The decades following the death of James V in 1542 saw a revival of the authority of parliament, with the estates reasserting themselves as a principal fount of political legitimacy for fundamental changes in religion, and for successive regimes. This article closely examines how a convention in December 1583 and parliament in May/August 1584 were instrumental in delegitimising the Ruthven regime, overturning the revolutionary politics of the previous quarter century, and briefly establishing what James VI described as a free monarchy. Despite the short-lived duration of an authoritarian government, this analysis reveals how the young James VI and his close advisors reasserted royal authority, and the crucial role of the privy council, convention, and parliament in that process. Recent historiography has tended to see James VI, at least until 1603, as open to consultation and debate in working with the Scottish parliament. This benign interpretation contrasts with the negative reputation he quickly acquired with his English parliament, and the increasingly authoritarian tactics he deployed in Scotland after 1603. Instead, the evidence of the 1584 parliament indicates that, when given the opportunity, James VI chose to allow his servants to bully and frighten the estates into submission. In reestablishing his authority in the months immediately after escaping the Ruthven regime in July 1583, the king, his councillors, and their rivals all acted cautiously and hesitantly while the outcome of the political standoff hung on a knife edge. The December 1583 convention dramatically changed the political landscape, depriving the Ruthven faction of legitimacy, while their failed rebellion in April 1584 unleashed violence, oppression, and an opportunistic power grab by the king and his councillors that ushered in a form of authoritarian monarchy resembling what James VI had so far only imagined. This article underlines the fundamental role of parliament in conferring political legitimacy, questions the young king’s agency, far-sightedness, and innate reasonableness, while arguing that this brief, authoritarian episode was more a product of pragmatism and contingency than ideology.
The Scottish philosophe Adam Ferguson’s views on the British empire—especially beyond the Atlantic context—have proved elusive. This Document draws upon a new letter of Ferguson to show that these views encompassed the British empire in India. It reveals that, in the 1770s and 1780s, he supported the continuation of this empire under the embattled East India Company. It finds that his support was rooted in a sense that Britain must compete with European rivals. Finally, it suggests that Ferguson was the source of what was to become a key defence of the Company: it was bad in theory but justified by experience.
This article reconstructs the programme of public events led in Scotland over the course of 1579 by the widow and heir of John Stewart, fourth earl of Atholl, in an attempt to secure justice for his alleged death by poisoning. It argues that Margaret Fleming, the earl's widow, chose a strategy of public performance, petitioning and spectacle to do this. The use of performance in this way is an overlooked means by which justice was sought within the context of Scotland's endemic culture of kin-based feuding. This offers an additional perspective to established historiography on bloodfeud in Scotland, which has tended to focus on the use of violence as the central tool for resolution and on the private and public legal processes used to mediate feuds. The article also provides a range of important new evidence relating to unscripted and processional performance in early modern Scotland, which highlights cultural continuities with death-rites in the early modern period across Europe.
Decades before George IV's highly publicised and 'tartanised' visit to Edinburgh in 1822, Jane, duchess of Gordon played an important role in making Scottish culture desirable to London's high society. Using her position as a successful political hostess for members of the government of William Pitt the Younger, Jane publicly supported and patronised Scottish arts and culture, including music, dance and clothing. In addition to making Scottish culture fashionable in the Ton, Jane used her visible social position to showcase both her loyalty to the Hanoverian monarchy and her passion for her homeland, thus demonstrating that Scottish identity could fit comfortably within an evolving model of British national identity. This article argues that the duchess of Gordon contributed to the ongoing reshaping of Scottish identity in the later Georgian period, from a symbol of Jacobitism and rebellion to one of loyalty and romanticism. Best known as an early patroness of Robert Burns, Jane's impact on the development and expression of Scottish national identity has been largely overlooked by historians. Yet she stands as a significant example of the soft power exercised by elite women in the political and cultural realms of Georgian Britain.
At the start of the twentieth century, hundreds of South Asian students arrived each year in Edinburgh. Although a small, middle-class, transient body, these students constituted one of the largest South Asian communities in Scotland for several decades and provide a crucial insight into the history of Edinburgh as an imperial space. Socially and politically, they came together in one of the country's most militant student organisations, the Edinburgh Indian Association (EIA). After its formation in 1883, the EIA quickly accrued a dedicated membership, considerable funds and a clubhouse at 11 George Square, organising important debates, socials and protests. Acting as a fulcrum of local anti-colonial politics, the EIA contested racist restrictions in university halls, housing, clubs and cafes from 1905, and focused considerable energy on the issue of accommodation, both in terms of the 'digs' where students stayed and the broader social attitudes of the Scots they encountered. Significantly, as tensions around class, race and gender heightened again in the interwar period, EIA members also helped re-fashion what it meant to be cosmopolitan in Edinburgh. Rejecting a pro-imperial, male-dominated, middle-class egalitarianism, the EIA espoused a more inclusive worldliness that encompassed women and workers, and tried to break free from colonial hierarchies and prejudices.
