Scottish Politics 1567–1625

Abstract

in 1599 seven copies of Basilikon Doron, James VI’s account of kingship, were privately printed and given to his wife and son and to ‘some of my trustiest servants’, who included, at first sight surprisingly, the earls of Huntly, Erroll and Angus, those earls who had had a long run of defiance of the Crown in the late 1580s and early 1590s. What they thought, if they read it, of James’s condemnation of the Scottish nobility’s ‘natural sickness, that I have perceived … a feckless arrogant conceit of their greatness and power’1 can only be guessed at. What is certain is that this judgement of them has been subsequently endorsed by historians of James’s reign. James himself has been given credit for bringing to an end, before he left Scotland in 1603, the long struggle for control by the monarchy over a nobility which had for at least two centuries enjoyed too much power. He had, it is claimed, succeeded in curbing their political dominance, thereby ensuring the authority of the Crown; and apparently to give theoretical justification for his position, he had introduced, when he wrote the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Dor on in the late 1590s, a concept of monarchy which was totally new to Scotland, based on the theory that kings were answerable to God alone and not to their people. In terms of secular politics therefore the major issue of the reign is the place of the magnates in Scottish political life and their relationship with the Crown.