Kingship and the Commonweal

Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland

Roger A. Mason

• Publisher: John Donald
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781788853972
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This major collection of essays brings together in readily accessible form the fruits of research into the political thought and culture of Renaissance and Reformation Scotland. As a collection, it ranges from detailed studies of the writings of figures of international standing, such as John Mair, John Knox, George Buchanan and King James VI and I, to more discursive explorations of the changing self-perceptions of the Scottish political community during an era of dramatic political, cultural and religious upheaval. Each essay is self-contained, making its own contribution to a specific area of research. All are variations on the crucial theme of kingship and the commonweal, analysing from a variety of perspectives the way in which the changing nature of the relationship between the Scottish crown and the Scottish people was perceived and articulated by contemporaries. At once focused and ranging, this important collection illuminates in original and innovative ways how a traditionally conservative political community came to terms not only with the cultural influences emanating from Renaissance Europe, but with the revolutionary impact of the Reformation, the constitutional crisis of the reign of Mary Queen of Scots, and the increasing likelihood and eventual reality of union with England.

CHAPTER 1

Kingship, Tyranny and the Right to Resist in Fifteenth-Century Scotland

Reprinted with minor revisions from SHR, 66 (1987), 125–51. In writing the original version I benefited enormously from the co-operation of Dr Craig Macdonald in making available his typescript of Book VII of John Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome (NLS MS 18.2.8). His STS edition has since appeared in print (see note 11) and I have altered the footnotes accordingly. I am also grateful to J. H. Burns, Norman Macdougall and Sally Mapstone for their helpful comments on draft versions of this essay.

In recent years our understanding of fifteenth-century Scottish kingship has been radically transformed. The traditional picture of a weak crown made weaker and a poor realm poorer by the irresponsible antics of anarchic feudal barons has been thoroughly reappraised. In revisionist hands, Scotland’s allegedly over-mighty magnates have undergone a veritable sea-change and emerged as responsible partners in a generally pacific and constructive relationship with the crown. By the same token, the early Stewart kings are portrayed – at least when of age – as hard-headed realists astute enough to recognise that, given their impoverished circumstances, a powerful nobility was essential to the good governance of the realm. Despite or precisely because of its firm reliance on self-in-terest, this system of laissez-faire monarchy is said to have ensured a measure of security for the new Stewart dynasty and of stability for its ancient Scottish realm which was conspicuously absent from contemporary France and England. In contrast to these other countries, it is argued, crown-magnate relations in fifteenth-century Scotland were characterised by co-operation rather than confrontation.¹

Almost certainly this picture of the sweet reasonableness of the Scottish political community will be modified by further research. Already, in fact, elements of robust unreason are re-entering the picture and, in future, kings are likely to be described as rather less rational than ruthless in their policies towards the nobility and magnates as rather more grasping than gracious in their attitudes to the crown.² Nevertheless, the revisionist exercise has proved far from unrewarding. Among many other things, it has highlighted both the comparatively low level of political violence in fifteenth-century Scotland and the fact that, while two Scottish kings – James I and James III – did suffer at the hands of their subjects, there was no sustained resistance to the Stewart dynasty as such.³ Scotland, in short, never experienced the fratricidal dynastic conflicts which afflicted contemporary France and England.

To an historian of political ideas, this reinterpretation of the nature of crown-magnate relations in fifteenth-century Scotland is of considerable interest. Possibly because of the lack of obvious sources, political thought in later medieval Scotland is not a subject which has attracted much attention from historians. In a recent article, however, Matthew McDiarmid has argued on the evidence of literary sources (particularly the chronicles) that one distinguishing feature of the Scottish tradition was its staunchly libertarian emphasis on the accountability of kings to their subjects. At one point, indeed, he asserts that George Buchanan, among the most radical of sixteenth-century political theorists, says nothing about ihe Scots’ right to resist, depose and even kill their kings which was not said by medieval chroniclers such as John of Fordun and Walter Bower and which was not, at least by implication, fundamental to the outlook of the political community at large.⁴ As will become clear, this is not a view which is sustainable on the basis of the available evidence. Neither the chronicles nor any other late medieval source provide evidence that theories of resistance, deposition and tyrannicide ever figured more than marginally in the political thought of fifteenth-century Scots. Rather these sources testify to a political ideology as conservative as it was patriotic and one in which the idea of resisting the crown – far less deposing a king – was stated (if at all) in only the most hesitant and ambiguous of terms.

