The meeting between the youthful, in the middle case ever youthful, Reformations of England, France and Scotland and the ageless art of dynastic squabbling prompted the arrivals into English of “assassination” and “massacre”. It also provides an excellent example of words getting footholds through early use by well-known playwrights.
On 23 January 1570, James Stewart, the Earl of Moray and regent for his infant nephew King James VI of Scotland became the first head of government to be assassinated by a firearm.
The assassin was James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh and Woodhouselee. He was no professional. After the murder, he fled to France where he was invited to kill Admiral Coligny, a leader of the French protestants. He spurned the idea:
A man of honour is entitled to avenge his own just quarrels; but would cease to be so if he committed murder for another.
The first record of “assassinate” in English is 1600, in an anti-papist tract. Five years on – and two years into James VI’s other job as the first King James of England – it received a lasting public outing in a play about the murder of a Scottish king:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly: if the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence
Winding back a while, Admiral Coligny did not gain much by missing his assassination. In 1572 and days after someone did in fact try to kill him with a firearm, Coligny and thousands of other Huguenots were murdered.
While “massacre” in its modern sense had been introduced into English by a Scottish writer a few years before, it was the playwright Christopher Marlowe who picked up the tale in his 1593 The Massacre at Paris. We know the affair the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Incidentally the person many regarded as responsible for the attack on Coligny was the Duke of Guise, who believed Coligny had arranged the assassination of his father.
As for the word “regent”, it has a peculiar quality. The word “gerent” is its synonym and its anagram.
An earlier protagonist in Reformation politics, Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall fame, was elevated to Vicegerent of the King in Spirituals in 1536 and executed four years later.
