Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture

By Arthur Williamson

This book deals with the problem of Scottish identity within the British context in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On James VI’s succession to the English throne in 1603 the Scots were troubled at the prospect of Scotland’s nationhood being absorbed by a supremely confident and intolerant England. Their strategic response was to develop a self-conscious attention to Scotland’s past.

The non-institutionalised nature of Scottish society made it difficult for the Scots to produce a long and respectable history to vie with England’s much-vaunted and impressive pedigree. The idea that the Scots seized on to define and validate their identity was that of the covenant with God – and this had profound and far-reaching results.

This original and stimulating book provides a valuable contribution to the understanding of the processes of secularisation in early modern Europe, and indicates the significant ways in which the Scottish experience differed from that of England. It therefore provides a useful corrective to an Anglocentric interpretation of ‘Britain’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Donald
• Release date: Jan 24, 2004
• ISBN: 9781788854344

Book preview

Scottish National Consciousness

in the Age of James VI

O! this faire world without the world, no doubt,

Which Neptune strongly guards with liquid bands,

As aptest so to rule the Realmes about,

She by her selfe (as most Majesticke) stands,

Thence (the worlds Mistris) to give judgement out,

With full authority for other Lands,

Which on the Seas would gaze attending still,

By wind-wing’d Messengers their Soveraignes will.

—Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling

I may say, as a Scotishman to you as a Scotishman, and I trust not without some regarde unto your native countrie … these maters of alteratioun of discipline I take to be verie unprofitablie handled for this countrie of Scotland, more unprofitablie to be prosecuted, and most unprofitablie of all to be effectuated, as a verie step which can hardlie … but come to a preeminence of that other countrie beyond it, yea, a tyrannizing over it.

— David Hume of Godscroft

Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI:

The Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Public Culture

---

ARTHUR H. WILLIAMSON

Department of History, New York University

For the Memory of MBW

This eBook was published in Great Britain in 2021 by John Donald,

an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 1979 by John Donald

Copyright © Arthur H. Williamson, 1979

eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 434 4

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The right of Arthur H. Williamson to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1 FROM ELECTION TO TYPOLOGY

i.The Marian Exiles in Scotland

ii.The Pattern of the Scottish Apocalyptic

iii.The Moral Ambiguities of the Scottish Reformation and the Drift toward Typology

2 THE FAILURE OF ANTICHRIST AND THE EMERGENCE OF SATAN

3 COVENANT, CODIFICATION, AND UNION

4 A PRESBYTERIAN HUMANISM: PATRIOTISM VERSUS THE APOCALYPSE

5 ‘THE GOOD PATRIOT’ AND THE SEARCH FOR A SCOTTISH PAST

i.Greater Britain: From Major to Maxwell

ii.George Buchanan and the Retreat from ‘Britain’

6 GEORGE BUCHANAN’S SCOTTISH CONTEXT

i.David Chambers and ‘La Recherche des Singularitez plus remarquables concernant l’estat d’Escosse’

ii.The Character of Scottish Politics

7 EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION: THE NATIONAL COVENANT OF 1638

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Introduction

‘There is none, neither old nor young, neither learned nor unlearned, but he has heard of Antichrist.’

— John Jewel

STUDY of the Scottish past has frequently followed well marked lines of inquiry. Partisan interest has insured that nowhere have traditional formulations prescribed the structure of investigation more resolutely and enduringly than in the Reformation era. The meaning of the Negative Confession long continued to be disputed within terms — and for purposes — very largely like those out of which the issue first arose nearly four centuries ago. The no less partisan dispute about Knox’s ultimate ecclesiology has persisted until even more recently. This essay constitutes an attempt to broaden the approach to early modern Scotland. Focusing on the decades straddling the union of crowns, it seeks to examine the ways in which the Scottish people developed vocabularies for speaking of themselves either as Scots or as members of a larger ‘British’ order. The essay concerns, then, the modes by which Scotsmen conceived of themselves as social beings, the values and implications attached to the kind of mode adopted, and the tensions within Scottish culture which made choice necessary and articulate. Perhaps such an approach can prove more useful than questions which — after a point — have little beyond their longevity to recommend them.

