DOUGLAS, GAVIN Scottish poet and bishop, third son of Archibald, 5th earl of Angus (called the "great earl of Angus" and "Bell-the-Cat"), was born c. 14i4, prob ably at one of his father's seats. He was a student at St. Andrews, and thereafter it is supposed at Paris. In 1496 he obtained the living of Monymusk, Aberdeenshire, and later he became parson of Lynton (mod. Linton) and rector of Hauch (mod Prestonkirk), in East Lothian; and about 15o1 was pre ferred to the deanery or provostship of the collegiate church of St. Giles, Edinburgh, which he held with his parochial charges. From this date till the battle of Flodden, in Sept. 1513, he appears to have been occupied with his ecclesiastical duties and literary work. Indeed all the extant writings by which he has earned his place as a poet and translator belong to this period. After the disaster at Flodden he was completely absorbed in public busi ness. Three weeks after the battle he, still provost of St. Giles, was admitted a burgess of Edinburgh, his father, the "Great Earl," being then civil provost of the capital. The latter dying soon afterwards (Jan. 1514) in Wigtownshire, where he had gone as justiciar, and his son having been killed at Flodden, the suc cession fell to Gavin's nephew Archibald (6th earl) . The marriage of this youth to James 'V.'s widow on Aug. 6, 1514 did much to identify the Douglases with the English party in Scotland, as against the French party led by Albany, and incidentally to de termine the political career of his uncle Gavin. During the first weeks of the queen's sorrow after the battle, Gavin, with one or two colleagues of the council, acted as personal adviser, and it may be taken for granted that he supported the pretensions of the young earl. The first outcome of the new connection was his appointment to the abbacy of Aberbrothock by the queen regent, before her marriage, probably in June 1514. Soon after the mar riage she nominated him archbishop of St. Andrews, in succession to Elphinstone, archbishop-designate. But Hepburn, prior of St. Andrews, having obtained the vote of the chapter expelled him, and was himself in turn expelled by Forman, bishop of Moray, who had been nominated by the pope. In the interval, Douglas's rights in Aberbrothock had been transferred to James Beaton, archbishop of Glasgow. The breach between the queen's party and Albany' had widened, and the queen's advisers had begun an intrigue with England, for the removal of the royal widow and her young son to Henry's court. In those deliberations Gavin Douglas took an active part, and for this reason stimulated the opposition which successfully thwarted his preferment.
In Jan. 1515 on the death of George Brown, bishop of Dunkeld, the queen nominated him to the see, which he ultimately obtained, though not without trouble. For the earl of Athole had forced his brother, Andrew Stewart, prebendary of Craig, upon the chapter, and had put him in possession of the bishop's palace. The queen appealed to the pope and was seconded by Henry VIII., and the pope's sanction was obtained on Feb. 18, 1515. Some of the correspondence of Douglas and his friends incident to this transaction was intercepted. When Albany came from France and assumed the regency, these documents and the "pur chase" of the bishopric from Rome contrary to statute were made the basis of an attack on Douglas, who was imprisoned in Edin burgh Castle, thereafter in the castle of St. Andrews (under the charge of his old opponent, Archbishop Hepburn), and later in the castle of Dunbar, and again in Edinburgh. The pope's inter vention procured his release, after nearly a year's imprisonment. The queen meanwhile had retired to England. After July 1516 Douglas appears to have been in possession of his see, and to have patched up a diplomatic peace with Albany.
On May 17, 1517 the bishop of Dunkeld proceeded with Albany to France to conduct the negotiations which ended in the Treaty of Rouen. He was back in Scotland towards the end of June. Albany's longer absence in France permitted the party-faction of the nobles to come to a head in a plot by the earl of Arran to seize the earl of Angus, the queen's husband. The issue of this plot was the well-known fight of "Clear-the-Causeway," in which Gavin Douglas's part stands out in picturesque relief. The triumph over the Hamiltons had an unsettling effect upon the earl of Angus. He made free of the queen's rents and abducted Lord Traquair's daughter. The queen set about to obtain a divorce, and used her influence for the return of Albany as a means of undoing her husband's power. Albany's arrival in Nov. 1521, with a large body of French men-at-arms, compelled Angus, with the bishop and others, to flee to the Borders. From this retreat Gavin Douglas was sent by the earl to the English court, to ask for aid against the French party and against the queen, who was reported to be the mistress of the regent. Meanwhile he was deprived of his bishopric, and forced, for safety, to remain in England, where he effected nothing in the interests of his nephew. The declaration of war by England against Scotland, in answer to the recent Franco-Scottish negotiations, prevented his return. His case was further complicated by the libellous animosity of Beaton, arch bishop of St. Andrews (whose life he had saved in the "Clear-the Causeway" incident), who was anxious to thwart his election to the archbishopric of St. Andrews, now vacant by the death of Forman. In 1522 Douglas was stricken by the plague which raged in London, and died at the house of his friend Lord Dacre. Dur ing the closing years of exile he was on intimate terms with the historian Polydore Vergil, and one of his last acts was to arrange to give Polydore a corrected version of Major's account of Scot tish affairs. Douglas was buried in the church of the Savoy, where a monumental brass (removed from its proper site after the fire in 1864) still records his death and interment.
