Who was William Elphinstone? Leslie Macfarlane tells how he set out to discover the creator of King's College Chapel in the great archives of Europe more than forty years ago

But what do we know of its creator, Bishop William Elphinstone, who planned it as the College's focal point of worship when he founded the University five years before in 1495? And how did he set about the hazardous task of launching such an expensive venture in so sparsely populated an area?

Well, a good start can be found in Hector Boece's short but vivid sketch of him in his Lives of the Bishops of Aberdeen which appeared in 1522, and upon which almost all later biographies of him have been based. Boece knew the bishop well, in that it was Elphinstone who had first invited him to come to his fledgling university to teach its young liberal arts students in 1497, and had then appointed him as its first Principal in 1505. True, his study is limited to his own personal experience of him and what he could later glean from the bishop's kinsmen and other friends and acquaintances, but it is all the more compelling for that.

And, of course, since Elphinstone held a number of high offices of state during his life, much more is now available to us about him from the nation's public records, to which Boece had no access. They make it clear to us, in fact, that Elphinstone had not only been a member of the king's daily Council and Chancellor of Scotland, but was also a widely travelled ambassador and an experienced statesman of European renown.

With this in mind, many years ago, I suggested to the then Principal, Sir Thomas Murray Taylor, that I should make a search through those relevant European archives which might well contain records of him. He enthusiastically agreed, and I made several visits to these archives between 1958 and 1970.

My first port of call had to be the Vatican archives in Rome, where I hoped to find the royal supplication which James IV addressed to Alexander VI in 1495, requesting the pope, as the patron of learning, to confirm Elphinstone's wish to found a university in Old Aberdeen.

Now at that time the papal chancery adopted a set procedure by which important letters of this kind were first checked to ensure that their material was competent, and then placed before the pope for his decision; if, after discussion, the pope gave his approval, he signed and dated the original supplication, added any necessary qualifying clauses, and sent it to be copied word for word into a special series of registers.

The original was then sent to an expert calligrapher in the chancery to draft from it the pope's formal consent, omitting its opening address to the pope, and substituting in its place a suitable preamble and conclusion. The Bull, as this document was known, was then sealed, and either despatched to the sender, or was to be collected from the chancery, and the original supplication was then destroyed.

When after a prolonged search I found the enregistered copy of James IV's supplication, I was then able to construct the whole sequence of Bishop Elphinstone's visit to Rome. On 6 February 1495 he was ushered into the presence of Alexander VI, who doubtless questioned him closely on the king's letter before him as to why the foundation of a university in Old Aberdeen was necessary at all, and how it was to be funded.

Since, however, it was Elphinstone who had drafted the king's letter in the first place, he was in a strong position to elaborate on the need for a more educated laity, given the shortage of doctors, lawyers and schoolmasters in the country, and he is likely to have done so; and as for its funding, the king himself had promised him annual rents from his lands in Banffshire to provide the salary of a university mediciner, while relatives, friends and the burgesses of Aberdeen had promised their financial support.

Such explanations must have satisfied the pope, for after their discussion Elphinstone had the pleasure of seeing the cardinal who was with the pope at the time write the all important words at the foot of the royal letter: Concessum ut petitur in presentia domini nostri pape, Johannes cardinalis. Datum apud Sanctum Petrum Octavo Idibus Februariis, Anno Tertio. So we see that Alexander VI had approved of James IV's request in the Vatican on 6 February 1495. Four days later the calligrapher had completed his task, and the handsome Bull of Foundation, dated 10 February, was collected by Elphinstone and taken home with him to Old Aberdeen where it remains to this day in the University archives.

While working in the Vatican archives I was also able to check other documents relating to the University and its Chapel, including Alexander VI's agreement on 9 February 1496 to Elphinstone's proposed distribution of the University's earliest revenues; Julius II's Bull of Confirmation on 18 April 1506 of Elphinstone's foundation of King's College; and especially the documents concerning Elphinstone's Second Constitution of the University which had remained unconfirmed after his death in 1514, but which Bishop Gavin Dunbar retrieved and had obtained its confirmation from Pope Clement VII on 18 January 1527.

All in all, the months spent in the Vatican archives had shown me the close cooperation which had been required between the king, Bishop Elphinstone and the papacy, not only to get the foundation of the University off the ground, but also in the manner in which the bishop had been able, step by step, to shape the academic, liturgical and financial needs of King's College to his design.