This is a depressingly negative conclusion for an essay which purports to discuss tyranny and the right to resist and, for that reason alone, it seemed worth stating it at the earliest opportunity. Moreover, although it relates to and may well help to explain the Stewart dynasty’s apparently quite remarkable capacity for survival, it is not a conclusion which is so self-evident as to require no further comment. After all, acts of resistance to royal authority clearly did occur in fifteenth-century Scotland: James I was assassinated in 1437, James II was forcibly defied by the house of Douglas in the early 1450s, and James III faced a series of rebellions culminating in his death in arms against his own subjects in 1488. To be sure, this hardly compares with the catalogue of rebellions and depositions which punctuate the history of contemporary England. Nevertheless, it may still be sufficient to cast doubt on the central contention to be advanced in what follows: namely, that fifteenth-century Scots actually shied away – apparently quite deliberately – from espousing those theories of resistance and tyrannicide for which in the sixteenth century, through the writings of John Mair, John Knox and George Buchanan, Scotland was to become notorious. Before examining how late medieval Scots reacted to bad government, however, it is as well to look at their conception of good government. In other words, before considering their attitude to (and remedies for) tyranny, it is important to reconstruct in some detail their understanding of the nature and function of kingship.

*

We may well begin by asking what, in the most general terms, a medieval king was expected to do. The simplest answer is that his principal tasks were to defend the realm and to administer justice within it. These were the responsibilities with which, for example, the Scottish parliament charged the earl of Fife when he was made guardian for Robert II in 1388.⁵ There was nothing peculiarly Scottish about this: weightily sanctioned by both biblical and classical authorities (e.g., 1 Samuel 8.19–20; Virgil, Aeneid, 6.852–4), defence and justice were seen throughout Europe as the essential functions of the royal office. They had, moreover, the additional imprimatur of the Roman law. Royal responsibility for defence and justice are the leading themes of the proemium to Justinian’s Institutes on which was modelled, perhaps via Bracton or Glanvill, the prologue to Scotland’s own fourteenth-century legal code, Regiam Majestatem.⁶ Such concerns were singularly appropriate to the later years of Robert I’s reign when Regiam Majestatem was most probably compiled.⁷ As we shall see, however, defence and justice remained the dominant preoccupations of Scottish political literature throughout the later middle ages.

Of course, in a Scottish context, the conventional belief in the king’s duty to defend the realm was more than usually significant. The English claim to feudal superiority over Scotland, although acted upon only intermittently, was an ever-present threat to the status of Scottish kings and thus to the integrity of the Scottish kingdom. By definition, therefore, the defence of the realm entailed a repudiation of English pretensions and an unqualified insistence that the king of Scots owed allegiance to no superior but God alone. According to the increasingly elaborate historical mythology developed by the chroniclers, the king was the latest representative of a royal line stretching back in unbroken succession to the foundation of the kingdom by Fergus I in the fourth century BC. He was, in short, the most powerful available symbol of the kingdom’s historic and continuing autonomy.⁸

Important though this clearly was, however, it is not an aspect of Scottish kingship which need detain us here. Rather it is on the king’s responsibility for the administration of justice that we must focus attention. In this context, it is important to stress that justice implies something more than the simple provision of legal remedy through the king’s courts. As the fount of justice the king’s judicial role was obviously of the first importance; but equally clearly the concept of justice had much wider connotations which in the later middle ages led it to be interpreted as nothing less than the maintenance of a stable social and political order. In this more comprehensive sense, justice may be equated quite simply with good governance.⁹ Not surprisingly, therefore, late medieval discussions of justice readily spill over into other related fields: most notably, the importance of good counsel to successful royal government and, perhaps above all, the importance of the king possessing Christian virtue in more than princely abundance. Even at one’s most charitable, it is hard to describe this kind of political moralising as anything other than jejune. Nevertheless, so fundamental was it to the political outlook of late medieval Scots that it would be perilous in the extreme to dismiss it out of hand.

The preoccupation of fifteenth-century Scottish poets with justice, good counsel and the virtues of the king has not gone unnoticed by literary critics and historians.¹⁰ But prose writers no less than poets shared the same concerns. Before looking at their works more closely, however, it is worth pondering the contention that most fifteenth-century social and political criticism is of a highly conventional nature and that attempts to read into the political literature of the period detailed commentaries on specific events may reveal more about the critic’s ingenuity than about either the text or the incident which he is seeking to illuminate. This is not to say that fifteenth-century authors were politically unaware, but merely to warn that the limited political vocabulary available to them led topical allusions to be couched and often wholly submerged in nebulous typological generalisations. Even where a text may be fairly precisely dated, therefore, its value as a source of specific information rather than conventional political wisdom must remain suspect. An interesting case in point, a vernacular prose work, is John Ireland’s Meroure of Wyssdome. Although largely concerned with theological matters – Ireland r...