Titlepage: SCOTLANDS / PAR'NESIS / To Her Dread Soveraign, / KING / CHARLES / THE SECOND. / [rule] / Mens Scoti'. / All Presbyterians, pure, sincere and true, / Afflicted by that Independent crue, / Are here untouch'd, and are declar'd to be / Joyn'd in the League and Covenant with me. / [rule] / [design] / [rule ] / Printed in the Year, 1660.

    The authorship of this poem has excited scholarly attention over the last century and a half. In his 1823 edition of the poem, Laing wrote shrewdly of the Restoration in general:

Such a general feeling of satisfaction was manifested at the return of the exiled Monarch, as being an event which promised to bing back peace and tranquility to the Country, that it was unfortunate the King, and his Ministers should have proved unmindful of their past experience, and have used no endeavours either to conciliate the affections, or to promote the interests of the People at large.

    The writer of this congratualtory Poem, which is sufficiently expressive of loyalty and attachment, has not been ascertained. (p. xv)

   During the next fifty years, word got about that the poem was by William Lithgow, an Aberdonian adventurer who would have been in his eighties in 1660. In 1863, Maidment took the attribution seriously enough to argue against it, a tactic subsequently adopted by the DNB in their entry for Lithgow. Maidment makes no case from Lithgow's age, but points out that because Scotland's Paranesis contains a marginal reference to the author having written a poem in 1633 entitled "Scotlands welcome to King Charles," "thence it was conjectured that as Lithgow had written an address to the unhappy Charles in 1633, he reasonably was the author" (p. xxxii). In the National Library in Edinburgh, a copy of Lithgow's verses from 1633 are bound in just ahead of the 1660 poem at shelfmark EN 1.88. Maidment continues with the attribution to Lithgow:

This idea was to a certain degree countenanced by the fact that the volume [EN 1.88] had belonged to Robert Mylne, a well-known book-collector and enthusiastic antiquary, who having survived for above one hundred years, must have been a young man of more than twenty years of age when the "Paraenesis" appeared in 1660; and, as he had arranged the contents of the volume in the order in which it at present remains [still true 1986] it might be taken for granted that he did so in the belief that it was a supplement to the poem that preceded it. (pp. xxxii-xxxiii)

    Maidment fails to notice Lithgow's age, but does notice other poems from the 1630s with titles just like the one mentioned in the margin. ¹ And he has his own candiate, one William Douglas, author of "Grampius Gratulation to his High and Mightie Monarch, King Charles" which appeared in a 1630 volume entitled Addresses by the Muses of Edinburgh to his Majesty (printed in small Qto by "the heirs of Andro Hart, 1630"). After quoting a section of this poem, to suggest stylistic similarities, Maidment cites a biographical entry for Douglas from a volume he calls the "Catalgues of Scotish Writers" as published by Stevenson in Edinburgh, 1833. Unable to find this volume in any of the major libraries in Scotland, I can only quote Maidment again:

William Douglasse, Professor of Theology at old Aberdeen. He wrote a Treatise on Pslam edia, 4to; Item Acad'miarum Vindicas, 4to; item, orationem Panegyricam de Carolo Secundo, 4to; item, stable Truth, 4to, 1660. He dyed toward the year 1670. item, Vindicacias Veritatis, 4to, 1655" (cited, ibid, p. lii)

   The case for Douglas seems as weak to me as the likelihood of the poem being by Lithgow. Douglas's poem on the Restoration, referred to here, is presumably the Latin Oratio Panegyrica ad eisodia (Wing STC item D 2043) to be found in several places.

    On the Covenant, see also The Covenant.

    Opens with defense of the Covenant -- details

    Sees loyalty to a divinely appointed monarch to be an absolute duty to God, taking Samuel Daniel's line that even tyrants in office are to be obeyed. The position of a presbyterian Stuart loyalist in 1660 requires a great deal of irony and ventriloquizing to negotiate, but a great deals hangs on the poet's argument that

Then doth God favour Ethnick Princes cace,
Though alians from the Covenenant of Grace,
Redress their wrongs, confound their enemies
Detect and punish lewd conspiracies...

   The poet skillfully uses enjambment to finesse arguments, turning against the seeming closure of the rhythm and stress of the couplet by continuing the syntax to extend or change the argument. The poet takes the position of never having lost loyalty to Stuart kings, being among those to write pro-Stuart verses in the 1630s when Charles came to Scotland. Dynastic loyalty and racial difference were seldom found apart at this time, so the "Ethnick Prince"'s Scottish bloodlines are as important as the different kind of loyalty owed by the Irish. Snub -- chalres neveractually made it to scotland back then; CHECK

    Poet ends with provsional endorsement of Charles; not questioning his right, but implictly suggesting that a king would behave a certain way towards Scotland.