Bridging the Continental divide: neo-Latin and its cultural role in Jacobean Scotland, as seen in the Delitiae Poetarum Scotorum (1637)

  [p63]

From a beloved Carr to her dear Carr

1Your dear girl, as much as she is able to send you salutations, sends these words to her dear man; but she cannot keep them to herself, nor does she write them down: her jailer watches over her with relentless attention, and forbids words to be noted down by pen. What the guard is not able to prevent, though, are her sighs, her sobbing, her tears: through these she takes comfort in unburdening her worries. Who knows whether the Thames, onto which your cell looks, will hear these laments of your woman, and, as it hastens to the ocean with its onrushing water, carry them down to your tower? Although you have been locked in prison, you will, I think, drink in her rippling whispers and grasp them with an out-stretched ear.

11Yet I fear that you do not know this; clearly this lament of hers first comes to you from me: 'Thus far we have lived together free from troubles, and our life was nothing except a spectacle of joy. Now it is the kind of spectacle accustomed to shame the tragic stage, our joys now tumble down, overturned by a violent storm. So transient is the constancy of Fortune! You, torn from the light of court, endure the cavern of a gloomy prison. I myself, while bearing a child in my womb, a have been handed over to the jailer, aware of my crime; left alone with my thoughts, I die in a thousand ways. Lucina, goddess of child birth, even now threatens, the judge presently contrives more painful contractions. Perhaps if I am freed from the danger of chilbirth, scarely will I escape the hand of the executioner. Suppose I even manage to escape, or suppose I am able to avoid his blow, which will live brandished on my family and my reputation? O I would rather be more useful in death! However much insatiable Nemesis threatens me with death,  [p64]I would completely despise her, and would be rewarded, if your death is to be redeemed by my own death. And not only Alcestis will have been sung of in poems, because she was able to suffer the fate due to her dear man. b But its wicked pronouncements, which never fail to hit its wretched targets, I know not what they gloomily prescribe to anticipate concerning you. I myself have seen when a barge crammed full with many an attendant, and burdened with my booty, went to the tower. Alas all too well I recall the barge, which was covered perhaps with a funereal drape, and tinged with a blood-red hue. A black throng of attendant birds - of the type which usually accompany corpses - were following in flight across the empty sky. As they caw, as they split the air with their raucous lament, the gloomy boatswain's command seemed to be given to the rowers. Moreover, an apparition shows me all these things in my dreams; an apparition which brings back to me a vision of you without your head. I pray that the dreams are without substance, that Etruscan wisdom c is false, and that there is no faith in all of their predictions. No differently have you been torn from my arms, and been compelled to endure things worse than death. It is clearly more disagreeable than death to accept fate's capricious alternations, while ill-will crows triumphantly. In summary: it is a shame more cruel than every death that my crimes are added to those famous criminals whom judgement has justly detained in jail - especially given that scarcely ever does any recorded day erase it from the fasti. Ah, ignorant is anyone who confines you in a narrow cell, and would deny an open house to you as a guest - you who were accustomed to hold sway across the august court, and to part the entire hall with your retinue, and who are now enclosed in a filthy dungeon, receiving neither sun nor air unless a little squeezes through the narrow bars. Let the rough jailer rage on while fiercely executing his tasks: it is their duty to be as unkind as possible. Yet you neither wished to wipe out the royal line, nor wished to betray the royal sceptre for it to be burned in a sulphurous pyre. The crime of having broken a friend's trust, and a marriage torch burning with the death of an innocent, is laid before you.  [p65]I do not know how truthful the witness was who testified, and I do not know with what account of the circumstances he will prosecute you. I know this: I gave birth to the crime with a Locusta as midwife, d and she provided an easy route to realise my wishes. She bid that I hide quick-silver e in a bun, she taught me how to hide arsenic in salt. I did everthing that my wretched mistress said, and my captain went unseen towards Dis' caverns. What should I have done? He was setting up an obstacle to our love, and dared to harm me unjustly in a thousand ways. If my dreadful act has delivered just punitive retribution, even so my crime will be that of an unlawful passion. If poison has been administered, a woman may justify the deed, for the unarmed sex has poisons in place of spears. Finally, whatever it was, it was the folly of a great love, and whoever is a lover also acquits themselves of their crime with little trouble. The people's justice sympathises with blind madness, and, alas, love is an all too well known type of madness. Yet I do not excuse the crime nor deny it, nor indeed the punishment for it. It would be right to atone for the wicked deed with my death. However many wounds ill-will makes ready for you (ill-will which follows noble men like shadows follow the body) I should by right have them. Stand apart from my own ill-will! With your life spared, may I be able to appease Jove, as has been right before when he has been neglected. Thus whether Lucina will give an end to my sufferings, or whether what I fear most, the urn of a fierce judge will end them, nevertheless I shall descend to the dark shades happily, and I shall die a Carr faithful to her dear man Carr.'