Douglas's literary work, now his chief claim to be remembered, belongs, as has been stated, to the period 1501-13, when he was provost of St. Giles. He left four poems.
1. The Palice of Honour, his earliest work, is a piece of the later type of dream-allegory, extending to over 2,000 lines in nine lined stanzas. The poem carries on the literary traditions of the courts of love, as shown especially in the "Romaunt of the Rose" and "The House of Fame." It is dedicated to James IV. No ms. of the poem is extant. The earliest known edition (c. 1553) was printed at London by William Copland; an Edinburgh edition, from the press of Henry Charteris, followed in 7 9• 2. King Hart described King Heart in his castle, surrounded by his five servitors (the senses), Queen Plesance, Foresight and other courtiers. The poem runs to over goo lines and is written in eight-lined stanzas. The text is preserved in the Maitland folio ms. in the Pepysian library, Cambridge. It is not known to have been printed before 1786, when it appeared in Pinkerton's Ancient Scottish Poems.
3. Conscience is in four seven-lined stanzas. Its subject is the "conceit" that men first clipped away the "con" from "con science" and left "science" and "na mair." Then they lost "sci," and had nothing but "ens" ("that schrew, Riches and geir") .
4. Douglas's longest, last, and in some respects most important work is his translation of the Aeneid, the first version of a great classic poet in any English dialect. The work includes the 13th book by Mapheus Vegius; and each of the 13 books is introduced by a prologue. The subjects and styles of these prologues show great variety; some have little or no connection with the books which they introduce, and were perhaps written earlier and for other purposes. In the first, or general, prologue, Douglas attacks Caxton for his inadequate rendering of a French translation of the Aeneid. That Douglas undertook this work and that he makes a plea for more accurate scholarship in the translation have been the basis of a prevalent notion that he is a Humanist in spirit and the first exponent of Renaissance doctrine in Scottish literature. Careful study of the text will .not support this view. Douglas is in all important respects even more of a medievalist than his con temporaries; and, like Henryson and Dunbar, strictly a member of the allegorical school and a follower, in the most generous way, of Chaucer's art. There are several early mss. of the Aeneid extant : (a) in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, c. 1525, (b) the Elphynstoun ms. in the library of the University of Edin burgh, c. 1525, (c) the Ruthven ms. in the same collection, c. ' 53 5 (d) in the library of Lambeth Palace, 1545-46. The first printed edition appeared in London in 1553. An Edinburgh edition was issued from the press of Thomas Ruddiman in 1710.
For Douglas's career see, in addition to the public records and general histories, Bishop Sage's Life in Ruddiman's edition, and that by John Small in the first volume of his edition of the Works of Gavin Douglas (4 vols., 1874, the only collected edition of Douglas's works) . A new edition of the texts is much to be desired. On Douglas's place in Scottish literature see SCOTLAND: SCOTTISH LITaRA TvRE, also G. Gregory Smith's Transition Period (1900) and chapters in the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii. (1908). P. Lange's dissertation Chaucer's Einfluss auf die Originaldichtungen des Schotten Gavin Douglas (Halle, 1882) draws attention to Douglas's indebtedness to Chaucer. Further discussion of the question of Doug las's alleged Humanism will be found in Courthope's History of English Poetry, i. (i895), T. F. Henderson's Scottish Vernacular Litera ture (1898), and J, H. Millar's Literary History of Scotland (19o3). For the language of the poems see G. Gregory Smith's Specimens of Middle Scots (5902). (G. G. S.)