The
Parliament of Scotland, officially the
Estates of Parliament, was the
legislature of the
Kingdom of Scotland.
The unicameral parliament
of Scotland is first found on record during the early thirteenth
century, and the first meeting for which reliable evidence survives
(referred to, like the contemporaneous Parliament of England, as a
colloquium in the surviving
Latin records) was at Kirkliston
(a small town now on the outskirts of Edinburgh
) in 1235, during the reign of Alexander II of
Scotland.
The parliament, which is also referred to as the
Estates of
Scotland, the
Three Estates ( ), the
Scots Parliament or the
auld Scots
Parliament ( ), met until the
Acts of Union merged the parliament of
Scotland and the Parliament of England, creating the new
Parliament of Great Britain in
1707.
The pre-Union parliament was long portrayed as a constitutionally
defective body that acted merely as a
rubber stamp for royal decisions,
but research during the last decade has found that it played an
active role in
Scottish affairs,
and was sometimes a thorn in the side of the
Scottish crown.
Three Estates
The members were collectively referred to as the
Three
Estates ( ), or 'community of the realm' (
tres
communitates), composed of:
From the 16th century, the
second estate was reorganised
by the selection of
Shire
Commissioners: this has been argued to have created a
fourth estate. During the 17th century, after the
Union of the Crowns, a
fifth
estate of royal office holders (see
Lord High
Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland) has also been
identified. These latter identifications remain highly
controversial among parliamentary historians. Regardless, the term
used for the assembled members continued to be 'the Three
Estates'.
A
Shire Commissioner was
the closest equivalent of the English
office of
Member of Parliament,
namely a commoner or member of the lower
nobility. Because the parliament of Scotland was
unicameral, all members sat in the same chamber, as opposed to the separate
English House of
Lords
and House of Commons
.
The Parliament also had
University constituencies. The
system was also adopted by the
Parliament of England when
James VI ascended to the English throne.
It was believed that the universities were affected by the
decisions of Parliament and ought therefore to have representation
in it.
This continued in the Parliament of Great Britain
after 1707 and the Parliament of
the United Kingdom
until 1950; in the Republic of Ireland
, constituencies for Trinity College, Dublin and
the National
University of Ireland still elect representatives — until 1937
these representatives were elected to , subsequently to Seanad Éireann.
Origins
From the time of
Cináed I,
the Scottish
kingdom of
Alba was ruled by chieftains and
petty kings under the
suzerainty of a
High
King, all offices being filled through selection by an
assembly under a system known as
tanistry which combined a
hereditary element with the consent of those
ruled. Usually the candidate was nominated by the current office
holder on the approach of death, and his heir-elect was known as
the tanist, from the
Scottish
Gaelic tànaiste: second. After
Macbeth was overthrown by
Máel Coluim III in 1057,
under the influence of Norman settlers in Scotland,
primogeniture was adopted as the means of
succession in Scotland as in much of Western Europe. These early
assemblies cannot be considered 'parliaments' in the later sense of
the word, and were entirely separate from the later,
Norman-influenced, institution.
The Scottish parliament evolved during the
Middle Ages from the
King's Council of Bishops
and Earls. It is perhaps first identifiable as a parliament in
1235, described as a ‘colloquium’ and already with a political and
judicial role. By the early fourteenth century, the attendance of
knights and
freeholders had become important, and from 1326
burgh commissioners attended. Consisting of
The Three Estates; of
clerics, lay
tenant-in-chief and burgh
commissioners sitting in a single chamber, the Scottish parliament
acquired significant powers over particular issues. Most obviously
it was needed for consent for taxation (although taxation was only
raised irregularly in Scotland in the medieval period), but it also
had a strong influence over justice, foreign policy, war, and all
manner of other legislation, whether political,
ecclesiastical, social or economic.
Parliamentary business was also carried out by ‘sister’
institutions, before c. 1500 by
General Council and thereafter
by the
Convention of
Estates. These could carry out much business also dealt with by
Parliament—taxation, legislation and policy-making—but lacked the
ultimate authority of a full parliament. The Scottish parliament
met in a number of different locations throughout its history.
In
addition to Edinburgh, meetings were held in Perth
, Stirling
, St Andrews
, Dundee
, Linlithgow
, Dunfermline
, Glasgow
, Aberdeen
, Inverness
and Berwick-upon-Tweed
.
