page_title: William Mure (writer)
section_title: Later works
hierarchical_section_title: William Mure (writer) / Career / Later works
caption_attribution_description: English: 16th c oak door from Rowallan Castle, Royal Scottish Museum
context_page_description: Sir William Mure of Rowallan was a Scottish writer and politician, and prominent member of the Clan Muir.
context_section_description: The rest of Mure's poetic output is quite different in nature, and expresses his deep commitment to Calvinism and, latterly, to the presbyterian model of kirk government. It has been suggested that the shift in Mure's poetic focus may have been prompted by his reading of Francis Hamilton's  King James His Encomium (Edinburgh, 1626). Mure could equally well have been influenced by his local minister, the strongly presbyterian Glasgow graduate and neo-Latin poet Michael Wallace, who had become minister of Kilmarnock in 1610. His Carmen Panegryricum welcoming James VI and I to Paisley on 24 July 1617 visit was, like Mure's welcome to Hamilton, included in The Muses Welcome of 1618, and there is no question that Wallace and Mure were well acquainted.
  In 1628, at Edinburgh, Mure published A Spirituall Hymne or The Sacrifice of a Sinner to be offred upon the Altar of a humbled heart Christ our Redeemer. Inverted in English Sapphicks from the Latine, i.e. translation of the Ayrshire theologian Robert Boyd of Trochrig's Hecatombe Christiana...ad Christum Servatorem: the terminally ill Boyd had published the Hecatombe the previous year, with a dedication to his cousin Bishop Andrew Boyd.  Mure followed his paraphrase of Robert Boyd with his own lengthy meditation on the Last Judgement, entitled ‘Doomes-Day containing Hells horrour and Heavens happinesse’, to which he appended the three sonnets entitled ‘Fancies Farewell’.  In these last, Mure repented of his Muse's ‘Houres mis-employed, evanisht as a dreame’ and ‘younger yeares, youthes sweet Aprile mispent’.   In 1629, Mure published the 3236 lines of The True Crucifixe for True Catholikes, a sustained denunciation of Roman Catholicism.  The preliminary paratext consists of a sonnet by Drummond of Hawthornden, Latin verses by John Adamson, John Gellie and Michael Wallace, and ten vernacular couplets by Walter Forbes. Mure appended a postliminary sequence of ten spiritual sonnets, possibly inspired by the example of James Melville, who concluded A Spirituall Propine of a Pastour to His People (1598) with a series of ten sonnets. Mure's final sonnet, ‘To the Blessed Trinity’, is an echo of the first sonnet in Melville's sequence, namely ‘Svpreame, essence, beginner, vnbegon’; but the latter itself stands in an ambiguous relationship to the sonnet ‘Supreme Essence, beginning Vnbegun’ by Mure's uncle Alexander Montgomerie.
  The influence of James Melville's The Black Bastel, or A Lamentation in name of the Kirk of Scotland (written 1611, published in 1634) is unmistakable in Mure's vehemently anti-episcopalian and anti-Laudian sonnet sequence The Joy of Teares, published in 1635: the numerous verbal and conceptual links between The Joy of Tears and The Black Bastel leap off the page. They range from references to Eli and the ‘captive ark’ and the ‘hungry souls’ fed by the incomparable pre-episcopal Kirk, to mentions of ‘dogs and swine’, ‘poperie’ and the mourning faithful. Melville's image of the enslavement of the defiled Kirk by James VI and I and his bishops - ‘‘upon a royall Throne, / Did awfull sit … a rampand Lyon red … And round about him thirteen wolues did dance/ To keep her sheep’  - underlies Mure's ‘woolfs that lams do chase’ in line 5 of his twelfth sonnet. By 1635, tensions had already risen very high between Charles I's authoritarian, episcopal ‘Court of High Commission’ and the presbyterian opposition.  Mure did not dare to name himself as author of The Joy of Teares. Instead, he stated on the title page that the book was ‘published with the gratious licence and privilege of GOD Almighty, King of Heaven and Earth the penult day of Iuly, Anno Dom.1635’, and in a couplet following  his opening sonnet to the reader, Mure wrote ‘No marvel I my name forbear/ Since blameless Truth dar scarce appear’.
  Following the signing of the National Covenant in spring 1638 and the outbreak of hostilities between the Scottish Covenanting régime and King Charles, Mure wrote in support of the Covenant. In 1640, he published A Counter-buff to Lysimachus Nicanor; calling himself a Jesuit, a
caption: 16th-century oak door from Rowallan Castle, National Museum of Scotland.
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