Any significant reformer in any age must sooner or later confront the question: why does the contradiction exist between how things are and how they ought to be? Phrased differently the question might run: how is it that things went wrong? Still another variant might be: why is it that you, unlike others before you, have perceived and are properly responding to the wrongs that require remedy? How have you become wiser than your ancestors? The religious reformers of the 16th century met that kind of question and the vast theological issues linked with it by historicizing the problem. The sacred prophecies in scripture were crucial in providing the scheme for formulating such a response. For the prophets and apostles, it turned out, had foretold the triumph of the papacy; so too in the most spectacular son-et-lumière imagery had they told of its subsequent defeat, destruction and judgement. This highly historical framework involved more complex consequences than might at first be expected. By responding to the problem historically, the reformers’ necessary emphasis on time undercut the medieval concept of the church as a largely timeless institution whose sacraments ceaselessly repeated the moment of Christ’s sacrifice. At once the underpinnings of the medieval church, the theology together with the scholastic apparatus which so powerfully supported it, were similarly disturbed. For the reformers the past assumed new importance and came to be witnessed with fresh eyes in the cultures where they triumphed. Time and the prophetic became central to the 16th century as men collated the past with scriptural symbol and thereby re-oriented the foundations of Western thinking. This time-dominated, approach of the religion of the Word succeeded in merging the sacred drama, described most notably in Revelation, both with humanist techniques of historical analysis and with an historicized understanding of the Nazarene’s sacrifice. These perceptions would form the essential critique of the religion of the Mass.

Prophecy therefore acquired a new, indeed striking prominence in the period of the Reformation. Appeals had been made to prophetic history before this time, and men had earlier argued that the Roman church was an apostate and not the culmination of the church’s experience on earth, but not since the earliest centuries of Christianity had this mode of thought so dominated mainstream society. For John Bale, that key theoretician of the English Reformation, the book of Revelation embodied the sum of scripture: ‘not one necessary point of belief is in all the other scriptures, that is not here also in one place or another.’ ‘He that knoweth not this book, knoweth not the church whereof he is a member.’ John Jewel, a figure still more decisive in shaping the Elizabethan regime, believed that Christian prophecies spoke so peculiarly to his own day that they were as if ‘purposely written for us’. Such were the men who defined orthodoxy at the outset of Elizabeth’s reign. In this respect they were characteristic of a great many reformers and of their age.

However, as a number of modern observers have recognized and described, the English reformers possessed more than a generalized interest in the sacred drama. Highly politicized theoreticians rather than systematic theologians, they found the Christian apocalypse speaking directly to English society in strikingly specific ways. For men like Bale, Jewel and others — and most outstandingly John Foxe — English experience came to appear at the core of the narrative of sacred time, and they proposed an imperial vision within these terms which has permanently transformed English culture. Such a vision was made possible and persuasive by the character of the English institutional context. Thus, despite their profound urge to reform, to institute discipline, to transform morals, to realize true Christianity and found the truly Christian society, the English reformers discovered the apocalyptic critique of the status quo to be in many ways integrative and affirming of native institutions. That the Reformation in the English-speaking world found itself so little given to theology as to produce a theologian of European stature — William Perkins — only in the last decade of the century may strike some as an indication of political health. It manifestly indicates the commitments of those who built the Protestant order.

But, in at least some sense of the term, the ‘English-speaking world’ extended beyond the kingdom of England. The kingdom of Scotland fell heir to many of these ideas — especially through the work of the great Anglo-Scot, John Knox, and his associates. Still, such ideas could hardly be transported unaltered into the Scottish environment, for Scottish institutions were not such as to allow for a national past portrayed within these terms. If England’s destiny might manifest itself as a continuity of election visibly operating in world history, the Scots could construct no comparable perception of political and cultural autonomy. Rather, a ‘British’ orientation was strongly encouraged which looked to a broadened imperial monarchy — potentially as pregnant with English historical assumptions as with apocalyptic portent. This line of thinking, with its royalism and apocalypticism, could prove powerfully attractive to many Scots — and perhaps never more so than to King James VI.

