Elizabeth Melville

Elizabeth Melville, Lady Culross (c.1578–c.1640) was a Scottish poet.

In 1603 she became the earliest known Scottish woman writer to see her work in print, when the Edinburgh publisher Robert Charteris issued the first edition of Ane Godlie Dreame, a Calvinist dream-vision poem. A large body of manuscript verse was discovered in 2002, and her extant poetry runs to some 4,500 lines, written in many different verse-forms. There are also twelve letters, eleven of them holographs. Melville was an active member of the presbyterian resistance to the ecclesiastical policies of both James VI and Charles I. She was a personal friend of leading figures in the presbyterian opposition, whose frustration eventually erupted in 1637 in the Edinburgh Prayerbook Riots, leading to the National Covenant of February 1638, the Glasgow General Assembly which abolished the episcopate, and the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

An inscribed flagstone commemorating her as one of Scotland's great writers was unveiled by Germaine Greer on 21 June 2014 in Makars' Court, Edinburgh. The inscription is a quotation from the Dreame – "Though tyrants threat, though Lyons rage and rore/ Defy them all, and feare not to win out" (edition of 1606).

Melville's father was the courtier and diplomat Sir James Melville of Halhill (1535–1617), one of the many children of the Fife landowner Sir John Melville of Raith, an early convert to protestantism who was executed for treasonable communication with the English invaders in 1548. Despite inheriting his father's protestant convictions, Sir James began his career as a page to Mary, Queen of Scots in France in 1549. Like his brothers Sir Robert (of Murdocairnie) and Sir Andrew (of Garvock), James later served Mary in Scotland, and remained loyal to her after her fall and forced abdication. The Melville brothers would nonetheless eventually go on to become loyal and valued servants of Mary's son, King James VI of Scotland. Sir Robert became treasurer-depute in 1582, Sir Andrew became master of the household to King James (having served the imprisoned Mary in that capacity during her English captivity), and Sir James would resume his wide-ranging diplomatic activities. His Memoirs of His Own Life, written in old age for the political education of his heir, are a well-known historical source. Sir James's long association with a French court notable for highly educated women, who both wrote and published their works, may well have inspired his decision to have his daughters well educated, presumably at the family home, the long-vanished Halhill Tower near Colessie. Sir James had inherited Halhill from his adoptive father, the lawyer Henrie Balnaves, a close friend of the Reformer John Knox. Like Knox, Balnaves had been banished to serve a penal sentence in France. The theme of the persecuted Christian elect is prominent in Eizabeth Melville's poetry; between her father's absolute commitment to the Reformed faith, her paternal grandfather's ‘martyr’ status, and the suffering for the faith of her adoptive grandfather Balnaves, her protestant antecedents were impeccable.

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