James VI and Noble Power in Scotland 1578-1603

Miles Kerr-Peterson, Steven J. Reid, Miles Kerr-Peterson, Steven J. Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138946064
• eBook ISBN: 9781351982870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

James VI and Noble Power in Scotland explores how Scotland was governed in the late sixteenth century by examining the dynamic between King James and his nobles from the end of his formal minority in 1578 until his accession to the English throne in 1603.

The collection assesses James' relationship with his nobility, detailing how he interacted with them, and how they fought, co-operated with and understood each other. It includes case studies from across Scotland from the Highlands to the Borders and burghs, and on major individual events such as the famous Gowrie conspiracy. Themes such as the nature of government in Scotland and religion as a shaper of policy and faction are addressed, as well as broader perspectives on the British and European nobility, bloodfeuds, and state-building in the early modern period.

The ten chapters together challenge well-established notions that James aimed to be a modern, centralising monarch seeking to curb the traditional structures of power, and that the period represented a period of crisis for the traditional and unrestrained culture of feuding nobility. It is demonstrated that King James was a competent and successful manager of his kingdom who demanded a new level of obedience as a 'universal king'. This volume offers students of Stuart Britain a fresh and valuable perspective on James and his reign.

1 James VI and James Douglas, Earl of Morton

Amy Blakeway

Of all James VI’s nobles, James Douglas, Earl of Morton, was perhaps most able to appreciate the difficulties his monarch faced in balancing the conflicting pressures of rule. During his half-decade as James VI’s regent from November 1572 until March 1578, Morton was required to, as contemporaries said, ‘bear the person of the monarch’ – in other words, he was required to fulfil all the monarch’s duties and in return enjoyed almost monarchical rights.¹ In the long run, however, Morton’s experience of rule proved a poisoned chalice. Taking as its focus the years between Morton’s loss of the regency in 1578 and his execution for treason in 1581, this chapter argues that Morton’s failure to thrive politically in the early years of James’ majority was due to the legacy of his regency. As regent, Morton had managed Scottish diplomacy as well as domestic affairs. Unfortunately for him, following his loss of the regency, English diplomats and, crucially, the English queen Elizabeth I failed to understand that it was not Morton, but King James, to whom they should direct their diplomatic efforts. This alienated Morton domestically and paved the way for the accusations of treason that led to his death sentence. In suggesting that the English made this profound mistake, this chapter also argues that James VI had greater political significance in this period than either his English contemporaries or modern historians have realised. The period 1578–81 was not one in which the monarch was little more than a puppet in political life. These three years witnessed James’ gradual, but nonetheless discernible, emergence as an influential participant in domestic and international affairs.

Arguing that Morton fell because the English failed to recalibrate their diplomatic relations with Scotland to suit James’ emergence as an adult ruler departs from received wisdom on the subject in two ways. In 1956 Maurice Lee argued that during Morton’s regency Scotland had become England’s ‘satellite’, in other words, that Scotland was effectively controlled by England during this period, particularly as regards to her diplomatic alignment. According to Lee, Morton lost the regency and was in due course executed, because Elizabeth ‘abandoned’ him because ‘the menacing state of affairs on the European continent’ precluded her intervention in Scotland.² Lee’s argument that English agents were aware of and influenced by events in Europe remains convincing; his argument that Morton (or by implication any other Scottish noble) rose or fell on their say-so is not. As we shall see, in actual fact the English were extremely interested in both Scotland and Morton throughout this period. At times, however, their lack of willingness to intervene for Morton was dictated not by continental events, but by concerns much closer to home, namely, the situation in Ireland. Moreover, when the English did intervene in Scotland they tended to be successful only when their preferences aligned with those of the dominant group within Scotland.

Arguing that English intervention in Scotland antagonised a monarch who was anxious to defend his own growing power concomitantly suggests that James emerged as an adult monarch somewhat earlier than previous accounts suggest. The question of when James’ adult rule commenced is not straightforward to answer, and various dates between 1578 and 1585 have been offered for consideration.³ The reason this question has provoked such confusion is at least in part that it actually needs to be separated into two questions. First, when did James legally, formally and technically begin his adult rule, in other words, his rule in his own name without a regent acting on his behalf? Second, when did James actually start to exert power and impose his will upon the polity? To solve the conundrum of when James VI’s personal rule commenced we need to separate the moment when James theoretically took responsibility for government from the process whereby in practice he started to exert power. Legally, James’ minority ended when Morton demitted the regency. At this juncture, it was made amply clear that James had accepted the ‘burding of the administratioun … upoun him self’, and henceforth no other person had any legal responsibility for fulfilling the monarch’s role in governance.⁴

The moment Parliament acknowledged that James began to reign without a regent is thus easy to identify. Sadly, identifying a point at which James exerted power as though he were an adult monarch is less clear cut. Moreover, searching for a single date after which James’ rule suddenly changed, a moment when the personal rule began, is an attempt to impose misleading clarity on a complex situation. Instead, we need to think of the period between Morton’s loss of the regency in 1578 and November 1585, the latest date proposed for the start of James’ personal rule, as a period of gradual transition during which the Scottish polity slowly moved from royal minority to personal rule whilst James’ role in governance incrementally grew. Periods of transition at the end of a royal minority, during which a young monarch adopted more responsibility and the polity adapted around him, have been observed in other contexts, notably in the case of Edward VI of England.⁵ In the conclusion we will consider the parallels that can be drawn between James VI’s emergence as an adult ruler and his grandfather James V’s experience of the same process during the 1520s.