Lords of the Articles
From the early 1450s until 1690, a great deal of the legislative
business of the Scottish Parliament was usually carried out by a
parliamentary committee known as the ‘Lords of the Articles’. This
was a committee chosen by the three estates to draft legislation
which was then presented to the full assembly to be confirmed. In
the past, historians have been particularly critical of this body,
claiming that it quickly came to be dominated by royal nominees,
thus undermining the power of the full assembly. Recent research
suggests that this was far from always being the case. Indeed, in
March 1482, the committee was taken over by men shortly to be
involved in a coup d’etat against the King and his government. On
other occasions the committee was so large that it could hardly
have been easier to control than the full assembly.
More generally, the
committee was a pragmatic means to delegate the complicated
drafting of acts to those members of parliament skilled in law and
letters — not unlike a modern select committee of
the UK
parliament
— while the
right to confirm the act remained with the full assembly of three
estates.
Crown
At various points in its history, the Scottish Parliament was able
to exert considerable influence over the Crown. This should not be
viewed as a slow rise from parliamentary weakness in 1235 to
strength in the seventeenth century, but rather a situation where
in particular decades or sessions between the thirteenth and
seventeenth century, parliament became particularly able to
influence the Crown, while at other points that ability was more
limited. As early as the reign of
David II, parliament was able to
prevent him pursuing his policy of a union of the crowns with
England, while the fifteenth-century Stewart monarchs were
consistently influenced by a prolonged period of parliamentary
strength. Reverses to this situation have been argued to have
occurred in the early sixteenth century and under
James VI and
Charles I, but in the seventeenth
century, even after the Restoration, parliament was able to remove
the clergy's right to attend in 1689 and abolish the Lords of the
Articles in 1690, thereby limiting royal power. Parliament's
strength was such that the Crown turned to corruption and political
management to undermine its autonomy in the latter period.
Nonetheless, the period from 1690 to 1707 was one in which
political "parties" and alliances were formed within parliament in
a maturing atmosphere of rigorous debate. The disputes over the
English
Act of Settlement
1701, the Scottish
Act of
Security, and the English
Alien Act
1705 showed that both sides were prepared to take considered
yet considerable risks in their relationships.
History
Parliament before 1400
Between 1235 and 1286, little can be told with certainty about
Parliament's function, but it appears to have had a judicial and
political role which was well established by the end of the
century. With the death of
Alexander III, Scotland found
itself without an adult monarch, and in this situation, Parliament
seems to have become more prominent as a means to give added
legitimacy to the Council of Guardians who ran the country. By the
reign of
John Balliol
(1292-96), Parliament was well established, and Balliol attempted
to use it as a means to withstand the encroachments of his
overlord,
Edward I of England.
With his deposition in 1296, Parliament temporarily became less
prominent, but it was again held frequently by
King Robert Bruce after 1309. During
his reign some of the most important documents made by the King and
community of the realm were
made in Parliament — for instance the 1309–1310
Declaration of the Clergy —
although the extent to which the 'community' was able to speak
independently of the King is a matter of debate.
By the reign of
David II, the
'three estates' (a phrase that replaced 'community of the realm' at
this time) in Parliament were certainly able to oppose the King
when necessary. Most notably, David was repeatedly prevented from
accepting an English succession to the throne by Parliament. During
the reigns of
Robert II and
Robert III, Parliament
appears to have been held less often, and royal power in that
period also declined, but the institution returned to prominence,
and arguably enjoyed its greatest period of power over the Crown
after the return of
James I from
English captivity in 1424.
15th century
After 1424, Parliament was often willing to defy the King — it was
far from being simply a ‘rubber stamp’ of royal decisions. During
the fifteenth century, Parliament was called far more often than,
for instance, the
English
Parliament — on average over once a year — a fact that both
reflected and augmented its influence. It repeatedly opposed
James I’s (1424–1437) requests
for taxation to pay an English ransom in the 1420s, and was openly
hostile to
James III
(1460–1488) in the 1470s and early 1480s. In 1431, Parliament
granted a tax to James I for a campaign in the
Highlands on the condition that it be
kept in a locked chest under the keepership of figures deeply out
of favour with the King. In 1436, there was even an attempt made to
arrest the King 'in the name of the three estates'. Between October
1479 and March 1482, Parliament was conclusively out of the control
of
James III. It refused to
forfeit his brother, the
Duke of Albany,
despite a royal siege of the Duke's castle, tried to prevent the
King leading his army against the English (a powerful indication of
the estates' lack of faith in their monarch), and appointed men to
the Lords of the Articles and important offices who were shortly to
remove the King from power.