Having completed this search, it then seemed logical to go through Boece's Life of Elphinstone from his early youth onwards in order to check his facts and add to them from other European sources. We are told that Elphinstone was born in Glasgow, attended the Cathedral grammar school there, became a priest in 1455, graduated MA at its University in 1462 and was studying canon law there until 1465, when his uncle sent him to the universities of Paris and Orleans to further his legal studies. Much of this was first checked from Glasgow's city, episcopal and university printed records, but Boece's account of Elphinstone's stay in Paris and Orleans was vague and required investigation. Accordingly, several weeks were spent ransacking the relevant archives of both these cities to elicit the facts. In the event, a considerable amount of fascinating information about him was discovered there: the Scots he met in the Law School in Paris, the lectures and courses he attended in canon law there, and the law books he purchased when he began lecturing himself there after his graduation in 1468.

In 1470, however, he moved down to Orleans University to study Roman civil law, but which course of studies he was forced to abandon in 1471 when he was appointed the chief legal officer of the diocese of Glasgow. What became clear to me, however, as I followed his studies and read his lectures, was that Elphinstone's six years in these two French law schools laid the foundation of his future reputation as one of Scotland's greatest lawyers of the fifteenth century. Hence it is not surprising to note his rapid rise from his position in Glasgow to his becoming the Commissary General of the archdiocese of St Andrews in Edinburgh, a member of the king's Council in 1478, and thereafter ambassador at large and the chief negotiator of royal treaties with other European monarchs.

Because of the importance of international treaties to the Country's political stability at the time, it therefore seemed essential to look first at those he negotiated with Richard III in 1484 and Henry VII in 1486 in London, together with the mission he had undertaken on crown business to Louis XI in Paris in 1479, in order to try to discover his legal thinking in this important area of Scotland's search for peace between the three countries.

What emerged from my study of the documents in the British Library and Public Record Office in London, and at the Quai d'Orsay archives in Paris was that the Anglo-Scottish treaties included clauses stating that should England invade France, the Scots would not be compelled to assist the French by invading England in retaliation - clauses completely rejected by the French crown, however, whose policy of national aggrandisement depended largely on keeping the Scots and English permanently hostile to each other in order to prevent the English from invading France.

But as Elphinstone saw it, a line had to be drawn under the mere succession of truces from war which had plagued relations between Scotland and England for centuries, and that solemn treaties had to be concluded in their stead which must include these clauses and which their kings should be bound on oath to uphold. Although he loved France, his legal mind had led him to be convinced of the need for long term solutions within the framework of public international law, and to the end of his life he strove to achieve them, as we know from his visit to the German emperor Maximilian in 1495 in order to seek a treaty of alliance and friendship between James IV and Maximilian just at the time when the latter was possessed of a hair-brained scheme to form a league with Scotland, England and Spain against France, as I discovered when working through the imperial archives in Innsbruck and Vienna.

There were other visits which Elphinstone made abroad on his way to and from Rome, notably to the Scottish Staple centres at Bruges, Middelburg and Veere, mostly to discuss his trading concerns with the Conservator of Scottish Privileges and to arrange his foreign currency exchange, as I found when I examined his list of imports in their archives and in their printed records; imports which were especially heavy when he was building King's College and its Chapel. In sharp relief to these records, however, I was surprised by an entry which revealed that while lodging at Bruges during Easter 1495, Elphinstone had actually taken over the ceremonial duties of the Bishop of Tournai, had consecrated the chrism at the church of St Walburg on Holy Thursday, and had participated at the Easter vigil at which he ordained a number of young priests, and had to read, rather than sing, the Mass.

Yet despite all these forays to European archives, which added much to our picture of his activities abroad, the underlying character of the man is still best to be found in our own University archives. For despite his formidable administrative gifts, he remained at heart a devout Christian, as we may see for ourselves - not in the commentaries he made in the margins of his legal text books, but in the beautiful Chapel he created, and in the comments he silently made in the margins of the homelies and sermons to be found in his devotional books, not meant for others to see. A worthy founder, indeed, of "this noble college".

Dr Leslie J Macfarlane is an Honorary Reader in the Department of History, and author of William Elphinstone and the Kingdom of Scotland, 1431-1514, The Struggle for Order, published by Aberdeen University Press (AUP).