris XV. ... Accessit decimussextus liber, ... Nouissime collati sunt decimusseptimus & decimusoctauus, priori editione ... polliciti, ... Avthore D. Francisco Flussate Candalla. 12 ff + 575 pp. fol. Lvtetice, Apvd lacobvm dv Pvys, 1578. [sed in fine] : Lvgdvni, ex officina loannis Tornasii, ... .D.LXXVIII.
La fauconnerie de plusieurs 4°
Franchières, Jean de, c. 1400–1488. La fauconnerie de F. Ian des Franchières ... recveillie des liures de M. Martino, Malopin, Michelin, & Amé Cassian. Avec, une autre Fauconnerie de Guillaume Tardif ... Plvs, La vollerie de mossire Artelouche d´Alagona ... D´avantage, Un recueil de tous les oiseaux de proye, servans à la fauconnerie & vollerie ... (Poitiers: E. de Marne[t] et les Bouchets frères, 1567)
Geneologica Romanorum Imperatorum
Genealogia Imperatorum, ac Regum Romae (1555).
Le Grand Epidaure 12o
Historia Patrum
Holinshed
Icones animorum
Joannis Barclaii Icon animorum (Londini : ex officina Nortoniana, apud J. Billium, 1614)
Illustrorum imagines 4o
[Andrea Fulvius, Illustrorum Imagines (Rome, 1517) numismatic]
The Institutions of the Order of the Garter
K. James VI his works ff
Leçons de perspective positive folio
Leçons de perspective positive par Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau, architecte, A Paris, par Mamert Patisson imprimeur MDLXXVI
Mechanicorum liber folio
Dal Monte, Guidobaldo (1545–1607) Guidi Ubaldi e marchionibus montis mechanicorum liber Pisauri apud Hieronymum Concordiam. M. D. LXXVII[8]-130-[1] f. : fig. gr. s. b. ; in-fol.
Monstrorum historia
Schenck, Johann Georg, Monstrorum historia memorabilis, monstrosa humanorum partuum miracula... vivis exemplis, observationibus et picturis referens. Accessit analogicum argumentum de monstris brutis. Supplementi loco ad observianas... Schenckianas, edita a Joanne Georgio Schenkio,... (Francofurti : impr. Vidae F. de Bry et duorum ejus filiorum, 1609)
[?]Nenhensius de fratribus roseae crucis
Possibly Johann Valentin Andreae, Cento de fratribus roseae crucis (1618)
Onosander par viginere 4°
L’Art Militaire d’Onosender, Autheur Grec. Ou il traicte de l’office et deuoir d’un bon chef de guerre. Mis en Langue Françoise et illustré d’anotations par B. de Vigenère, Bourbonnois
Opera omnia Lypsii
Originus folio
Origen, or Origanus, David: Nova; Motuum Coelestium Ephemerides Brandenbvrgicae, Annorvm LX, incipientes ab anno 1595, & desinientes in annum 1655, ... Cum Introductione ...i table, 54 ff. + 790 pp. + I f. 4 (Francofurti: cis Viadrnm, 1609).
Orontius horologis 4°
Orontii Finé ... de solaribus horologiis, & quadrantibus, libri quatuor (Parisiis, [1560.])
Osorius 3 vol folio
? Hieronymi Osorii,... de Gloria libri quinque, de nobilitate civili et christiana libri totidem... denuo recogniti et ab innumeris... mendis vindicati; addita nunc primum authoris vita ab Hieronymo Osorio nepote eleganter conscripta (Lugduni: apud J. Pillehotte, 1609)
Paradini symbola heroica, (Leiden, Raphaelengus, 1600) 8o
Philostrati opera
Paulus Jovius
Paulus Jovius/Paolo Giovio? Many possibilities: perhaps Elogia doctorum virorum ab avorum memoria publicatis ingenii monumentis illustrium authore Paulo Jovio Novocomense episcopo nucerino. Praeter nova Joan. Latomi Bergani in singulos epigrammata, adjecimus ad priora Italicae editionis, illustrium aliquot poetarum alia Basileae [ca 1561], or Pauli Jovii Novocomensis... historiarum sui temporis tomi tres. 16° (Lugduni, 1561), a copy of which was given to St Andrews in 1620
Philojudaeus in libros Mosis
Φιλωνος ... εἰς τα του Μωσεως, κοσμοποιητικα, ἱστορικα, νομοθετικα. Του αὐτου Μονοβιβλα. Philonis ... in libros Mosis, de mundi opificio, historicos, de legibus. Ejusdem libri singulares. Ex bibliotheca regia. Gr.( Parisiis: Ex officina A. Turnebi, 1552).
Eiusdem lucubrationes
[Philonis Judaei ... Lucubrationes omnes quotquot haberi potuerunt nunc primum Latinæ ex Græcis factæ, per S. Gelenium, etc.] (Basileæ, 1561).
Photii bibliotheca
Photius, Bibliotheca/Myrobiblion (Augsburg, David Hoeschel, 1601)
[Pliny the Younger, Panegyric, cited on ceiling Panegyricus Traiani ed. princ.1492.]
