The Royal Stuarts: A History of the Family That Shaped Britain Read Free Page B

established there – the Douglases, Maxwells, Johnstones, Scotts – whose loyalty to the Crown was provisional, their obedience ever uncertain. Every Stewart king, until the Union of the Crowns of 1603, had to scheme and struggle to establish his authority. Success in that struggle was never more than temporary.
    The unity of the state was merely political, neither cultural nor linguistic. Suspicion, fear and resentment divided Highland and Lowland Scotland. The fourteenth-century chronicler, John of Fordoun, 2 writing in Aberdeen, had declared that:
The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken among them, the Scottish and the Teutonic, 3 the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and the plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and outlying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilized habits, trusty, patient and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in divine worship, yet always ready to resist a wrong at the hands of their enemies. The Highlanders and peoples of the islands on the other hand are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, easy-living, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person but unsightly in dress. Hostile to the English people and language, and, owing to the diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel.
    It is scarcely necessary to remark that John of Fordoun was himself a Lowlander, one moreover who, living close to the Highland line, was even more suspicious of the mountaineers and hostile to them than those dwelling further south might be. But every medieval writer makes the same sort of distinction, John Mair 4 in the early sixteenth century writing of the ‘wild Scots’ and the ‘house-holding Scots’. For others the Highlanders were ‘the Irish’ (their language generally being called ‘Erse’) and the Lowlanders the true ‘Scots’.
    The Scotland of the early Stewarts, scarcely recovered from the destructive Wars of Independence, when the richest part of the country had been ravaged time and again by English armies, with crops ruined and towns burned, was poor and in many respects backward. Though burghs had been growing in number and, intermittently, in prosperity since the eleventh century, they mostly remained very small. There was no capital city, no Scottish equivalent of London or Paris. Edinburgh did not receive a royal charter till Robert the Bruce gave it one in 1329; there are many more ancient burghs in Scotland. It was only in the time of the later Stewarts that it became a favoured royal residence. The court itself was peripatetic; therefore the administration too, for what we should call the civil service still operated out of the king’s household. There was as yet no Scottish equivalent of the English exchequer working from a fixed base. In any case, all medieval monarchs were almost constantly on the move, because this was the only way in which they could exercise justice, and because it was easier to bring the court to food stores than to carry the food stores, in a land with few serviceable roads or navigable inland waterways, to the court. Finally, the royal revenues, drawn from the king’s own estates and from the customs duties, were always inadequate, quite insufficient to allow for the creation of a strong state – another reason why the co-operation of the nobility and the consent of the community of the realm, expressed in parliaments, were essential if government was to function at all. Parliament, known usually as ‘the Estates’, met infrequently, and its members – barons, knights, bishop, abbots and burgesses – were summoned or invited by the king rather than elected.
    This parliament, which had a judicial as well as a legislative function, was in a sense an extension of the General Council, which was composed of members of the royal family,