James
IV (1488–1513) realised that Parliament could often create more
problems than it solved, and avoided meetings after 1509. This was
a trend seen in other European nations as monarchical power grew
stronger—for instance England under
Henry VII, France and some of the
Spanish
Cortes Generales.
16th century
During the sixteenth century, the composition of Parliament
underwent a number of significant changes and it found itself
sharing the stage with new national bodies. The emergence of the
Convention of Royal Burghs as the ‘parliament’ of Scotland’s
trading towns and the development of the Kirk’s General Assembly
after the
Reformation (1560)
meant that rival representative assemblies could bring pressure to
bear on parliament in specific areas.
Following the Reformation, laymen acquired the monasteries and
those sitting as ‘abbots’ and ‘priors’ were now, effectively, part
of the estate of nobles. The bishops continued to sit in Parliament
regardless of whether they conformed to
protestantism or not. This resulted in
pressure from the Kirk to reform ecclesiastical representation in
Parliament. Catholic clergy were excluded after 1567 but Protestant
bishops continued as the clerical estate until their abolition in
1638 when Parliament became an entirely lay assembly. An act of
1587 granted the lairds of each shire the right to send two
commissioners to every parliament. These shire commissioners
attended from 1592 onwards, although they shared one vote until
1640 when they secured a vote each. The number of burghs with the
right to send commissioners to parliament increased quite markedly
in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries until, in the
1640s, they often constituted the largest single estate in
Parliament.
The first printed edition of the legislation of the Parliament,
The New Actis and Constitutionis, was published in
Edinburgh in 1542 by the printer
Thomas Davidson under commission
from
James V.
17th century
In the second half of the sixteenth century, Parliament began to
legislate on more and more matters and there was a marked increase
in the amount of legislation it produced. During the reign of
James VI, the Lords of the
Articles came more under the influence of the crown. By 1612, they
sometimes seem to have been appointed by the Crown rather than
Parliament, and as a result the independence of parliament was
perceived by contemporaries to have been eroded. This decline was
reversed in the Covenanting period (1638–1651), when the Scottish
Parliament took control of the executive, effectively wresting
sovereignty from the King and setting many precedents for the
constitutional changes undertaken in England soon afterwards. The
Covenanting regime fell in 1651 after Scotland was invaded by
Oliver Cromwell whose
Protectorate government imposed a
brief Anglo-Scottish parliamentary union in 1657.
During this period, Parliament gained the only permanent home it
ever had.
King Charles
I ordered the construction of Parliament
Hall
, which was completed in 1639.
The Scottish Parliament returned after the Restoration of
Charles II to the throne in 1660, and
this was called the 'Drunken Parliament'.
Union with England
It is an
oversimplification to claim, as Robert
Burns did, that the Union of England and Scotland (and hence
the dissolution of the Scottish Parliament) was brought about by
the Scots
members
being "bought and
sold for English gold", but bribery and parliamentary division
combined with wider economic imperatives, partly arising from the
disaster of the Darien
Scheme
, enabled the Crown to incorporate Union with
England in the Acts of Union 1707
which brought the Parliament
of Great Britain.
Composition and procedure in the 17th century
Presidency of parliament
The office
of the presiding officer in parliament never developed into a post
similar in nature to that of the Speaker of the House of
Commons at Westminster — mainly because of parliament's
unicameral nature, which made it more like the English House of Lords. An act of 1428 which created a 'common
speaker' proved abortive, and the
chancellor remained the
presiding officer (until recently the
Lord Chancellor of Great Britain did
similarly preside over the House of Lords). In the absence of the
King after the
Union of the
Crowns in 1603, parliament was presided over by the
Lord Chancellor or the
Lord High
Commissioner.
