ABSTRACT
Gude Counsell advises King Humanitie in Lindsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (lines 1904-7):
In the last line Lindsay combines the rhetorical devices of paronomasia and traductio to achieve a proverbial effect tightly linking death and the enduring life of one’s deeds in memory or written record.1 With the exception of being urged to work by good counsel to ensure his reputation, this is the final substantive piece of advice the king receives before the herald Diligence brings the first part of the play to a close: one must learn from chronicled examples because one will become a chronicled example. The sentiment implies an endless line of witnesses stretching from the past into the future and containing the present king himself as both actor and spectator. In practice, those who wielded power must have spent as much time listening for murmurs of discontent from their contemporaries as imagining a future audience for their deeds. Lindsay dramatizes this anxiety also: the estate of Temporalitie asks for Gude Counsell to be sent for to save his estate ‘fra murmell’ (line 2526), and when Gude Counsell arrives, he is asked by the Merchand how to (line 2544):
Bower’s chronicle also bore witness to such a concern, noting that the governor Albany refused to tax for the rebuilding of Jedburgh Castle in 1409 lest the poor people should speak ill of him (‘maledicerent’, xv, 21, line 9) for such a novel exaction.2 However, while murmuring may have been a potentially dangerous kind of communication employed by the least powerful, more sophisticated language,
often taking a theatrical form, was also open to groups or individuals who wished to petition those of higher status, or needed to communicate an injury. The essential difference between the two types of communication is that while those murmuring might hope to be overhead, the person who employed the more complex language expected to be listened to. Kingly deeds and theatrical communication came together especially at times of petition or dissent. This chapter will concentrate on a group of such occasions. One of the recurring public scenes of ‘gude and evill report’ which King Humanitie could have encountered in his chronicle reading would have involved kings leaving their towns, and this chapter will study three such departures more closely: one account which sought to ensure a poor reputation for a Scottish king, and a further pair of linked stories from Walter Bower, which set out examples of good royal practice for others to emulate. In these episodes the exposure of a theatricalized action to an audience of present and future witnesses was its most important feature, and the chronicles reasserted this through their transmission of the story.
