Parliament of Scotland

This article is about the pre-1707 parliament. The article on the devolved legislative body established in 1999 is at Scottish Parliament.

The Parliament of Scotland, officially the Estates of Parliament, was the legislature of the independent 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^[1].

The parliament, which is also referred to as the Estates of Scotland, the Three Estates (Scots: Thrie Estaitis), the Scots Parliament or the auld Scots Parliament (English: old), 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^[2] 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.^[3]

The Three Estates

The members were collectively referred to as the Three Estates (Middle Scots Thrie Estaitis), or 'community of the realm' (tres communitates), composed of:

the first estate of prelates (bishops and abbots)
the second estate of lairds (dukes, earls, parliamentary peers (after 1437) and lay tenants-in-chief)
the third estate of burgh commissioners (representatives chosen by the royal burghs)

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 an Dáil Éireann, 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 tenants-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.^[4] 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.^[5]

The 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.^[6] 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.^[7]

The 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.^[8]

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.^[9]

The fifteenth 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.^[10]

The sixteenth 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.^[11]

The seventeenth 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.

Union with England

It is an oversimplification to claim, as Robert Burns memorably 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.^[12]

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.

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

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

[1] K. Brown and R. Tanner, History of the Scottish Parliament, i, 'introduction'.

[2] R. Rait, 'Parliaments of Scotland' (1928)

[3] Brown and Tanner, passim; R. Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament, passim; K. Brown and A. Mann, History of the Scottish Parliament, ii, passim

[4] Tanner, Parliament, passim

[5] Brown and Tanner, passim; Brown and Mann, passim

[6] Typified by Rait, op. cit

[7] R. Tanner, 'The Lords of the Articles before 1542', in Scottish Historical Review (2000)

[8] Brown, Mann and Tanner, History of the Scottish Parliament, i, ii, passim.

[9] Brown and Tanner, History of Parliament, i, passim

[10] Tanner, Late Medieval Scottish Parliament, passim

[11] Rait, Parliaments of Scotland

[12] C. Whatley, Bought and Sold for English Gold?, passim; Brown and Mann, History of the Scottish Parliament, ii, passim

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