ABSTRACT
The dominant image of George Buchanan today is probably that of the rather dour pedagogue who attempted to educate the young James VI by, as an ode composed for the 1906 Buchanan quatercentenary puts it, ‘[w] ith voice and hand correcting kingly pride’.1 Although he was much more than a proponent of resistance theory, many sixteenth-and seventeenthcentury readers, too, were interested in Buchanan’s work primarily for its insistence on the limits of royal power, and nowhere was this more clearly the case than in the Netherlands. Not surprisingly, the Dutch found the writings of this celebrated scholar entirely relevant to their own Revolt against Spain: his was an authoritative voice – and an impeccably Protestant one at that – defending the removal of tyrants for the greater good of the commonwealth. In addition to a number of Latin editions of Buchanan’s works printed in the Netherlands, two texts were also published in Dutch: a translation of his political treatise De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (1579) appeared in 1598 and was reprinted in 1610, and his early play Baptistes (written in the 1540s, but first printed in 1577) was published in a Dutch version in 1652. The focus of this essay will be on these two translations – both in their own way investigations of kingship, tyranny and resistance – as illustrations of the particular contexts in which Buchanan’s ideas were interpreted in the Dutch Republic.