Before moving to these arguments, however, it is helpful to consider Morton’s status as an ex-regent in a little more detail and to outline previous interpretations of his fall.⁶ As regent, Morton was bound by the longstanding convention that regents were debarred from the office of keepership of the monarch’s person: in other words, regents were not permitted to be responsible for the monarch’s upbringing or to dwell in the royal household.⁷ Moreover, the point of having a regent was that someone should ‘bear the person’ of the monarch. As such, regents were required to travel throughout the realm fulfilling monarchical duties. Of James VI’s regents, Morton spent the least time in Stirling, probably due to his lack of a kinship connection within the royal household and to the location of his own lands, particularly Aberdour in Fife and Dalkeith in Midlothian.⁸ Perhaps the relative tranquillity of post-civil war Scotland lulled Morton into a false sense of security whereby he neglected his relations with James, since Sir James Melville of Halhill observed that ‘ruleing all at his pleasure’ Morton ‘maid na accompt of any of them that wer about the King’, whom he alienated through a failure to distribute patronage.⁹

The extent of Morton’s alienation from the royal household by early 1578 is starkly demonstrated in the correspondence exchanged between Morton and his kinsman William Douglas of Lochleven the week before he lost the regency.¹⁰ Typically, Morton was not even near Stirling. Instead, he was in Holyrood, from whence he complained that Alexander Esrkine of Gogar, Master of Mar, had not informed him of recent events in the royal household. Disturbingly for Morton, Colin Campbell, sixth Earl of Argyll, had arrived and ‘the kingis Majesteis commandit to gif him acces and a chalmer within the castle’.¹¹ Relations between Argyll and Morton had broken down during Morton’s regency, when Morton had demanded that Argyll’s wife, Annas Keith, return some royal jewels in her possession. Annas had acquired these jewels during the regency of her first husband, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, and claimed that these constituted security on unpaid debts the crown owed to her children from their marriage. She now wanted Morton, as regent, to repay the debt from the crown coffers.¹² Although the question of the jewels was eventually resolved, Argyll and Morton remained antagonistic. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Argyll’s close access to James aroused Morton’s concern.¹³ He requested that Lochleven should keep him ‘advertist’ of events.¹⁴ Denying accusations of ‘ambicioun’ and ‘avariciousness’, the soon-to-be-ex-regent affirmed that he above all people would support James taking the reins of government himself, ‘Sen I think neuir to sett my face aganis him quhais honour saulftie and preseruatioun hes bene sa deir unto me’.¹⁵ This remark is worth pausing over, since Morton’s easy acquiescence to demands he should demit the regency has proved difficult to explain. This avowed desire to obey James could be dismissed as mere rhetorical commonplace or an exercise in self-preservation, but it is perhaps most likely that, as he would in 1581, Morton over-estimated the strength of his relations with James. After all, Morton also declared that ‘I will neuir beleif to find otherwayes at his hand then favour, althogh, all the unfriends I haif in the earthe wer about him to persuaid him to the contrary’.¹⁶

If he did indeed esteem his relations with James to be so strong as to resist challenge, Morton miscalculated. Argyll’s arrival in Stirling was the culmination of a process already underway in 1577, when Argyll was esteemed to be ‘especiallie well liked of by all that are about the King’.¹⁷ Conversely, throughout the summer and autumn of 1577 Engli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 James VI and James Douglas, Earl of Morton
• 2 Of bairns and bearded men: James VI and the Ruthven Raid
• 3 Friendship, politics and religion: George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly and King James VI, 1581–1595
• 4 James VI, noble power and the burgh of Glasgow, c. 1580–1605
• 5 He ‘made them friends in his cabinet’: James VI’s suppression of the Scott-Ker feud
• 6 Noble power in the West Highlands and Isles: James VI and the end of the mercenary trade with Ireland, 1594–96
• 7 Rise of a courtier: The Second Duke of Lennox and strategies of noble power under James VI
• 8 ‘For the King Favours Them Very Strangely’: The rise of James VI’s chamber, 1580–1603
• 9 The Octavians
• 10 The Gowrie Conspiracy: Do we need to wait until the Day of Judgement?
• Index