This essay reads Thomas Murray’s 1604 Latin translation of King James’s short epic poem Lepanto in the contexts of the wider phenomenon of English-to-Latin translation and the palimpsestic translative poetics of King James’s Scottish court before, during, and immediately after his accession to the English throne in 1603. It characterises the ‘badness’ of James’s poem as a partly intended effect of its strategy of ‘avoidant allegory’, whereby it manages to recast the Catholic victory over the Ottoman at Lepanto as a prophecy of Protestant triumph. It reads the ‘Scoto-French Protestant’ poetics of Lepanto and its translations alongside Du Bartas and Buchanan, but also compares its allegorical approach to that of G.K. Chesterton’s 1911 poem ‘Lepanto’. Ultimately, it argues that Murray’s Naupactiados Metaphrasis casts James’s politically flexible poem as a more explicit and aggressive statement of militant Scottish Protestant imperialism; however, Murray’s act of Latinization is still mired in, and even deepens, the problematically shadowy and avoidant poetics of James’s original.