Alexander Montgomerie

Like some other pieces, it may have been written (at least in part) by autumn 1584, for the 19-year-old king included a passage from it in his literary manifesto Some Reulis and Cautelis to be observit and eschewit in Scottis poesie, published around September of that year.

But there seems to have been a fundamental change in the culture of the court towards the end of 1585, when the king took personal control of the government, and in the summer of 1586 Montgomerie joined an enlarged Scottish contingent fighting for the Dutch Republic against the Spanish.

He stayed there for more than two years, serving at Zutphen at the same time as the unfortunate Sir Philip Sidney, and eventually experiencing severe financial difficulties as a result of non-payment by the Dutch authorities.

Mongomerie largely disappears from view after the collapse of his legal case, until he became involved, in late 1596 or early 1597, in a Catholic plot to seize the rocky outcrop of Ailsa Craig, in the lower Firth of Clyde, as support for a Spanish intervention in the Earl of Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland.

His death proved as controversial as much of his life, for the authorities of the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh refused to allow him to be buried in the churchyard on the grounds of his Catholicism, only an intervention by the king himself forcing them to change their minds.

The range of his work is extensive, from elegant court songs including Lyk as the dum Solsequium and Melancholie, grit deput of Dispair to the bitter, sometimes contorted word-play of the sonnets associated with the dispute over his pension, from witty pieces addressed to the king to the profound religious sensibility of A godly prayer and the extraordinary Come, my childrene dere.

The Cherrie and the Slae, which he probably revised and completed shortly before his death, is an ambitious religious allegory, employing a demanding, lyrical stanza form which suggests that it was intended for singing, despite its considerable length.

His poetry reaches back to the earlier makars, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, but he also translates from Clément Marot and from Ronsard, and some of his work invites comparison with Baroque writers such as Marino, Góngora, Donne and Herbert.