Dunbar’s Disappearance

Sally Mapstone

• The Poems of William Dunbar edited by Priscilla Bawcutt
  Association for Scottish Literary Studies, £70.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 948877 38 3

In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in its praise of London, the Troy Novant of all cities, its river, its walls, its merchants, their wives, its virgins and, naturally, its mayor:

He ys exempler, loodster and Guy [guide]
Pryncypall patron, & Rose orygynall
Above all mayrys, as mastyr most worthy –
London thow art the flowyr of Cytees all.