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Parliament and Convention
in the Personal Rule
of James V of Scotland,
1528–1542
Amy Blakeway
Parliament and Convention in the Personal Rule
of James V of Scotland, 1528–1542
 Amy Blakeway

Parliament and
Convention in the
Personal Rule of
James V of Scotland,
1528–1542
Amy Blakeway
School of History
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, Fife, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-89376-7    ISBN 978-3-030-89377-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89377-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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In memory of my father
John Graham Blakeway
1954–2002
 Acknowledgements

At its heart, this book argues that specialised and expert advice was a cen-
tral factor in governing Scotland in the reign of James V. It is therefore
fitting to first offer my heartfelt thanks to friends and colleagues who gave
their care, time and attention to reading draft chapters at various stages:
Jackson Armstrong, Paul Cavil, Mark Godfrey, Julian Goodare, Emily
Michelson, Cynthia Neville and Bess Rhodes. Counsel, of course, could
be delivered in a group as well as one-on-one, and I also owe thanks to
those who listened to earlier versions of chapters delivered as seminar or
conference papers, so thanks too to the attendees at the Edinburgh
University Scottish History Seminar I delivered in 2019, my paper at the
Scottish Legal History Group in 2019, the IHR’s Tudor-Stewart seminar
in 2017 and colleagues at the Legal Cultures Colloquium in 2020 (thanks
to Alice Taylor for inviting me to this).
I hope that whatever else people think of this book they at least see the
riches of the archival material on which it is based—even if this is compli-
cated and frustrating at times—and it is important to express my gratitude
to the staff who helped me at the National Records of Scotland, National
Library of Scotland, Aberdeen City Archives, John Gray Centre (East
Lothian Archives), A. K. Bell Library (Perth and Kinross Archives) and the
British Library. A fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for
the Advanced Studies in the Humanities and a grant from the Strathmartine
Trust made travel to these places possible. Acknowledging these debts of
course recalls another facet of James’s governance—the need for meticu-
lous record keeping, and cash to keep the show on the road.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Finally, however, my biggest thanks are owed are to my friends and

family. Just like James’s kin and household must have been his first sound-
ing boards, thank you for listening to me talk about this project and offer-
ing sympathy and solace. You know who you are—but there are three
people I need to name. Thank you Aunt Elaine for your supportive listen-
ing ear. Emma Hart and family: thank you for lending me your flat and
Oscar the cat whilst I needed the Edinburgh archives. Above all, deep,
deep thanks are owed to my mother, Christine Blakeway, who has been my
rock throughout, and who confirmed the last date I needed for this
book—the year of my father’s birth. It is to his memory this book is
dedicated.
 Conventions

All sums of money given are in £ Scots unless otherwise specified, and all
dates are in new style with the year beginning on 1 January. Original spell-
ings have been retained and contractions silently expanded.
A crown was worth £1, a ducat £2.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Council and Conventions 23

3 Conventions of the Lords, War and Wedlock: Public Or

Private Consultation? 83

4 Consultation and Access for the Third Estate139

5 Taxation and Finance177

6 Legislation, Treason and Parliament227

7 Conclusion283

Appendix A: Attendance at Conventions293

Appendix B: Repassed Legislation319

Bibliography331

Index347

xi
 Abbreviations

ACA Aberdeen City Archives

Aberd. Recs. J. Stuart (ed.), Extracts from the Council Register of the Burgh of
Aberdeen (Spalding Club, 4 vols, 1844–1872)
Actis (1542) The New actis and constitutionis of parliament maid be the rycht
excellent Prince Iames the fift kyng of Scottis (Edinburgh, 1542)
Actis (1566) The actis and constitutiounis of the realme of Scotland: maid in
Parliamentis haldin be the rycht excellent, hie and mychtie princeis
kingis James the first, secund, thrid, feird, fyft, and in tyme of
Marie now quene of Scottis, viseit, correctid, and extractit furth of
the registers by the Lordis Depute be hir Maiestieis speciall
commissioun thairto (Edinburgh, 1566)
ADCP R. K. Hannay (ed.), Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs,
1501-1554. Selections from the Acta Dominorum Concilii
introductory to the register of the Privy Council of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1932)
APS T. Thomson and C. Innes (eds), Acts of the Parliaments of
Scotland, (Edinburgh, 12 vols, 1814–75)
BL British Library, London
CSPV Rawdon Brown et al. (eds), Calendar of State Papers Relating To
English Affairs in the Archives of Venice (London, 38 vols,
1864–1947)
ECA Edinburgh City Archives
Edin. Recs. J. D. Marwick et al. (eds), Extracts from the Records of the Burgh
of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 13 vols, 1869–1967)
ER George Burnett et al. (eds), Exchequer Rolls of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 23 vols, 1878–1908)
HP Joseph Bain (ed.), Hamilton Papers (Edinburgh, 2 vols, 1890)

