ABSTRACT
Buchanan’s work was well known to a literate English audience and it is clear that he exercised a significant influence on the development of English politics, religion and literature. Buchanan’s hostile attack on Mary Stuart may even have been sponsored by the English authorities as a means of discrediting her and marginalizing support for her as a deposed queen soon after she fled south of the border in 1568.1 Buchanan’s representation of Mary as the faithless, murdering Queen, who betrayed both husband and country to satisfy her selfish whims, determined how Mary was seen by an English audience.2 Given that Buchanan was also known in Elizabethan England as the main advocate of monarchomach resistance theory in the British Isles, and that he advocated the moral need for godly subjects to assassinate ungodly monarchs, there was something of an irony in such official English sponsorship.3 And, of course, Buchanan was also known as the most significant humanist theorist of poetics in the British Isles.4