And yet not all Scots would agree. John Napier’s critique of the Foxian imperial vision precluded the kind of politics it implied and thereby identified different loci of power and authority. The consequences of such a step could prove highly complex. For in so doing Scotsmen were challenged to devise drastically different — and potentially radical — modes of conceptualizing Scottish society. Only with some difficulty could an autonomous Scotland appear as the special theater of the historical redemption. This circumstance would in turn make itself felt in the daily world of Scottish political life. Events there might well appear less momentous if only because it was less than self-evident that Scotland, in itself, was possessed of a unique cosmic significance or peculiarly engaged in a world mission. At the same time and for the same underlying reasons Scotland was less obviously susceptible to the legal traditionalism so characteristic of England. Scottish institutional development, being much more ad hoc and less clearly established than in other realms, insured that the definitions of formal law were far from coterminous with Scotsmen’s understanding of the public order. A number of far-reaching consequences issued from this situation. With this kind of emphasis Scottish politics might assume a more civic character, and Scots might lean heavily upon humanistic learning and models. The problem of instability — apparent enough to any participant in 16th century Scottish politics – might also require a dynamic response. In the specifically Scottish context men might seek a massive re-organization of the diverse elements comprising Scottish experience. Scottish life and institutions might require establishment and integration in a far more active manner than would appear congenial in the highly traditional world of the south.

If vocabularies of self-creation and vocabularies derived from humanism then spoke to the Scottish context with dramatic cogency, we might expect that climate to have proven one encouraging to innovation. In the following pages will appear indications that, at moments, it did so indeed. Nonetheless the general picture which emerges is one of ambivalence, an ongoing tension between an imperial motivation and an urge to the referents of autonomy. The following essay suggests that the tension forms an important matrix for understanding Scottish political culture.

To discuss the impulses which encouraged Scotsmen to think of themselves in terms of autonomy or to think of themselves as Britons — and, still more, to propose these conflicting impulses as central features of Scottish politics — is inescapably to speak to the present. No such intention informed my concern when I first undertook this research for my doctoral thesis some years ago. Whether or not this ambivalence within Scottish self-consciousness remains with us in some form today is a matter about which I am not fully confident. Certainly this much is unarguable: the prevailing ethos in British politics, even for much of the left — Burkean conservatism — derived from distinctly English experience. From a great many perspectives this ethos has resulted in an impoverished, conservative notion of ‘Britain’.

This book, like a great many appearing these days, owes an enormous amount to the thinking of Professor J. G. A. Pocock. Mine, however, involves a vast personal debt as well. What follows would be unimaginable without The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: at the same time it would hardly be any more imaginable without John Pocock’s consistent encouragement. In addition, I was much helped as a graduate student by Professor Gordon Donaldson and Mr Edward Cowan of Edinburgh University. Without the help of both these scholars it is difficult to see how I could have progressed very far at all with my dissertation. I have also been much encouraged by the kindness of many scholars at universities both in Britain and America. In addition, I owe yet a further debt to Mr Peter Basquin and Mr David Storry. My debt to my wife Liz in this project is so varied and significant as to be difficult to articulate. Whether the book in fact redeems any of these debts remains as yet problematic.

1

From Election To Typology

Wherefore Constantine, most faithful emperor of the Romans, when he convoked the council of priests at Nicaea, neither dared to take the chief place for himself nor even to sit among the presbyters, but chose the hindmost seat.

—John of Salisbury, Policraticus

It would certainly appear—and it is something of an historical curiosity — that whereas the Presbyterian programme was formulated in England before it was in Scotland, on the other hand the emergence in Scotland of a claim for jure divino episcopacy preceded its emergence in England.

