Esther Inglis and the making of a Scottish Jacobean genius

The concert closes a whole conference about Inglis which will see the launch of Edinburgh University Library’s permanent online exhibition about Inglis, curated by Anna-Nadine Pike.

A new book by Jamie Reid Baxter about the poet and calligrapher (c1570-1624) also discusses Inglis’s formative Scottish background, the life of her family in Edinburgh and her work.

Alan Riach: Jamie, you’ve been a champion of the work of Esther Inglis for some time now. How would you introduce her?

Jamie Reid Baxter: Start with her poetry itself.

The fyre, aire, water, earth, the world with changes fill:

They tourne and tourne again, each in the other still;

So God was pleas’d to mak what this lowe worlde presents

Of well-agreeing warrs of contraire Elements

To teache us that we ought for our cheef good enquyre

Else-where than in the earth, the water, aire or fyre:

That the true reste of man, rests in an hyer place

Then earth, aire, water, fyre; Or all they can embrace.

Alan: That’s got me hooked.

You introduced me to the work of Elizabeth Melville, the first living Scottish woman poet to have a book of her own published in that fateful year of 1603. Esther Inglis I did not know about at all, so I’m already grateful to make her acquaintance! Tell us more, please.

Jamie: For Esther Inglis, 2024 is a double anniversary. She was the daughter of French protestant refugees who arrived in Scotland sometime before August 1574 when Esther was no more than four.

She died in Leith on August 30, 1624. King James VI & I, whom she knew personally, died in March 1625. She was the first female self-portraitist of the British Isles, and accomplished truly remarkable work as a calligrapher and limner. That’s the work for which she was renowned, both in her own lifetime and again since the 1990s.

Her gorgeous manuscripts are held in libraries from Stockholm to California, and the Folger Library in Washington opens its own Inglis quatercentenary exhibition on October 25. Some of her work, including a letter to King James, can currently be seen in the National Library’s Scotland and Europe exhibition.

And her visual work inspired the poet Gerda Stevenson’s Nine Haiku for Esther Inglis, which will be heard sung on October 20, in a new setting commissioned from Sheena Phillips.

Alan: But if we want to focus on Inglis herself as a poet, there’s real accomplishment right there too.

Jamie: Indeed. Esther is one of our handful of Scottish Jacobean women poets – but not recognised as such. Let me say first that I’ve been working in Scottish history since the early 1980s, but it took nearly 40 years for Franco-Scottish Esther to enter my consciousness, in July 2018, thanks to Michael Bath’s then brand-new book, Emblems In Scotland.

Bath has 20 pages on Esther’s work, the first modern Scottish coverage of her as a Scot, in her Scottish Jacobean context. Indeed, Bath’s pages were 21st century Scotland’s first printed contribution to the burgeoning international Inglis scholarship.

Alan: Did we not know much about her before that here in Scotland?

Jamie: If you want another major Scottish contribution to Esther Inglis scholarship, we actually have to go back to the 19th century, to 1865! That scholarly colossus David Laing, in the proceedings of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries produced his magnificent “Notes on Mrs Esther Inglis”.

Many decades later, Elspeth Yeo of the National Library of Scotland co-wrote a 1990 catalogue raisonné of Inglis’s then-known works, a truly groundbreaking monument of bibliographical scholarship which advanced our knowledge of Inglis by light-years – but that catalogue was issued in the US, as an occasional publication of the Bibliographical Society of America.

Alan: So it made little impact in Scotland?

Jamie: For whatever reason, this enormously important publication had no resonance in Scotland. Mention “Esther Inglis” even today, and people often think you must mean Elsie Inglis.

Alan: Elsie Inglis (1864-1917) was a Scottish medical doctor, a surgeon, a teacher, a suffragist, and she’s probably best remembered as the founder of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.

She suffered considerable misogynist opposition from the patriarchy of her own time. All the more reason to distinguish clearly between these two extraordinary women and see them in a complementary light in their own different historical eras and very different areas of accomplishment – and not confuse the one with the other!

Jamie: Let’s hope that by next year, and the big James VI & I commemorations that are coming, Esther will no longer be mistaken for Elsie. Thankfully, a good deal of fuss is finally being made about Esther here in her own Edinburgh, in this quatercentenary of her death – not least thanks to Edinburgh University.

