Whatever powers they might acquire over the centuries, and however much monarchs might often regret the need to call them, parliaments were royal institutions through and through. Parliaments across Europe had their origins in the Normancuria regis, and in Scotland they were summoned at the will of crown, with attendance commanded and required by the king. This royal nature was underlined by the fact that parliament was, and remained, a court of law that heard and settled disputes and legal appeals, and acted as the ultimate arbiter of royal justice. While there was, from the earliest time, a clear...

The history of church and parliament between 1235 and 1707 is one that rests on mutual concerns, secular and ecclesiastical, some of which were characterised by a spirit of co-operation, others by various degrees of tension. Such a long period naturally witnessed evolution, not only within each body but also in terms of how they interacted with one another. Unsurprisingly, it was the Reformation that heralded the most radical changes in how church and parliament interacted. The late medieval period saw the slow evolution of a clerical estate and little interest by parliament in ecclesiastical affairs at least until the...

Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, parliament was transformed in the face of political, socio-economic and religious developments, but what impact did those developments have on the nobility, its most powerful members? The widespread use of firearms, the development of a cash economy, and the combined impact of Renaissance and Reformation ideas all altered the nobility and its place in society. Meanwhile, the rise and fall of individual lineages are the stuff of baronial history but, while it is necessary that we have such history, it rarely tells us anything of real importance beyond explaining a particular narrative. In the...

Although lacking the political muscle of the nobility (the peerage and the lairds) or the status of the higher clergy (the bishops, abbots and priors), from the fourteenth century until the spring of 1707 the royal burghs were a significant and essential component of parliament. Indeed, for the purposes of parliamentary elections, both to Westminster and to Holyrood, Scotland remains divided into ‘county’ and ‘burgh’ constituencies. In legal theory at least, the burghs are therefore the most enduring element of Scotland’s parliamentary constitution. They have outlasted the hereditary peers and the higher clergy while the county representatives did not become...

The link between the political effectiveness of a parliament and the sophistication of its procedures has been made by critics of ‘institutionally underdeveloped’ assemblies, including the pre-1707 Scottish parliament.¹ Constitutional commentators, as much as general historians, have developed this strong sense of negativism, from the patriotic unionism of Thomas Craig of Riccarton in the reign of James VI to the detailed parliamentary studies of Robert Rait in the 1920s. The argument, especially in light of the 1689 Revolution, the union of 1707 and eighteenth-century Whiggishness, is often made by contrasting Scotland with England. We are told more advanced parliamentary procedures...

More than three centuries after it became a regular feature of national life, James VI regarded parliament with regal loftiness as ‘nothing else but the head Court of the King and his vassals’.² Writing in 1684, Sir George Mackenzie echoed such views in emphasising that parliament was, in his eyes, a court of law presided over by the monarch, since ‘the parliament of old was only the king’s baron-court in which all freeholders were obliged to give suit and presence’. He saw its authority, and therefore its legal competence, as dependent upon the king, arguing that ‘since we had kings...

Modern, democratic institutions are expected to place the concerns of the people at the heart of policy, reflecting their economic, social and ethical priorities. Pre-modern, pre-democratic parliaments were representative in their own way: the elite, headed by the monarch, embodied the kingdom but protected their privileges and property and, in their different estates, promoted the interests of church, aristocracy and commerce, while some pressure groups, such as pre-Reformation church councils and the legal profession, were also influential. The activities of the ‘rivals to parliament’ – the privy council, convention of royal burghs and the post-Reformation general assembly of the Church...

On 29 June 1567 in the parish church of Stirling, James VI, aged just over thirteen months, was crowned king of Scots. After the ceremony, it was proclaimed that ‘his highness is crowned, inaugurate and established in this kingdom in the presence of the nobility and Estates convened for execution and accomplishment of the queen’s will and commission’. Mary Stewart’s somewhat less than voluntary ‘commission’ had been expressed in documents sealed at Lochleven five days before. Those who assembled at Stirling were not in any sense a parliament but their proceedings and those at Lochleven were in due course accorded...

This chapter is about how Scottish parliaments functioned politically. It is about what parliaments did – or, more precisely, about how political actors used parliaments to do things. It is not a narrative of political events in parliament; much of this has been provided by the previous volumes in this series and by other works cited therein. It is a structural analysis of the types of things that people used parliament to do, and how it did them. The question behind much of the discussion is: Whatdifferencedid it make, politically, for Scotland to have parliaments?

Politics is best...