—Gordon Donaldson, The Scottish Reformation.

i.  The Marian Exiles in Scotland

THE Marian exiles, like a great many other 16th century reformers, emphatically believed that they were living in ‘the latter days’ of the world and that their revolt from the Roman church enacted the Christian eschatology portrayed at length in Daniel and Revelation. The unprecedented upheaval in which they were participating was thus inspired by divine intention and was certain to lead to a worldwide reformation. The true Christian religion would be instituted: sound doctrine and the preaching of the gospel would flourish. In the same process, Antichrist, the institutionalized agency of evil seen as the papacy and the Turkish Empire, would be destroyed. They believed this cataclysmic change would be attended by a visible improvement in manners and morals, and, eventually, by the conversion of the Jews. These events would be followed after a relatively short though unspecified time by the apotheosis of the true church and the last judgement in which the final retribution of all evil, both its source and members, would occur. Individual reformers might emphasize different aspects of these expectations at varying moments. They might stress the role of divine or of human agency. They might see these events occupying a relatively extended period; they might see them as dramatically telescoped. But the basic scenario enjoyed remarkably wide acceptance and exercised enormous influence on people’s public self-consciousness.

Moreover, it had long been widely believed — though the belief did not derive from purely scriptural prophecy — that the last age of the world would be dominated by a great emperor. And, many Protestants were inclined to merge this prophecy with their understanding of the Christian eschatology: the nations of the earth would not be overrun by yet one more world ruler like the pope and the Turk, but there would indeed be a great secular ruler, a godly prince, who would prove instrumental in protecting the true churches against their great adversaries and in bringing about reformation.¹ In effect, this idea of a chosen prince could make a much heightened national consciousness compatible with the universal assertions of orthodox Christianity.

It is perhaps only natural that these two sorts of expectation should fuse in the minds of so many reformers. After all, conversion had historically been effected by kings, and prophets — which the reformers believed themselves to be — had usually addressed their prophecies to monarchs. But, far more than that, such expectations would necessarily link with the imperial, caesaropapal claims made by any prince, and most notably Henry VIII, when he denied an autonomous and international authority. Empire and apocalypse were consequently but two aspects of one system of ideas for a great many Protestants. The pattern — one might almost say the type — for this latter-day emperor had been set out, at least in general terms, by that godly emperor Constantine the Great. Constantine had destroyed Satan’s public kingdom by ending the ‘ethnic’ Roman emperors and the persecution of the faith. Of course, this achievement was not permanent. But it had initiated a golden period for the church, and, in addition, Satan was restrained for a millennium from launching his full fury. Reformers stressed, moreover, that this achievement resulted directly from Constantine’s active efforts. Not only had the emperor summoned the Council of Nicaea which formally established the Christian Church, but, as John Aylmer emphasized, he had also served as the ‘moderator’ in that assembly. In effect, the assembly was no more than the ecclesiastical branch of his government.² But if such ideas became commonplace among many reformers (though certainly not all), Englishmen made distinguished use of them. For the Marian exiles, this fusion had occurred very quickly, and they were singularly successful in identifying Elizabeth I as the prophesied godly emperor who would bring about the reformation. As a latter-day Constantine, Elizabeth would reform England, and under English leadership the reformation would be completed throughout the world.

