Scottish Text Society publications > Third series > Thomas Hudson's historie of Judith

INTRODUCTION.
XIX
and prebendaris quhatsumewer unrentallit . . . sen the
Ixi yeir of God ”—i.e., since 1561, the year of the First
Book of Discipline. It is probable that it was the exercise
of the powers here conferred to sue for recovery of alienated
revenues that made necessary the Act of the Scottish
Parhament of 1592 ratifying the appointment. It is
wholly concerned with the payment of his salary, for
which it repeats the arrangements of 1586 and confers
the same powers.
To the year 1587 belongs the only scrap of personalia
that has been preserved, a letter written in that year
to the notorious Archibald Douglas, who was then in
London. For some reason it found its way into the
hands of Cecil, and is now preserved at Hatfield among
his papers.1 It is little more than a note asking Douglas
to procure for him a copy of the Common Places of Peter
Martyr, an English translation, printed at London in
1583, of Peter Martyr Vermigli’s Loci Communes Sacrarum
Literarum, which had originally appeared at Zurich in
1563-
When the royal household was reorganised on the
marriage of King James to Anne of Denmark the Hudsons
were retained in their old post. In May 1590, William,
Robert, and Thomas Hudson, His Highness’s Violars, were
paid £S200 by His Majesty’s precept and special command
to “by thame cleithing,” 2 presumably to enable them
to make a fitting appearance in the festivities with which
in that month Scotland welcomed James and his bride
home from Denmark. In the following February the
names of the four of them appear in The Estate of the
King and Quenis Maiesties Houshald, with the “ quantitie
of (thair) ordinar Allowance.” They were to have
1 Hatfield MSS. (Hist. MSS. Commission. 1889), vol. iii., p. 252.
2 Papers Relative to the Marriage of James the Sixth (Bannatyne
Club. 1828), Appendix II., p. 17.