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Any ruler with a jot of wisdom will seek advice on and a broad consensus with the policies he is pursuing. The earlier
Scottish kings obtained their consensus by consulting a small group of advisors (usually nobles and prelates) on matters of specific policy, and a much wider group of landowners for matters of general application to the
community as a whole. Often the king would take the advice offered by his small council to he discussed (but preferably approved) by the larger one. It is in this context that the word 'parliament' (from the French
parler, to talk) first appears in Scotland in 1293. Who attended parliament? Firstly there were the nobles the great families who held their lands directly from the Crown and who were summoned individually. Secondly
there were the prelates - the bishops, abbots, priors and occasionally the lesser clergy. Scotland's first two parliaments consisted only of these two groups, but in 1326 the king (Robert I) decided to ask for a
substantial tax and for that reason ordered the burghs to send representatives to parliament. This is the first known example of both burgesses avid elected representatives being present. These three communities'-
lords, prelates and burgesses - came to be known as the Three Estates. In 1428 James I tried to extend the principle of representation to the lesser landowners of the shires and an Act was passed ordering elections of
commissioners to be held in the sheriff courts. In the event the Act was not carried out. The shires eventually gained representation to the parliament in 1594. Unlike its English counterpart, the Scottish
parliament remained throughout its history a single chamber - there was no division between Lords and Commons. In both countries, while parliament did become the chief law court, it was not the only means of
legislation. The Privy Council (which grew out of the undifferentiated Council in 1545) had astonishingly wide powers through which the king could govern by proclamation. In Scotland, there were also the General
Councils or Conventions of Estates which could be summoned. These were meetings of the three estates with a smaller membership and less formality than a parliament; they had no judicial powers but could legislate and
raise taxes. They could also be summoned at shorter notice than parliament (which required 40 days' notice) but their drawback was that they could only tackle matters for which they had been specifically summoned. Apart
from these alternative assemblies, there were other reasons why, on the whole, the Scottish parliament did not develop as an opposition force. The Scottish kings were not continually trying to raise large armies for
foreign wars, which meant that there was no need to keep raising money by taxation, thereby handing the political initiative to parliament. Moreover, the medieval Scottish monarchy generally managed to live within its
means. James I and James II did not give away the huge amounts of land they held; in fact an Act of 1455 prevented them from doing so without parliamentary consent. Thus the monarchy could live off rents and the customs
charges from trade without burdening the country with heavy taxes, so that finance was only occasionally a contentious issue. Exceptional taxation's for any financial emergency such as ransoms, royal
marriages or important embassies were always specifically negotiated with the estates. This need to secure agreement gave the Scottish parliament its strongest hand, but ironically this led to its effective emasculation
as a body of opposition. After David II was released by the Treaty of Berwick in 1357, he had to call a parliament almost every year to discuss the problems of paying his ransom. Probably to increase his chances of
getting his policy approved, he encouraged parliament to appoint a committee of around 20 prominent members from all three estates to discuss the agenda, consider petitions and prepare draft legislation for the full
parliament. Thus were born the Lords of the Articles, whom James VI and the later Stuart monarchs came to use as a tool to censor what came before parliament. This effectively prevented any tradition of aggressive
parliamentary initiative from emerging in Scotland as it did in England. It is with the return of James I from captivity in England that the real development of parliament begins. James set out quite deliberately to
revive parliament as a means of bringing the royal will to hear on his subjects. He legislated in his parliaments on a remarkable range of activities. These included not only the more obvious matters of
obeying the king's laws and not telling seditious tales, but also the provision of tree legal representation for widows, orphans and the poor, the orders that archery be practiced instead of football, that no salmon
should he caught in close season and that nests of rooks should be destroyed. This extraordinary variety can only have been the result of the king's subjects being able to petition him in parliament and to have their
requests considered by the Lords of the Articles and turned into law. During the rest of the 15th century when parliament met fairly frequently (perhaps every two years for two to three weeks), its function was to give
full public authority to the decisions of the king or, during the too frequent minorities, of the faction in power. It is striking that after James IV gathered authority in the late 1490s parliament met only twice in 15
years. During the 16th century the contrast emerges between active and effective periods of royal rule under James V and VI when fewer parliaments (well managed by the king's councilor's who sat in them) were called,
and the royal minorities and reign of Mary when the various regencies or governing cliques tended to have need of the public support and authority of parliaments, which thus met more frequently. At these times
parliament could be more vocal about the condition of the community, with which it was noticeably concerned throughout its history. This reached a new peak in 1560 when, in the absence of the monarch, it abolished the
pope's authority in Scotland and set up a Protestant church. Despite the loss of the Court as the centre of Scottish political life following the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Scottish parliament emerged
during the 17th century as a worthy alternative to, amid (during the troubles of the 1640s and 1690s) an effective check on, the absolutist tendencies of the absentee monarchy. The frequency of assemblies - on average
one full session every two years between 1603 and 1707 - enabled parliament to become established as a powerful constitutional watchdog. Its most striking feature during this time was that from a total membership of
just over 100 in the early days of the Stewarts, its numbers had grown to over 200 by the final Union session. This was partly due to the increased representation of the burghs, but mostly due to the arrival of shire
commissionaire's, authorised by an Act passed in 1587. The influence of these lairds contributed greatly to the most dramatic alteration to the Scottish parliament in its lifetime: the proscription of the clerical
estate by the revolutionary Convenanters in 1640, following their elimination of the bishops by the General Assembly Consequently, the Convenanters also succeeded in abolishing the hated Lords of the
Articles the bishops played a vital role in selecting its members. These agents of royal interference were to return with the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 but the reestablishment of Presbyterianism with the
Revolution Settlement in 1689 saw their final abolition. In fact it was the very independence shown by the liberated Scottish parliament after 1690 that brought about its end. Having pursued its own course in direct
opposition to William III's schemes of European alliances, parliament then raised the possibility of different successors to the Scottish and English thrones. At this point it became clear to the monarchy that the
system could not be allowed to continue. It had already taken the exercise of considerable influence and patronage verging on outright bribery to keep ministries favorable to the Crown in office. After the accession of
Anne in 1702, the full resources of the English treasury were mobilised to secure the passage of the Treaty of Union. And so, on 25 March 1707, the Scottish parliament voted to terminate its own existence as an
independent body. Constitutional advancement within Scotland was sacrificed to the personal pursuit of office and profit under the British Crown. In a referendum on devolution in 1997 the English government
approved the creation of a new Scottish Parliament and in 1999 Scotland officially opened Parliament again with its home in Edinburgh. The first minister of the new parliament for more than 300 years was Donald Dewar,
who sadly died in later 1999. It was a sad loss to Scotland and will be dearly missed by many. |