xiii
xiv ABBREVIATIONS

L&P J. S. Brewer (ed.), Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic, of the
reign of Henry VIII (London, 21 vols, 1862–1910)
LJV R. K. Hannay and Denis Hay (eds), The Letters of James V,
1513-1542 (Edinburgh, 1954)
NLS National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
NRS National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh
RCRBS J. D. Marwick and T. Hunter (eds), Records of the Convention of
Royal Burghs of Scotland (Edinburgh, 7 vols, 1866–1918)
RMS J. Thomson et al. (eds), Registrum Magni Sigilli Regum
Scotorum/Register of the Great Seal of Scotland (Edinburgh,
11 vols, 1882–1914)
RPC J. H. Burton et al. (eds), Register of the Privy Council of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 14 vols, 1877–1933)
RPS Records of the Parliaments of Scotland www.rps.ac.uk
RSS M. Livingstone et al. (eds), Registrum Secreti Sigilli Regum
Scotorum/Register of the Privy Seal of Scotland (Edinburgh,
8 vols, 1908–82)
SHR Scottish Historical Review
TA T. Dickson et al. (eds), Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of
Scotland (Edinburgh, 13 vols, 1877–1970)
TNA The National Archives, London
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

On Epiphany in 1540, James V, his Queen, Marie de Guise, his council

and their court gathered in the Palace of Linlithgow to enjoy an ‘inter-
luyde’ which laid bare the unhappiness of the peasantry and exposed the
faults of their superiors, especially the clergy. The forum in which this
complaint was aired was one which would have been amply familiar to this
politically active audience: the fictional peasant appeared before ‘A man
Armed in harnes withe a swerd drawen in his hande, A BUSSHOPE, A
BURGES man, and EXPERIENCE clede like a doctor whoe sete theym
all down on the dies under the KING’. In other words, the peasant
appeared before the three estates, gathered in a ‘playne Parliament’.1
Despite the play-bishop’s anger upon hearing the peasant articulate what
amounted to a thorough critique of the existing Church, the other two
estates considered that the clerical abuses were ‘verey expedient to be rea-
formede withe the consente of parliament’. Unsurprisingly, when ‘the
Busshope said he wold not consent thereunto The MAN OF ARMES
AND BURGES saide thay wer two and he bot one wherfor thair voice
shuld haue mooste effecte’. The proposed reforms duly passed into law as
‘the King in the playe Ratefied approved and confermed all that was
rehersed’. This conclusion to the Christmas festivities was reported to

1
‘The copie of the notes of the enterluyde’, January 1540, BL Royal MS 7 C XVI f.138r.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
A. Blakeway, Parliament and Convention in the Personal Rule of
James V of Scotland, 1528–1542,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89377-4_1
2 A. BLAKEWAY

English officials eagerly seeking information on the religious temperature

of the Scottish court, who seized upon James’s foreknowledge of the play
and warning to the clergy in its wake to amend their behaviour as a hope-
ful sign.2 Interest in the interlude as a source of information on James’s
openness to religious reform has survived the test of time and been shared
by modern historians of religious change in Scotland.3 Amongst literary
critics, too, the incident is far from being unknown: although literary
debate on the play’s possible relationship to the Lyon herald David
Lindsay’s later Satire of the Three Estatis has moved back and forth, the
pendulum seems to have settled at an acceptance of Lindsay’s authorship
and a close relationship between the 1540 interlude and the extant play
text despite the differing circumstances of production.4
In comparing the English spy report discussing the 1540 interlude with
the extant text of the Satire, Greg Walker has argued that both iterations
of the play ‘speak powerfully to the importance of parliament’ in the
Scottish polity.5 This observation is entirely in line with recent reassess-
ments by historians of parliament in late medieval and early modern
Scotland who, over the last generation, have dragged parliament out of
the wings and thrust it centre stage.6 Furthermore, Walker argued that the
Interlude played during James’s personal rule accorded a more central role
to the monarch than the Satire played during a minority, when parliament
assumed greater significance: in 1540, the pauper spoke to James; in 1552
and 1554, he appealed to parliament. Again, Walker’s claim that a period
of royal minority would lead to an increased role for governmental institu-
tions, in this case, parliament, is one which has been widely shared.7 The
case that well into the sixteenth century governmental institutions flour-
ished during royal minorities and the rule of women, whilst strong adult

