THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY, according to Robert Fleming in the Epistolary Discourse (1701), was to instruct. It existed in short, he considered, to ensure that ‘ we have the best examples that can be, to be imitated by us, and an account of the worst also, that we may avoid such pernicious courses’. An eminently practical view, this was widely shared amongst the otherwise diffuse Scottish community engaged in writing history during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It in no way deflected scholars like Buchanan and Lesley from violent conflict with one another. Yet their faith in the value of history was voiced in a rhetoric of historical intention possessing both growing currency and persuasive force. This fact alone must surely encourage us to take a closer look at early modern historical discourse before judging it, with the weight of conventional wisdom, the fractured and partisan record of a hopelessly intolerant debate. The resources of Calvinist and humanist thought, it is clear, were now giving rise in Scotland to a greatly enlivened, and sometimes disconcertingly radical, conversation between the most bitter opponents. The evidence of this we have already seen in abundance. But the same influences were also permitting a fortiori the development of a characteristic rhetoric. This pointed history itself towards the apparently vital questions of leadership, virtue, and historical causality. Their rhetoric may offer an insight into the purposes sought by historical scholars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It marks out, too, the routes of inquiry which the modern scholar would need to follow in the attempt to understand what social and intellectual role history was actually playing in Scotland in that crucial formative period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.

We will begin this chapter by exploring some of the consequences which followed from the widespread belief among Scotland's scholars that history operated as a moralistic and edificatory medium. We shall look in particular at the implications of the view that the historian's function was analogous to those of the humanist orator and the Calvinist preacher. This entailed in the first instance a particularly important place in Scottish historical thought for the Ciceronian notion of eloquentia