[Bartholomaeus Platina Historia de Vitis pontificum Romanorum (Cologne, 1574), cited on ceiling]
Polidori Vergili
Pontifiico[rum] Romanum effigies 8°
Possibly Panvinio, Onofrio (1530–1568) Accuratae effigies pontificum maximorum... XXVIII... iisque singulorum pontificum elogia... germanice interpretata... (Argentorati, 1578)
Praxis politica 4o
Raguaglie di Parnasso 2vol 8o
Traiano Boccalini, Raguagli di Parnaso centuria quarta [Venise ?, 1615 ou 1616]. There is a 17th century English translation, Advertisements from Parnassus, by Henry, Earl of Monmouth, London 1669. A chapter from this, on ‘the general reformation of the whole wide world’ appears in the first edition of the Rosicrucian Fama Fraternitatis (Cassel, 1614), and also in (Frankfurt 1615) and (Cassel, 1616)
Raphaelis Volatenani
Raphaelis Volaterrani De Institutione Christiana Ad Leonem X. Pont. Max. Libri Octo (1520)
Remonstrances de Mesire Jacques a la g[r]osle 4o
Faye d’Espeisses, Jacques (1543–1590)): Les Remonstrances ou harangues faites en la cour de Parlement à Paris aux ouvertures des plaidoyries, par feu M. Jacques Faye,... avec un recueil des points principaux des remonstrances faites en la mesme cour et aux mesmes occasions, par feu M. Guy Du Faur, seigneur de Pybrac,... (Paris: N. Lescuyer, 1600)
Rodolphus Hispanianus de origine temploru[m], folio
Rudolf Wirth Hospinianus, Originis errorum, hoc est, De origine, progressv, usu et abusu templorum ac rerum omnium ad templa pertinentium, libris quinque ... comprehensa ... (Tiguri, in officina Froschoviana, 1587)
Rosinus Dempsteri 4o
Johannes Rosinus, Antiqvitatvm romanarvm corpvs absolvtissimvm, ed. Thomas Dempster.
Sabellini aeneados
Secunda pars Enneadum Marci Antonii Sabellici ab inclinatione romani imperii usque ad annum M.D.IIII, cum Epitome omnium librorum et indice litterarum ordine diggesto.—“Au v° du titre”: Enneadis octavae. Epitome in tres ultimas Enneades rapsodiae Marci Antonii Sabellici.—“Fol. [4]”: Index in tres Enneades.—“Fol. [I]”: Enneades Marci Antonii Sabellici ab inclinatione ro. imperii ad annum salutis millesimum quingentesimum quartum.—“Fol. [I v°]”: M. Antonius Sabellicus Leonardo Lauretano serenissimo Venetiarum principi foelicitatem.—“Fol. II, sign. a ii”: Marci Antonii Cocci Sabellici Historiarum ab orbe condito Enneadis octavae liber primus.—“A la fin”: Marci Antonii Coccii Sabellici Rapsodiae historiarum ab orbe condito Enneadis undecimae liber secundus finit. Impressum Venetiis per magistrum Bernardinum Vercellensem anno MDIIII. die XX octobris (Venetiis, 1504)
Scaliger de emendatione temporu[m] folio
[Seneca, Epistolae ad Lucilium, cited on ceiling]
Stobornus folio
Johannes Stobaeus?
Summa Thomae
Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae
Les tableaux de plate peinture de Philostrate par viginere folio
Blaise de Vigenère’s Images ou Tableaux de Platte Peinture des Deux Philostrates Sophistes appeared with illustrations by a Parisian engraver, Jaspar Isaac (1614)
Tableaux de tous les arts libraux folio
Christophe de Savigny, Tableaux Accomplis de tous les Arts Libraux (Paris: Jean and Francois de Gourmant, 1587)
Tertuliani opera
Theatrus honoris clari Bonarsii
Scribani, Charles, S.I., 1561–1629 (Clarus Bonarscius). Clari Bonarscii Amphiteatrum honoris in quo calvinistrarum in Societatem Jesu criminationes iugulatae, editio altera, Palaeopoli Advaticorum, apud A. Vereyden (1606)
Theatrum genealogicon
Hieronymus Henninges, Theatrum genealogicum ostentans omnes omnium aetatum familias monarcharum, regum, ducum, marchionum, principum, comitum atque illustrium heroum et heroinarum, item philosophorum, oratorum, historicorum... diagrammatibus comprehensas... ingenio et labore M. Hieronymi Henninges,... (Magdeburgi: typis et sumptibus A. Kirchneri, 1598)
Theatrum Vitae Humanae
Theatrum vitae humanae Jean Jacques Boissard/Theodor de Bry, Theatrum vitae humanae a I. I. Boissardo... conscriptum, et à Theodoro Bryio artificiosissimis historiis illustratum ([Metis], typis Abrahami Fabri 1596)
Theodosii [?]Thopitae sphaeri:corum lib 3 4o
Theodosii Tripolitae Sphaericorum libri tres
Theoriae planetarum Purbachii 8°
Peurbach, Georg von (1423–1461), Theoricae novae planetarum... ed. Oronce Finé (Parisiis, 1525)
Theorik and pratique of varr 4o
Mendoza, Bernardino de, c. 1540–1604. Theorica y practica de guerra... En Anveres, en la emprenta Plantiniana (1596)
Thomae Mori opera folio
Traites de ciphres de vigninere 4o
de Vigenère, Blaise Traicté des chiffres, ou Secrètes manières d’escrire, par Blaise de Vigenère,... (Paris, Abel l’ Angelier 1587)