2
Eure to Cromwell, 26 January 1540, BL Royal MS 7 C XVI f.137r.
3
C. Kellar, Scotland, England and the Reformation, 1534–1561 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 69–70.
4
For a summary of this debate: Greg Walker, ‘The Linlithgow Interlude and the Satire of
the Three Estatis’, Medieval English Theatre (2015), pp. 41–56 at 41–2. See also: Greg
Walker, The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama (Cambridge, 1998),
pp. 117–123, 128–9; Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David
Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst, 1994), pp. 49–50.
5
Walker, ‘The Linlithgow Interlude and the Satire of the Three Estatis’, p. 54.
6
For an overview of this: K. M. Brown and R. J. Tanner, ‘Introduction: Parliament and
Politics in Scotland’ in K. M. Brown & R. J. Tanner (eds), Parliament and Politics in Scotland
1235–1560 (Edinburgh, 2004), pp. 1–28.
7
Jenny Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London, 1981),
p. 22; Julian Goodare, The Government of Scotland 1560–1625 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 130–1.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

Kings ruled free from the constraints of parliaments, councils and the like
is gradually being revised. However, its long dominance explains why we
know far more about the imaginary parliament crafted by Lindsay than the
parliaments actually summoned during James’s reign.
Whilst the spy reports of the interlude have been scoured for informa-
tion on the performance itself, read carefully, they reveal as much as about
real-life government as they do Lindsay’s fictitious parliament. William
Eure, the English official whose reports constitute our evidence for the
play, obtained his information from two members of James’s council.
Asking them directly ‘whate mynde the king and counsaile of Scotland was
inclyned unto concernyng the busshope of Rome’, the two Scots had
described a play about parliament (though not an actual meeting of that
assembly), said James had known about the play beforehand, and affirmed
that he and his council had watched it. Beyond this, they gave Eure to
understand that after Marie de Guise’s coronation, James intended to
hold a ‘convencon of the lords’—here, they hoped, might church reforms
be discussed.8 Looking again at the well-known report of Lindsay’s play,
we in fact see all the elements of consultation brought together: the con-
stants of the court and council, as well as the occasional meetings of parlia-
ment and convention. The appearance of all these things together
encapsulates one of the key arguments advanced in this book, namely, that
consultation and decision making in the personal rule were complex,
multi-stage processes which encompassed multiple meetings cutting across
different institutions and extra-institutional discussions alike.

* * *

To date, historiographical debate on the reign of James V has focused

largely upon the King’s character and his relations with his magnates.
Mid-twentieth-century surveys of sixteenth-century Scotland taught gen-
erations of undergraduates that James (perhaps on account of his Tudor
blood) was little better than a tyrant, obsessed by greed and unable to
work with his nobility.9 The reader of these works is left with the strong
impression that James was saved from the ignominious fate of murder at
the hands of his rebellious subjects, as his Scottish grandfather James III

Eure to Cromwell, 26 January 1539/40, BL Royal MS 7 C XVI f.137r.

8

Gordon Donaldson, Scotland: James V to James VII (Edinburgh, 1978 reprint), pp. 61–2;
9

Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, p. 12.