That is right and fitting – her brother David was an Edinburgh graduate, her son Samuel likewise, and Samuel’s godfather was the university’s first principal, Robert Rollock! Esther is undoubtedly a Franco-Scottish product of James VI’s Edinburgh, where she lived for three decades until she was 33 or 34.

She began creating calligraphic masterpieces at age 16, and had produced a whole string of them by 1604, before she, her husband and wee bairns followed their king south. The family then lived in London and rural Essex for 11 years until mid-1615.

Alan: That, too, must have contributed to her neglect in Scotland ...

Jamie: I think the neglect is mainly due to Scottish self-ignorance thanks to the dominant official narrative, whereby London – Shakespeare’s London, Tudor London – is the ultimate centre of everything. I could give you many instances of scholarly books and articles and PhDs presenting Esther Inglis as an Elizabethan glory of Early Modern Tudor England.

IN 2022-23, the New York Metropolitan Museum featured Esther in its exhibition “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England”; the New York “specialists” were following the example set in 2013-14 by London’s National Portrait Gallery, which prominently featured Esther in an exhibition entitled “Elizabeth I and Her People”.

And only last month, on Wednesday, September 25, the BBC Radio 3 “Essay” series had an episode about Esther Inglis, with the blurb presenting her as a “Tudor” book-maker.

Alan: But Esther wasn’t even in England in the reign of Elizabeth Tudor at all ...

Jamie: Exactly. All other considerations aside, this cultural misappropriation is appallingly bad history, let alone scholarship. Even if Esther had actually been a subject of Elizabeth Tudor, the dates don’t work – most of her extant work postdates the year 1603, the advent of Jacobean Great Britain. Serious, fact-based scholarship – to say nothing of the real Esther Inglis, the Franco-Scottish Jacobean – deserves better than that.

Alan: What about her writing, the poetry itself?

Jamie: Inglis made no fewer than 10 extant copies of a wondrous Huguenot poetic work, Octonaires sur la vanité et inconstance du monde, a series of 50 eight-line poems written over a number of years from 1570 onward, and published complete in 1583 by the Geneva-based Antoine de la Roche Chandieu.

The poems are addressed to “le mondain”, the worldling, besottedly in love with and blinded by the vanity of this inconstant world.

Alan: So, a sequence of short poems...

Jamie: Short, but of great power and intensity. The 50 French Octonaires sur la vanité du monde are shattering. They made a big impression in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and were republished several times.

They immediately inspired imitations in French, and they were also published in Latin, the international language, first in the 1590s, and then again in 1601.

Later, in 1629, they were translated into German by Martin Opitz, one of the founders of German Baroque poetry. The Octonaires had also, much earlier, been set to music by two different great French composers, Paschal de L’Estocart and Claude Le Jeune; the concert on October 20 features some of those settings.

Alan: How good are Esther’s translations as poetry?

Jamie: Well, try this, her 6th Octonarie:

Yow fountains cleire, yow floods, and brookes that runs amaine

And with a slydring pace

Roules out your restles race

Tell me I yow intreat, the cause of your long paine?

It is to figure foorth, our lyues as fast to flie

As we the streames do see,

And that our onely bliss

Rests no wayes heer below, where each thing restles is.

Alan: That strikes me as wonderfully turned, the language, rhythm, all the technicalities of alliteration and assonance, what makes great poetry, they’re all at work in those lines, easefully, confidently – she’s in charge of her material all right ...

Jamie: Esther didn’t merely translate; she also wrote a handful of original poems, good poems, in French and in English, or to be more precise, Anglo-Scots. Two of the little French poems will be heard sung on October 20, in settings I commissioned from Sheena Philips in 2019.

Esther’s longest poetic work is her translation of the Cinquante octonaires. There are three copies, dated 1600, 1607 and 1609. The first copy, dated 1600, is bilingual. The dates show that these poems are by definition Scottish Jacobean verse, a distinctive school of poetry.