After the Restoration, the Lord Chancellor
was made ex-officio president of the parliament (now
reflected in the Scottish Parliament
by the election of a presiding
officer), his functions including the formulation of questions
and putting them to the vote.
See also
References
Notes
- K. Brown and R. Tanner, History of the Scottish
Parliament, i, 'introduction'.
- R. Rait, 'Parliaments of Scotland' (1928)
- Brown and Tanner, passim; R. Tanner, The Late Medieval
Scottish Parliament, passim; K. Brown and A. Mann,
History of the Scottish Parliament, ii,
passim
- Tanner, Parliament, passim
- Brown and Tanner, passim; Brown and Mann, passim
- Typified by Rait, op. cit
- R. Tanner, 'The Lords of the Articles before 1542', in
Scottish Historical Review (2000)
- Brown, Mann and Tanner, History of the Scottish
Parliament, i, ii, passim.
- Brown and Tanner, History of Parliament, i,
passim
- Tanner, Late Medieval Scottish Parliament, passim
- Rait, Parliaments of Scotland
- C. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold?, passim;
Brown and Mann, History of the Scottish Parliament, ii,
passim
Bibliography
- K. M. Brown and R. J. Tanner, The History of the Scottish
Parliament volume 1: Parliament and Politics, 1235-1560
(Edinburgh, 2004)
- A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Early Parliaments in Scotland’, Scottish
Historical Review, 45 (1966)
- J. M. Goodare, ‘Parliament and Society in Scotland, 1560-1603’
(Unpublished Edinburgh University Ph.D. Thesis, 1989)
- C. Jackson, 'Restoration to Revolution: 1660-1690" in Glenn
Burgess (ed.), The New British History. Founding a
Modern State, 1603-1715, (London, 1999), pp.92–114.
- Alan R. MacDonald, ‘Ecclesiastical Representation in Parliament
in Post-Reformation Scotland: The Two Kingdoms Theory in Practice’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 50, No. 1
(1999)
- N. A. T. Macdougall, James IV (Edinburgh, 1989),
chapter 7
- "An Introduction to the pre-1707 Parliament of Scotland" (Based
on a paper to Staff Development Conference for History Teachers,
National Museum of Scotland, 25 May 2000 by Dr. Alastair Mann,
Scottish Parliament Project, University of St. Andrews).
- R. Nicholson, Scotland, the Later Middle Ages
(Edinburgh, 1974), chapter 15
- I. E. O’Brien, ‘The Scottish Parliament in the 15th and 16th
Centuries’ (Unpublished Glasgow University Ph.D. Thesis, 1980)
- R. Rait, The Parliaments of Scotland (Glasgow,
1924)
- R. J. Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament:
Politics and the Three Estates, 1424-1488 (East Linton,
2001).
- R. J. Tanner, 'The Lords of the Articles before 1540: a
reassesment', Scottish Historical Review, LXXIX (October
2000), pp. 189–212.
- R. J. Tanner, 'Outside the Acts: Perceptions of the Scottish
Parliament in Literary Sources before 1500', Scottish
Archive (October, 2000).
- R. J. Tanner, 'I Arest You, Sir, in the Name of the Three
Astattes in Perlement': the Scottish Parliament and Resistance to
the Crown in the Fifteenth Century’, in Social Attitudes and
Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton
(Sutton, 2000).
- C. S. Terry, The Scottish Parliament: its constitution and
procedure, 1603-1707 (Glasgow, 1905)
- J. R. Young, The Scottish Parliament 1639-1661
(Edinburgh, 1997)
External links
- The Records of
the Scottish Parliament, The complete acts and proceedings of
the Scottish Parliament, General Council and much other
parliamentary material from 1235 to 1707. The publication arose
from the work of The Scottish Parliament Project
- The First Scottish Parliament: the Middle Ages –
1707, Scottish
Parliament
- The Scottish Parliamentary Tradition, Scottish
Parliament
- The
Scottish Parliament Project - The Records of the Parliaments of
Scotland to 1707, University of St Andrews
- Scottish Parliament records, National
Archives of Scotland
- Scotland's powerful parliament, abstract of
The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the Three
Estates, Dr Roland Tanner, Tuckwell Press, ISBN
1-86232-174-4
- Original Scottish Parliament, The Scotsman
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