4 A. BLAKEWAY

had lost both his crown and his life, only by his untimely death following
a disastrous military campaign led by low-born favourites. With this type
of reputation, it is unsurprising that James for many years failed to attract
serious scholarly attention. This ‘most unpleasant of all the Stewarts’
apparently simply lacked the roguish renaissance charm of his father, the
salacious appeal of his daughter or the imminent pan-Britannic impor-
tance of his grandson.10 However, the first serious modern scholarly work
on James’s governance, Jamie Cameron’s reassessment of James’s adult
kingship, marked a departure from previous accounts of James as a
magnate-­crusher and emphasised instead that for most of his reign the
King enjoyed support from a broad cross-section of his nobility.11 Typically
of the time he was writing, however, Cameron’s interest was primarily in
monarch-magnate relations, not the institutions through which these
might be conducted. Accordingly, his attention to James’s parliaments and
conventions focused on an account of the 1528 parliament, the first of the
personal rule, and a discussion of magnatial attendance at subsequent ses-
sions and conventions as part of his broader case that James enjoyed a
broad base of magnate support.12 Alongside this reassessment of political
relationships, a wider group of studies have demonstrated that James pre-
sided over a lively and glamourous court which, as Andrea Thomas
observed, combined both chivalric and humanist influences to ‘glorify the
unique dignity and status of the monarch’ whilst fostering relationships
with his magnates.13 Such courtly talents, moreover, were put to good use

Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community, p. 12.

10

Jamie Cameron, James V: The Personal Rule, 1528–1542 (East Linton, 1998).
11

12
Whilst other sessions are noted in passing the major analysis comes at: Cameron, James
V, pp. 38–43, 356–9. For the parliament of 1528 see also: W. K. Emond, The Minority of
James V: Scotland in Europe 1513–1528 (Edinburgh, 2019), pp. 260–3.
13
Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie: the court of James V of Scotland 1528–42 (Edinburgh,
2005) p. 225; Andrea Thomas, ‘Crown Imperial: Coronation Ritual and Regalia in the
Reign of James V’, in Julian Goodare and Alasdair MacDonald (eds.), Sixteenth-Century
Scotland: Essays in Honour of Michael Lynch (Leiden, 2008) pp. 43–67; Janet Hadley
Williams, ‘James V of Scots as literary patron’, in Martin Gosman, Alasdair A. MacDonald
and Arie Johan Vanderjagt (eds), Princes and princely culture, 1450–1650 (Leiden: Brill,
2003), pp. 173–98; Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David
Lindsay of the Mount (1486–1555) (Amherst, Mass., 1994); Janet Hadley Williams (ed.),
Stewart Style, 1513–1542: essays on the Court of James V (East Linton, 1996); Sarah Carpenter,
‘David Lindsay and James V: court literature as current event’ in Jennifer and Richard
Britnell (eds), Vernacular Literature and Current Affairs in the early sixteenth-century:
France, England and Scotland (Aldershot, 2000).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

in the complex diplomacy emanating from James’s need for a wife and his
country’s enhanced European status, arising in part from Scotland’s posi-
tion as a bastion of orthodoxy standing against Henry VIII’s heresies, and
in part from James’s tantalisingly close position to his English uncle’s
throne.14
A number of relevant implications can be drawn from these studies.
First, if James had a sophisticated and glamourous court and was able to
conduct diplomacy adeptly, this would have required administrative back
up and adequate funding, which, in turn, would have required consulta-
tion to acquire it in the first place. Roger Mason has revealed how the
expansion of Latin literacy to layfolk facilitated the growth of a new pool
of individuals on whom James’s regime could rely alongside the tradi-
tional clerical stalwarts of royal bureaucracy.15 Theo van Heijnsbergen
built on this to show how, since many of James’s administrators were also
accomplished poets, literary and administrative talents might be combined
in the same individuals and operate through shared networks of connec-
tions.16 In this book, we will meet several of van Heijnsbergen’s culture
vultures putting their Latinity to good use in their day jobs. Secondly, the
quality of sophisticated ceremonial and literature circulating around
James’s court speaks both to the ability of James’s regime to communicate
outwards to a broader public and to direct its messages inwards in the
form of counsel to the monarch himself. In exploring how processes of
disseminating information to subjects and advising the monarch worked
in institutional settings, we are therefore knocking at an open door: it has
already been amply established that these were important concerns for the
regime. Thirdly, the humanists working at James’s court were intimately

