James, the son of King James IV of Scotland and his queen Margaret Tudor, a daughter of Henry VII of England, is the only legitimate child of his father to survive infancy.

He was born on April 10, 1512, at Linlithgow Palace, Linlithgowshire and christened the next day, receiving the titles Duke of Rothesay and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland.

He becomes king at just seventeen months old when his father is killed at the Battle of Flodden Field.

James is crowned on September 21, 1513, in the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle.

Sir David Lindsay (or Lyndsay) of the Mount, a poet and dramatist active in court life, will be appointed guardian of the infant King James V in October.

Gawin Douglas, the leading, poet produces an outstanding translation of Vergil's Aeneid.

Among the earliest translations of the Aeneid into a dialect of English, the work adheres closely to the Latin original.

In the evocative passages describing storms and the sea, Douglas makes good use of the great range of words available to him, capturing the joy and brightness of Vergil’s phrasing.

His original prologues to each book of the Aeneid are rich in fine literary criticism, autobiography, and nature description.

The Douglas family assumes a pivotal role in Scotland’s public affairs during the minority of James V. Three weeks after the Battle of Flodden, Gavin Douglas, still Provost of St Giles, had been admitted a burgess of Edinburgh.

His father, the "Great Earl," is the civil provost of the capital.

The Scottish nation is beginning its painful recovery, and Angus has won appointment as one of the councilors of Margaret Tudor the queen regent; but he dies soon afterwards at the end of October 1513 in Wigtownshire, where he had gone as justiciar.

His two eldest sons having perished on Flodden Field, the succession falls to Gavin's nephew, Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus.

Regents will rule Scotland during the childhood of James V: first his mother, until she remarries in 1514 to the pro-English Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus, then  John Stewart, 2nd Duke of Albany, who is next in line to the throne after James and his younger brother, the posthumously born Alexander Stewart, Duke of Ross.

Other regents include Robert Maxwell, 5th Lord Maxwell, a member of the Council of Regency who is also bestowed as Regent of Arran, the largest island in the Firth of Clyde.

A power struggle ensues among factions controlled by Albany, Angus, and Margaret.

The marriage of the young Earl of Angus to James IV's widow on August 6, 1514 does much to identify the Douglases with the English party in Scotland, as against the French party led by the Duke of Albany, and incidentally to determine the political career of his uncle Gavin.

During the first weeks of the queen's sorrow after the battle, Gavin, with one or two colleagues of the council, acts as personal adviser, and it may be taken for granted that he supports the pretensions of the young earl.

His own hopes of preferment have been strengthened by the death of many of the higher clergy at Flodden.

The first outcome for Gavin from the new family connection was his appointment to the Abbacy of Aberbrothwick by the Queen Regent, as Margaret Tudor was before her marriage, probably in June 1514.

Soon after the marriage of Angus to Margaret she nominates him Archbishop of St Andrews, in succession to William Elphinstone, archbishop-designate.

But John Hepburn, prior of St Andrews, having obtained the vote of the chapter, expels him, and is himself in turn expelled by Andrew Forman, Bishop of Moray, who has been nominated by the pope.

In the interval, Douglas's rights in Aberbrothwick have been transferred to James Beaton, Archbishop of Glasgow, and he is now without title or temporality.

The breach between the Queen's party and Albany's has widened, and the queen's advisers have begun an intrigue with England, to the end that the royal widow and her young son should be removed to Henry's court.

In these deliberations Gavin Douglas takes an active part, and for this reason stimulates the opposition that successfully thwarts his preferment.

David Lindsay (or Lyndsay) of the Mount, a poet and dramatist active in Scottish court life, becomes Lyon King of Arms, or chief herald, in 1531.

English authorities find some of the satire contained in interludes by such authors as John Heywood, John Rastell, David Lindsay, the late John Skelton, and John Bale, so offensive that interludes are banned by proclamation in 1533, the more political having by this time shed both their lightness and their aristocratic audience.

English poet and playwright John Heywood writes two interludes, plays similar to farces and made up of satirical debates in verse: “The Pardoner and the Friar, the Curate and the Neighbor Priest" and “John-John the Husband, Tib his Wife, and Sir John the Priest". Both written in about 1533, the latter, also known as “Johan Johan,” is a prototypical triangle of adultery involving a henpecked husband, shrewish wife, and lecherous priest.

Around the same time, Heywood writes “The Play of the Weather,” which, unlike his interludes, intended for a popular audience, is written for a courtly audience; its theme is that people are as unlikely to agree upon the weather as they are to agree on religion and politics.

Heywood is a Catholic and a member of Sir Thomas More's household, where his plays possibly see production.

The ideas of Italian Renaissance humanism, confined to the peninsula until about 1450, had from the late fifteenth century begun to spread around Europe.

This has influenced Renaissance in the Netherlands, the German Renaissance, French Renaissance, English Renaissance, Polish Renaissance and other national and localized movements, each with different characteristics and strengths.

Sir David Lyndsay’s morality play, The Satyre of the Thrie Estatis, is produced in 1540 as the first literary expression in Scotland of the Renaissance.

Sir David Lyndsay had revised and expanded his 1540 morality play The Satyre of the Thrie Estatis for a 1552 production, juxtaposing lively colloquial diction and comic character portrayal with moving and earnest satire of political and ecclesiastical corruption.

Lyndsay’s support for his contemporary, Scottish reformer John Knox, and his fervent belief in the need for just government and religious reform, is reflected in his allegorical poem of 1553, A Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, which is in part an indictment of Catholicism.

Scottish poet Gawin Douglas’s The Palace of Honour is posthumously published in the same year, as is the Eneados, his outstanding translation of Vergil’s Aenid.

Among the earliest translations of the Aeneid into a dialect of English, and the first successful example of its kind in the British Isles, it adheres closely to the Latin original.

Douglas captures the joy and brightness of Vergil, and makes good use of the great range of words available to him, particularly in describing storms and the sea.

In his original prologues to each book of the Aeneid, Douglas includes much fine literary criticism, autobiography, and nature description.