But, as Professor Haller has made clear, more was required for a vision of England as divinely elected to perform this great work than the fortuitous circumstances of having a monarch apparently committed to the reformed cause. Such a vision necessitated an institutional rather than a personal claim; an assertion of the Queen’s headship of an English Empire with an English Church as a part of that empire was not a typical statement but an historical one. Thus, the famous imperial claim in the preamble to the Henrician act in restraint of appeals rested upon ‘divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles’. To make Elizabeth the new Constantine, the English reformers were therefore required to demonstrate two things: first, that England had been an empire from the earliest times and had never lost that status; second, that this empire bore a peculiar relation to sacred prophecy. Its institutional continuity must indicate its unique destiny in sacred history; an undisrupted institutional integrity would not only be happy but purposeful in the fullest possible sense. The reformers’ successful efforts to do this culminated in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments … which, as Haller has described, interwove the sacred drama with the narrative of the English past. The progress of the English Reformation under Henry, Edward, and now Elizabeth, as well as its trials under Mary, were but the unfolding of a process begun far earlier in the English past and predicted earlier still in sacred writ. The story of the English Church — from its origins in apostolic times, through the struggle against the rising of Antichrist in the form of the Hildebrandine popes, through to the period of confrontation between Christ and Antichrist which began about the time of Wycliff and continued via the Lollards to the present events in the 16th century — was nothing less than the story embodied in the sacred drama itself. But as the English Church was only a part of the imperial English constitution, so too its story was only part of the larger story of England’s struggle to maintain her liberties against the same sinister forces. No individual moment or individual person in the English past, neither its origins nor any particular event thereafter, guaranteed England’s autonomous status as an empire or her appointed role. Rather it was England’s institutional continuity which made a continuity of election appear manifest.

Dr. Lamont has examined the enormous impact this apocalyptic had upon English piety and politics.³ Its effects, however, were felt elsewhere as well, for not all the men whose ideas contributed to its formulation settled in England with Elizabeth’s accession. Some of the Marian exiles — the must notable being John Knox — returned to Scotland. How would this mode of thinking operate there? It will be the objective of the first part of this chapter to show how Know tried — and failed — to perform a similar service for the Scottish Reformation, and, perhaps even more important, to examine the perspective from which he undertook that task. That Knox’s ideas and intentions were broadly of a piece with those of the purely English reformers is evident enough. In the liturgical troubles at Frankfurt, Knox was supported by a great many of the English exiles, including John Foxe. The victory of their opponents prompted both men to depart the town; they were always close personal friends.⁴ Their common experience in the Edwardian church and in exile ensured they shared the same concept of the godly prince who would institute the church and effect reformation against the papacy. Sacred prophecy was then a central ingredient in Knox’s thinking, no less than in that of his English comrades. Knox based his first and, in his own view, best remembered sermon upon Daniel and Revelation; from the outset his concern went beyond the elimination of abuses and the implementation of ‘discipline’ to the destruction of Antichrist. Sermons of a similar character closed his career.⁵ Like his English associates, he believed himself a prophet expounding the meaning of events in terms of sacred prophecy. The martyrdom of the reformed bishops Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer made a profound impact upon Knox, no less than the other exiles; like the other exiles, Knox felt a deep need to witness and record at length the particulars of all the Marian victims.⁶ In common with the exiles and, indeed, many reformers, Knox appears to have intended writing a documentary history of the early church — thereby locating and, presumably, elucidating the rise of Antichrist.⁷ No less typically, Knox was familar with the prophecies and the controversial potential in the writings of the medieval abbot and prophet Joachim of Fiore — a man Knox saw as providentially raised up to admonish his age (and those succeeding) of its defection from the true church.⁸ If Knox is characteristically known as the articulator of prophecy in its narrower and more literal sense of propheteia — the announcement of divine will — the programmatic nature of the divine intelligence operating within the entire course of time still remains a significant feature of the man’s thought. It is never far beneath the surface of nearly all his major writings, and to lose sight of it is to lose sight of their author. The duties of the watchtower involved the workings of divine providence not merely in day-to-day events, transgression followed by retribution, but in the prophesied course of human events in the latter days.

