|
| AUTUMN 2003 | SUMMER 2004 | WINTER 2004 | SUMMER 2005 | WINTER 2005 |
| AUTUMN 2006 |
Looking back to our futureRoland Tanner, winner of the Saltire Society's History Book of the Year Award 2003, challenges the convention that Scotland's pre 1707 parliament achieved nothing of significance. The history of the Scottish parliament before 1707 was a surprisingly neglected subject between the 1920s and 1990s. This neglect was symptomatic of a lack of Scottish historians generally, but also a result of the last book to have been published on the parliament, Robert Rait's Parliaments of Scotland (1924), which painted such a discouraging picture of the institution's powers and significance that it killed off interest in the subject for much of the rest of the century. According to Rait, the Scottish parliament was an ineffective body whose main function was simply to rubber-stamp whatever decision happened to be made by the king. Although Rait never spoke in explicit terms, his judgement on the Scottish parliament reflected the prevailing view of Scottish history then current: that Scotland before 1707 was an irrelevant backwater which had hardly been able to develop any independent institutional or constitutional apparatus worth keeping - the Union was the best thing that ever happened. The Scottish parliament certainly was dramatically different from its counterpart south of the border. For instance, the 'three estates' of clergy, barons and burgh commissioners sat in a single chamber, without separate houses of commons and lords. There were 'rival' institutions, called general councils and conventions of estates, which held similar powers to parliament and. Rait argued, undermined its authority. There were no knights of the shire, but instead there was a powerful committee called the 'lords of the articles', which carried out a lot of the humdrum business of drafting the acts. In the last decade systematic attempts have been made to question Rait's judgement on parliament, with major studies of the institution in each of the centuries since 1235 now complete, and an entirely new edition of all the acts of parliament before 1707 approaching completion. The new consensus is that the old Scottish parliament was far from weak or constitutionally defective; if anything it was the opposite. The fifteenth century is a good case study in the powers of parliament. By 1400 parliament was already nearly two-hundred years old, and had a long tradition of involvement in the key events of the kingdom. Yet, after James I (1406-1437) returned from his captivity in England in 1424, the Scottish parliament began to sit more often, and to play a leading role in political affairs. The initial reason for this prominence seems to have been James I's admiration for the English way of doing things, At this time the English parliament was granting massive annual subsidies to Henry V to fund his army in France. In Scotland there was no such tradition of taxation, but James attempted to establish one. Although the early parliaments after 1424 were willing to grant taxation to the king to pay his ransom, the financial demands quickly became unpopular, especially as the king misappropriated money for his building projects, Between 1425 and 1437 the king repeatedly faced both widespread tax-avoidance and parliamentary refusal to provide more finance. Finally, opposition to the king's aggressive treatment of some of his leading magnates and two failed military campaigns, led to a botched attempt to arrest the king'in the name of the three estates in parliament' in 1436. While parliament certainly assisted James I in the vigorous new style of kingship that he brought to Scotland, it created as many problems for him as it solved. It is one thing for a parliament to get in the way of unpopular royal policies, however, and another for that power to be perceived as a recognised right. Medieval thought certainly believed that monarchs should listen to advice - the notion of absolutism was a later invention - but there was no legal obligation for a king to pay any attention to what his subjects said. Nevertheless, fifteenth- century Scotland saw an increasingly legal perception of the powers vested in 'the three estates in parliament'. By 1445 James II (1437-60) was made to swear an oath neither to 'eike nor mynisshe [add to nor diminish]' the statutes ofthe realm without the consent of the three estates 'and naming to wyrke na use touching the comon profit bot [without] consent of the three estaitts'. In 1455 parliament went further, extracting a concession from James II that he and his heirs would not grant away his castles and property without parliamentary permission. The theoretical power of parliament of oversee the king had reached a late medieval peak. The Stewart monarchs, who consistently sought to increase their power over their subjects during the fifteenth century, were not likely to accept the theoretical power of parliament for long. In 1469 James III (1460-1488) passed an act through parliament that declared the king had 'fre impire' over his kingdom. 'Imperial' power meant that no external or internal authority had power in Scotland superior to the king, and it suggested tacitly that James did not accept parliament's right to overrule his decisions. Nevertheless, parliament played a key role in the crises of the king's reign, attempting to act as a check on the king's over-ambitious schemes to annex European duchies, discouraging him from raising tax, and criticising his implementation of justice. Yet he had established a political theory that would undermine parliament's theoretical powers in subsequent reigns. James IV (1488-1513) and James V (1513-1542) both
developed the imperial ideas of James III. James IV also
realised that parliament could be more trouble than it was
worth to late-medieval monarchs/ and after 1496
parliament was called less often, and played a less
significant role. Yet this was only a temporary setback, and
parliament remained central to Scottish affairs throughout
the period before 1707. Parliament for most of its history
was a powerful and influential body; in the fifteenth
century it was often obstructive to royal policies and
impossible to control. The old myth that Scotland was
incapable of producing effective governmental institutions
before 1707 is wrong. The Scottish parliament was at least
as successful as any other in Europe, and it was probably
more argumentative than most. Volume housebuilders
and architects:
|
Penny Lewis talks to Malcolm Fraser
who was applauded by last year's
Saltire housing design panel for the
remodelling and extension of a two
storey stone villa in the Grange
conservation area, Edinburgh.