Mason Kingship and the Commonweal

Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland
1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-1-78885-397-2
Verlag: John Donald
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

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.

Roger Mason is a Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely in the field of late medieval and early modern Scottish political thought and culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mason, Roger

Leseproben

Introduction
Kingship and the Commonweal

At no time before the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment did Scots contribute so markedly to the history of European political thought as they did during the era of the Renaissance and Reformation. The major upheavals and intellectual challenges of the sixteenth century generated in figures such as John Mair, John Knox, George Buchanan and King James VI and I an outstanding group of political writers whose international significance was immediately recognised by contemporaries and has long been acknowledged by historians. Many of the essays collected in this volume are directly concerned with analysing the writings of these canonical authors. At the same time, however, they attempt to recapture the broader intellectual contours of the political culture which shaped their thinking and on which their writings reflect. While they can make no pretence to constitute a comprehensive history of sixteenth-century Scottish political thought, the chapters that follow do nonetheless broach many of the major themes and issues which such a history would need to address.1

Prominent among those themes is the way in which sixteenth-century Scots perceived and articulated the changing nature of the relationship between the king and the political community over which he presided: that is, in words more akin to contemporary parlance, the nature of the relationship between kingship and the commonweal.2 ‘Woe be to him’, wrote James VI in 1610, ‘that divides the weale of the King from the weale of the Kingdome’.3 If James was not a particularly original thinker, he was often a highly perceptive one, not least when his own power was the issue at stake, and the potential dangers of juxtaposing kingship with the commonweal was a theme which he had raised in much starker and more revealing terms in the course of his The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. First published in 1598, the True Lawe is a remarkably concise and effective defence of the king’s divine right to rule and of his subjects’ duty of unstinting obedience to divinely constituted authority. In the course of it James castigated those who advocated resistance to tyranny for advancing the argument that ‘good Citizens will be forced, for the naturall zeale and duety they owe to their owne native countrey, to put their hand to worke for freeing their common-wealth from such a pesf’.4 Among such apologists, and perhaps prominent in James’s mind as he wrote the True Lawe, was his own former tutor, George Buchanan. For in his De Jure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus Buchanan had argued along precisely the lines criticised by James that the people’s duty to the commonwealth must take precedence over their allegiance to the king.

Buchanan’s Dialogue was probably the most significant – it was certainly the most notorious – political tract to be written in Scotland in the course of the sixteenth century. An elegant defence of elective monarchy and the accountability of kings to their subjects, it imparted a distinctively classical republican spin to an ideal of the commonwealth which was already well-established in Scottish political thinking. At a meeting of the general assembly in 1564, in the course of a famous debate between John Knox and William Maitland of Lethington on the question of resistance to tyranny, the minister John Craig expressed the view ‘that every kingdom is, or at least should be, a commonwealth, albeit that every commonwealth be not a kingdom’.5 Buchanan’s Dialogue is in many respects simply a detailed exploration of this succint formula; moreover, it comes to a broadly similar conclusion as Craig had reached when he told the assembly ‘that princes are not only bound to keep laws and promises to their subjects, but also that in case they fail, they justly may be deposed; for the band betwixt the prince and the people is reciproce’.6 Craig and Buchanan were by no means alone in developing such radical ideas in the Scotland of the 1560s. The events of that decade, culminating in the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots in 1567, generated an unprecedented level of radical political speculation of which Buchanan’s statement of the contractual basis of the relationship between the crown and the community was only the most infamous.

Although not published until 1579, the Dialogue was first written in the immediate aftermath of Mary’s deposition with the express purpose of justifying what was arguably the most significant single political act to occur in sixteenth-century Scotland. That Mary’s overthrow was camouflaged under the fiction of a voluntary abdication may well be testimony to the essential conservatism of a political community which was profoundly ill-at-ease with constitutional revolution. It was a fiction, however, which was unable to contain the development of the radical constitutionalism associated with Buchanan or the increasingly strident assertions of royal absolutism propounded by exiled Catholic supporters of Mary such as Adam Blackwood and William Barclay. Just as the deposition of Mary was an event of European significance, so the debate which it generated was addressed to a European audience.7 Yet the ideological polarisation which is such a feature of post-Reformation Europe is clearly apparent in a domestic Scottish setting. James VI’s development of a divine right theory of royal absolutism must be seen (as it is here in chapters 7 and 8) as a reaction not just to the theories of popular sovereignty associated with Buchanan, but also to their adoption by the radical presbyterian clergy within the Scottish kirk. The issue of sovereignty in late sixteenth-century Scotland was much more than an abstract debate over the nature and limits of royal authority; it was part of an intensely practical struggle to define the character of a reformed Scottish commonwealth and for control of the levers of power within it.

Looking back from the century’s end, James VI had no difficulty in pinpointing the events of the 1560s – the deposition of his mother and the Reformation-Rebellion against his grandmother – as the moment when Scottish kingship and the Scottish commonwealth were forcibly prised apart – with, in his view, consequences equally disastrous for both.8 He was undoubtedly correct in identifying the decade of the Reformation as a critical watershed when the idea of preserving the commonwealth at the expense of a wicked king (or queen) assumed unprecedented significance in the world of practical Scottish politics. In the realm of political theory, however, such an idea was far from new. It was a doctrine espoused, for example, by no less an authority than the great scholastic theologian, John Mair, probably the most intellectually gifted of all the authors considered in this book. The full extent of Mair’s achievement is only now beginning to gain the recognition which it deserves and, primarily a logician, philosopher and theologian, the analysis of his History of Greater Britain to which chapter 2 is devoted is unlikely to take the full measure of the man.9 Nevertheless, it has long been acknowledged that he played a key role in applying the theories of ecclesiastical conciliarism to the temporal realm, and in ensuring that such ideas were transmitted from the medieval to the early modern world. A student and teacher for some twenty-five years in Paris, Mair returned to Scotland in 1518 where he was to spend most of the remaining thirty years of his long and distinguished life and where he numbered among his pupils at St Andrews both George Buchanan and (very probably) John Knox. However, neither Buchanan nor Knox can be considered direct disciples of Mair, and just as it may be doubted whether the bleak analysis of Scottish political culture found in his History of Greater Britain was widely shared by his countrymen, so the extent to which his political ideas were widely known and accepted in Scotland is equally open to question.

If Mair’s influence on Scottish political thought is an issue which still requires thorough investigation, so too does the extent to which his radical politics were informed by a knowledge of native traditions. It is by no means certain that there existed in late medieval Scotland a continuous tradition of ‘libertarian’ thinking which might link Mair with that most famous of all Scottish ‘constitutional’ documents, the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320. Claims for the existence of such a tradition are examined in chapter 1 where it is argued to the contrary that expressions of political radicalism are remarkably rare in late medieval Scotland and that the dominant ideology was one in which kingship and the common good were so closely identified as to render resistance to royal authority all but inconceivable. The arguments developed in chapter 1, however, the earliest written of the essays collected here, need to be considered both in the light of the refinements subsequently introduced in chapters 3 and 4 and in relation to recent advances made on a wider scholarly front. Just as we now know more than we did in 1987 of the career and significance of John Ireland, so it has been argued that there is more evidence for theories of resistance to tyranny in fifteenth-century Scotland than my original article allowed.10 In the light of this research, it is now more appropriate to suppose that, while Scottish political thinking in the late medieval period was dominated by a conservative mainstream, less conventional currents of thought had their place in a political culture which was rather more varied and sophisticated than chapter 1...