ABSTRACT
Imprisoned in Hull in 1649, Colonel James Turner was depressed. Disillusioned by his experiences in active service for the Covenanters, he had initially welcomed the formation of the Engagement as an opportunity to promote anew Charles I’s cause, but strategic confusion, combined with poor troop discipline, had obliged Turner and the men under his command to surrender to English parliamentarian forces at Uttoxeter, in Staffordshire, in July 1648. As he later recalled in his Memoirs of His Own Life and Times, published posthumously in 1829, the subsequent regicide of January 1649 only confirmed that what ‘was intended for the Kings reliefe and restoration, posted him to his grave’.1 Moreover, the ensuing abolition of both the Stuart monarchy and the English House of Lords prompted Turner to feel ‘more out of love with Buchanan, whom I looked on as one of these, who had plentifully sown the seed of that Rebellion, which had procured all these dolorous Mischiefs’.2 Indeed, Turner recalled how, on returning from mercenary employment on the continent to join the Covenanting forces in Scotland during the 1640s, he had discovered that not only could every army minister cite the works of George Buchanan ‘as readilie as a Bible’, but also that the majority of army officers ‘carried Buchanan about with them likewise, and so universally was he cry’d up by all, that I imagin’d his ghost was return’d to earth to wander a little among the Covenanters’.3 Fortunately for Turner’s vivid imagination, the parliamentarian governor at Hull, Colonel Robert Overton, indulged his request to ‘furnish me with any books I called for’,
together with paper, pen and ink, during his enforced confinement, and the result was a manuscript entitled ‘A novell against Buchanan, giveing a faithfull and true account of his descent and reception into Hell, and his entertainment there’.4 Later, Turner described this satirical novel as being ‘bot Raillerie’: a literary fancy that was in no way intended to detract from the much more extensive set of ‘annotations and animadversions’ on both Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia and his De Iure Regni apud Scotos, which Turner had started several years previously, and which he had also found time to complete, while imprisoned at Hull between September 1648 and November 1649.
