2 - Arms and the Man

Summary

Before any informed discussion of Lauder's poetry is possible, the facts of his biography must be ascertained, the details related to the poems, and the poems themselves situated within the larger cultural and historical context. The brief accounts of Lauder in biographical reference works provide but limited information, and are insufficient as a basis for the interpretation of the poems. Lauder's personal life, his intellectual formation and interests, his military career, and the professional and social circles in which he moved while in the Netherlands are subjects which have never been investigated. Although gaps in the story inevitably remain, Lauder's career as poet can be seen as consisting of three main stages, corresponding to his youth in Scotland and England, his military activity on the Continent in the middle of the seventeenth century, and his later role as a respected expatriate senior citizen of Breda.

1603–22

According to the DNB, George Lauder was ‘born about 1600’, and enjoyed a floruit around 1677; for its part, the ODNB gives no date of birth but reports a floruit extending from 1622 to 1677. However, greater precision is possible: Lauder is reported as being in his sixty-eighth year when he died in 1670, and this fixes his year of birth as 1603.

The poet's father was Sir Alexander Lauder of Haltoun/Halton, about whom more directly. The generally accepted belief concerning the identity of his mother, however, requires immediate correction, since, despite statements made in reference works and repeated by literary critics, George Lauder was not the son of Marie/Mary Maitland. In relaying this erroneous line of descent, the DNB was echoing the words of Laing, and the mistake was repeated by L. E. Kastner in his authoritative edition of Drummond's Poems.2 Marie was the third daughter of the Scottish poet and judge Sir Richard Maitland of Lethington (1496–1586).3 She was probably the person who in or around 1586 copied out poems by Sir Richard and others into the so-called Maitland Quarto MS (Cambridge, Magdalene College MS 1408), which bears her signature; she was also a poet in her own right.