As scholars have frequently noticed, Knox’s History began as a justification for the overthrow of the Queen Regent, but its purpose was soon broadened. In the mid-1560s—perhaps significantly, at the time of the first sectarian troubles in England — Knox added Book IV, whose preface contains his famous patriotic outburst where he claimed the Scottish church to be the purest and best reformed of any Protestant church. At about the same time or shortly thereafter, he undertook Book I, in which be began to project a history of the Scottish struggle against Antichrist.⁹ The sources of this project are evident: he began borrowing extracts about Scottish martyrs from Foxe’s ‘notable work’. Also like Foxe, Knox set in search after Scottish Lollards and for evidence of earlier persecution of Scottish saints. And yet, Knox’s work parallels only the embryonic stages of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Knox quite evidently found that the Scottish past showed little indication of the progressive realization of sacred prophecy, and that it could not be treated in the same way the English reformers were coming to treat their nation’s history. The causes of Knox’s plight are not at first obvious. There existed no shortage of Scottish chronicles or of myths about Scottish origins; the wars of independence ensured they could be found in abundance. Nor did Knox simply confront a martyr shortage. Though it is true that the confessional struggle in Scotland was less bloody than in England, the real problem, especially in the pre-Reformation period, was finding the material out of which one might cull plausible candidates. Despite assistance from various quarters, Knox’s researches produced only one major document relating to Scottish Lollardy, while Foxe could probe episcopal registers rich with information.¹⁰ The scattering of Scottish records which had occurred at moments of civil war and foreign invasion no doubt aggravated Knox’s difficulties, but clearly the problem went deeper than that. He confronted absence far more than loss. So too, however momentous a Protestant prince might have been for the polity of a reformed Scottish church, such a prince would not have eased Knox’s task. The problem rather derived from the profound differences which existed between English and Scottish institutions.

Haller has heavily underscored the fact that the Marian exiles were ‘high ranking members of a displaced hierarchy and intellectual class cherishing a real prospect of returning by legitimate means to legitimate power.¹¹ As we have been suggesting, legitimate means and legitimate power would signify more than simply an imperial monarchy. A latter-day Constantine would have to be a legitimate prince, one legitimated not only by his godliness, but in every way. Otherwise, any man who seized power and promised reformation could claim to be the godly prince. Much later, James VI and I made this clear when he replied to the presbyterian objection that his imperial pretensions (and indeed the Constantinian model) threatened to overthrow the church as well as endanger the Scottish commonwealth: the king’s authority as a ‘Christian king’ and thus his right to call church councils within his own realm was far more firmly based than that which ‘anie usurping Emperor could claim over the face of the whole earth’.¹² But if a messianic emperor whose authority was not securely located within the context of a similarily endowed empire might prove highly dangerous, it would also prove a difficult matter indeed to create an empire ex nihilo. However much the reformers were obsessed with the idea of a messianic prince, such a prince could not be divorced from the traditional means of legitimation. For medieval men there had been two such means for describing their society and explaining why it ought to be that way: these were scholastic reasoning and the experience which was embodied in custom.¹³ Scholastic reasoning involved deductions from universal principles inherent in both nature and civil society, and clearly could not be the property of any particular nation. But experience was unique, for, as the English reformers knew, it was nothing else but the common patterns of behavior built up over time and formalized as the institutions described by the English common law. And, as many Englishmen were increasingly persuaded, the most unique aspect of their law as a whole was its antiquity, its longevity, its continuity, and, in so saying, its autonomy. This remarkably insular view of England — and this really did constitute England’s uniqueness — was possible because English law had long been so effectively systematized and unified that it could be understood purely in its own terms, while it also defined English behavior virtually everywhere in the realm.¹⁴ To think of England was ultimately to think of its law, and to think of its law was inherently to think of its autonomous, unchanging continuity throughout the past. This, rather than its fabulous history written in chronicles, made England an empire and assured its status as the elect nation.

