Largest Scottish Gold Issue
From the Ryan and Douglas Collections

312, Lot: 41. Estimate $80000. Sold for $150000. This amount does not include the buyer’s fee.

SCOTLAND. James VI. 1567-1625. AV Twenty Pounds (40mm, 30.54 g, 3h). Second coinage. Edinburgh mint. Dated 1576. · IACOBVS · 6 · DEI · GRA · REX · SCOTOR ·, crowned and armored half-length bust right, holding sword in right hand, branch in left; below, tablet inscribed IN · VTRVNQVE/· PARATVS ·/·1576· in three lines / PARCERE SVBIECTIS & DEBELLARE SVPERBOS, crowned royal shield. Burns 1 (fig. 947); SCBI 35 (Ashmolean & Hunterian), 1141 (same dies); SCBC 5451. Good VF, lightly toned, short hairline striking crack. Bold even strike, the king in high relief. Very rare, only seven Twenty pound pieces of 1576 are believed to be in private hands.

From the Clearwater Collection. Ex Spink 206 (1 December 2010), lot 975; Douglas Collection (Spink 119, 4 March 1997), lot 292; V.J.E. Ryan Collection (Part I, Glendining, 28 June 1950), lot 573.

The Twenty pound piece of James VI is the largest gold coin issued by a Scottish monarch. The young James is shown prepared for either peace or war reflecting the fraught early years of his reign during Morton’s Regency. James’s ill-fated son Charles I would borrow this imagery for his own gold coins in even more perilous circumstances of the English Civil War some 65 years later.

The coin’s reverse legend, PARCERE SVBIECTIS & DEBELLARE SVPERBOS (To show mercy to the defeated and crush the overbearing), taken from Virgil’s Aeneid (VI. 853), is indicative of the spirit of Humanist learning in James’s court. In the 1570s, the king’s tutor was the remarkable George Buchanan who, according to Hugh Trevor Roper, was ‘by universal consent, the greatest Latin writer in prose or in verse, in sixteenth century Europe’. Buchanan’s great work of political theory, De Jure Regni apud Scotos (Regarding Royal Law among the Scots), published in 1579, developed an understanding of kingship whereby sovereignty was derived from the people, and not by divine right as James and his descendants would later strongly advocate.