Walter Scott of Buccleuch, Italian poet?

Though never recognized any literary status, the name of Walter Scott of Buccleuch (1565–1611) looms large in the papers of one of the most intriguing intellectuals of late sixteenth‐century Scotland, William Fowler. As can be surmised in the extant manuscripts, now in the National Library of Scotland, Fowler intended to dedicate to Buccleuch his translation of Niccolò Machiavelli's Il Principe ; and the two Scots appear to have enrolled together at the University of Padua in 1592. Fowler's manuscripts contain a dazzling array of disparate material. The dedication of The Prince is followed by poems in Italian, written in a very fair hand. The name ‘Bukleuch’ is repeated on the margin. The hand is the same as other Italian poems, in Fowler's papers and in other manuscripts. In this paper I confirm the tentative attribution of these works to Buccleuch and analyse the poems, which show their author's interest in contemporary Italian culture – an interest acknowledged by Fowler, who speaks of Buccleuch as ‘mair perfyte and prompter in the Italian tonge than I be’.