A notable feature of Scottish Jacobean verse is alliteration – think of the work of Alexander Montgomerie, the king’s maister-makar: “Quhat mightie motione so my mynd mischeivis, / Quhat uncouth cairs throu all my corps do creep, / Quhat restles rage my Reson so bereivis ...” Now, my favourite of all the Octonaires is No. 28:

The beautie of the world goes

As soudain as the wind that bloes:

As soudain as yee sie the floure

To wither from his first colloure:

As soudain as the flood is gone

That’s chaste by others one by one:

What is the world then I pray?

A wind, A floure, A flood alway.

Jamie: Note the Jacobean Scots alliteration in the last line – the French “onde”, a wave, is deliberately translated as “flood” in order for the poem to end alliteratively – “A floure, A flood ...” There is even more serious alliteration in Esther’s 27th Octonary, translating “Mondain, si tu le sais, di moy, quel est le monde?”

Now, wordling (if thou canst) the world descryue to me.

If good, wherefore in it, such euils aboundant be?

If euill, why dost thou it so much cerche and procure?

If sweet, how hes it than, such store of bitternes?

If bitter, how doth it, thy senses so allure?

If frendly, why doth it so fremb a forme profes

To kill and ouerthrow, his fauourites with shame?

And if it be thy foe, why trusts thou to the same?

Alan: You see the same techniques at work there, so confidently, so fluently and powerfully...

Jamie: All that typically Jacobean Scots alliteration – “if frendly why doth it so fremb a form profes”. Eminently Scots is her consistent use of “word-ling”, not “worldling”, for “le mondain”, the earth-bound worldly fool. It’s quite deliberate, from the Scots metathesised form “wardle”, rather than “war’l”.

And she may just possibly be making a pun with this form – the worldling is a person full of little, meaningless earthbound words – he is not THE Word, Jesus Christ, the Word of God.

Alan: He – or indeed she – is something far more humble. And I love the implicit association of the creature of the world, a mere mortal being, with the human creature of the words, the user and maker of language, a makar, in fact ...

Jamie: Try this one, OCTO XIIII. This is a real challenge, first the French and then the transcription:

Ce n’est rien qu’une Echo tout cest immonde Monde,

Sortant d’un bois, d’un roc, et d’une profonde onde:

Un son naissant mourant, une voix vifve-morte,

Un air rejaillissant qu’un vent leger emporte,

Un parler contrefait, qui est esvanoui

Si tost qu’il a trompé celui qui l’a oui.

Tais-toy, fuy loin de moy, Echo, fuy Monde immonde,

Demeure au bois, au roc, et en l’onde profonde.

The world is nothing else exept an Eccho vaine

Ysswing from woods, and rocks, and eury watrie plaine;

A lyueles lyuely voice, a new-born dieing sounde;

A light aire that the wind doth bricoll and rebound;

A conterfeed speech, that in a tryce is gone

Befor it fully peirs the eares of any one.

O hold thy peace, flie hence, flie Eccho world flie

To watrie plaines, to rocks and eury hollow tree.

Alan: That seems to me to reflect back on to the French, so that we can read the verses in both languages, and perhaps one might say that they’re responding to each other sensitively. It’s an acknowledgement I think that no single language is ever enough, that every language is partial, a complementary part of the articulation of the whole world.

We’ll never comprehend the whole world through a single language and no human being could encompass the entirety of all languages anyway.

But sometimes, in considering a writer, a poet such as Inglis, we can see how sensitivity to languages and the forms of both empowerment and humility that language can convey, can hopefully make us see more deeply into what languages are, and what human beings are...

Jamie: Yes, Esther loses the genuine echo – “immonde Monde”, “profonde onde”, in lines two and eight – but she does emulate the French by making a nice reversal of the order of the nouns in the following lines two and eight.

And she scores over the French with “A liveless lively voice”. Note too that she has the courage to reverse the order of the elements in that line. And in “A light aire that the wind doth bricoll and rebound”, she fair outdoes the French in sheer movement!

Alan: It’s exhilarating – and dare I say, perhaps, suggests a distinctively Scottish inflection? A kind of playful flair at work?

Jamie: Yes, the same playful imaginativeness that we find in her calligraphy and coloured manuscript illumination. Esther’s Octonaries are a major new addition to the splendid body of verse written throughout the fifty kaleidoscopic years of Scotland’s Jacobean Age.