Thus, long before Foxe’s book reached its final form, John Aylmer could exclaim simply and with staggering self-confidence that ‘God is English’.¹⁵ In 1559 Aylmer could still think in terms of two international jurisdictions, referents some of his generation might never fully lose sight of. Yet in his thinking and that of his colleagues, the leadership of the reformed cause and the enactment of sacred prophecy were increasingly identified with the English nation and its history. Such remarkable assurance in this did not derive from any event taking place in 1558 or 1559 — not Elizabeth’s accession or any particular event, or even a single series of events — but rather from a continuity of events which reached far back into the English past and which were closely associated with the operation of English institutions.¹⁶ So, too, the English reformers’ confidence that Elizabeth was the new Constantine who would bring reformation to England rested less on what she actually did than on her location in history. Thus, the belief that England was the elect nation which would realize world reformation and prophecy did not so greatly rely upon what happened immediately in world affairs as upon an understanding of the past. A continuity of election was then predicated on a presumed institutional and legal continuity. Churchmen and lawyers thereby became intellectual allies, whose shared assumptions derived from the fact that there existed a massive body of legal record.¹⁷

Unlike England, Scotland was not so highly institutionalized as to possess a comparable body of record. This lack confronted Knox with a double task. He had not only to see an apocalyptic significance in the Scottish past, but he also had to build the basis by which Scottish institutional continuity could be presumed. In effect, he had to do what Scots lawyers were only beginning to do: to construct an adequate and cohesive body of Scottish record. Knox would spend the rest of his days in Scotland — and the bulk of his history — compiling just such a record, perforce concentrating upon recent and current events. Perhaps not surprisingly, Knox had the help of lawyers in locating documents and state papers.¹⁸ He was, however, the first Scottish reformer to undertake this sort of project, though by no means the last, for the collecting of contemporary documents would quickly become a presbyterian passion. Given the limitations he encountered, it seems doubtful whether Knox seriously intended to propose an imperial Scotland as a full Scottish alternative to the thinking of his former colleagues now south of the border. Far likelier, he sought no more than to conceptualize a Scottish history which complemented English experience and linked a Scottish past to the contours of the English vision. But, whatever his intention, his work, with its overwhelming emphasis on contemporary material, had the effect of helping to infuse Scottish reformers with a present-mindedness not shared by their English brethren. In time, the consequences would prove enormous, for, clearly, a society whose institutions were built in this way would differ radically from English society.

Still, the Marian exiles in Scotland were by no means operating within a social vacuum. If Scots law was underdeveloped and unsystematized, it also had to coexist with a body of unwritten traditions which were neither feudal in origin nor in any sense the law of the land. Those who appealed to these traditions — and figures as different as the minister James Melville and Francis Stewart, Earl of Bothwell, did so — occasionally referred to them by the undistinguishing name ‘lovable custom’. This non-legal ‘custom’ ascribed near-kingly responsibilities to the nobility, especially in time of grave crisis to the Scottish commonwealth. Behind it stood an often vague system of kin-obligations and family alliances. This body of tradition, however ill-defined, could constitute the decisive feature of public self-consciousness for many Scotsmen; in some areas, it seems, any other kind of obligation was largely unknown. Thus, as Englishmen came to devise parliamentary histories which served as general histories of England, so Scots wrote histories of great families as general histories of Scotland. The public memory of the Douglases in Scotland and the English memory of the Percies varied accordingly. Though equally preposterous, the English view of the past assumed a more closely institutional character than did the Scottish, and relied upon the prescriptive evidence of record. Scottish historical consciousness focused less upon institutions as such than upon the informal interaction between them and could at times rely upon purely oral tradition ‘according to our folk’.¹⁹

It may well be this coexistence between an underdeveloped feudal law and a tradition which was not law at all that lay behind the severe Scottish distinction between a written statute and a received custom which had the force of law. Statutes enacted in the Scottish parliament frequently fell into desuetude immediately upon enactment, and, indeed, those who wrote such statutes expected no differently. Such ‘enactments’ were often regarded as no more than informal statements of a particular government’s aspirations, not at all formal enough to be the basis of litigation. Statutes only became binding after they had become accepted as part of the patchwork of Scottish practices and reinforced as a reality in Scottish life by long usage. Thus, Scots lawyers long recognised the