14
Dana Bentley-Cranch and Rosalind Kay Marshall, ‘Iconography and literature in the
service of diplomacy: the Franco-Scottish alliance, James V and Scotland’s two French
queens, Madeleine of France and Marie de Guise’, in Hadley Williams (ed.), Stewart style,
1513–1542, pp. 273–88; Edmond Bapst, Les Marriages de Jacques V (Paris, 1889);
M. P. Rooseboom, The Scottish Staple an account of the trade relations between Scotland and
the Low Countries from 1292 till 1676; with a calendar of illustrative documents (the Hague,
1910); John Davidson and Alexander Gray, The Scottish staple at Veere, a study in the economic
history of Scotland (London, 1909); Kellar, Scotland, England and the Reformation; Richard
W. Hoyle and J. B. Ramsdale, ‘The Royal Progress of 1541, the North of England, and
Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1534–1542’, Northern History 41.2 (2004), pp. 239–65.
15
Roger Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and
Reformation Scotland (East Linton, 1998), pp. 104–138.
16
Theo Van Heijnsbergen, ‘Studies in the Contextualisation of Mid-Sixteenth-Century
Scottish Verse’ (University of Glasgow, unpublished PhD, 2009).
6 A. BLAKEWAY

familiar with notions of imperium and the concept that James was an
Emperor in his own kingdom who owed allegiance to no one else.17 Such
ideas were not new in the 1530s, and as Ryoko Harikae has shown with
reference to John Bellenden’s vernacular translation of Hector Boece’s
History, they appeared gradually and did not emanate in a straightforward
manner from the monarch.18 Even so, in the context of the intellectual
networks to which van Heijnsbergen has pointed, it seems reasonable to
suppose that this exalted understanding of monarchy tinged how James’s
administrators understood their own activities in the service of the crown.
Most pertinently for our present purposes, however, a small but grow-
ing number of studies of the roles of central institutions in James’s per-
sonal rule suggest that the 1530s witnessed significant governmental
development. The first moves towards this came from legal historians
interested, naturally enough, in the development of Scotland’s highest
civil court, the court of session.19 The late medieval royal council com-
bined both advisory and judicial functions: in May 1532, however, parlia-
ment approved the setting up of the college of justice, and this provided
these judicial sessions with an institutional identity distinct from that of
the council. This proved a decisive moment in the longer-term process
whereby the judicial sessions became the preserve of trained jurists alone.
Mark Godfrey’s work has been particularly valuable in showing that the
growing jurisdiction of the session and the eagerness of James’s subjects to
avail themselves of its services sits comfortably alongside the more estab-
lished historiographical emphasis on feud and extra-institutional justice.20
This important point about judicial practice—that dispute resolution hap-
pened both through the King’s courts and outwith them, and that these
two methods were not in competition but worked in concert with each
other—is reflected in the findings about political decision making and
counsel in this book. Consultation typically took place across a series of
interconnected and carefully managed meetings, including council,

17
Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, pp. 104–38.
18
Ryoko Harikae, ‘“Daunting” The Isles, Borders, and Highlands Imperial Kingship in
John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland and the Mar Lodge Translation’, in Joanna Martin
and Emily Wingfield (eds), Premodern Scotland: literature and governance 1420–1587: Essays
for Sally Mapstone (Oxford, 2017), pp. 159–170.
19
John W. Cairns, ‘Revisiting the foundation of the college of justice’, in Hector
MacQueen (ed.), Stair Society Miscellany Five (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 27–50; A. M. Godfrey,
Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland: The Origins of a Central Court (Leiden, 2009).
20
Godfrey, Civil Justice, p. 447, 355–399.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

parliament, conventions and extra-institutional means. These were not

­competing with each other for prominence, and a royal preference for one
was not an attempt to sideline another—just as royal efforts to develop the
court of session cannot be read as an attempt to extirpate arbitration.
Rather, the political toolbox was well stocked with a range of gadgets from
which to select the best for the job in hand.
The session was not the only group which grew out of the council,
drawing on some of its members whilst excluding others. Athol Murray
has shown that the lords of council appointed to the exchequer could act
with the authority of the full council and deal with its business whilst the
exchequer was in progress.21 Evidently, the council in this period offered a
pool of expertise from amongst which sub-groups could be selected on a
permanent or temporary basis to meet a specific need. Where, then, does
that leave the portion of the council dedicated to offering advice to the
King? Cameron’s focus on James’s interest in smooth relations with his
magnates meant that his interest in James’s council was confined largely to
membership, rather than its place in governance, although he noted the
difficulties facing the historian looking for its activities post-1532.22 In
making this case, he drew on R. K. Hannay’s observation that ‘public’
business declined in frequency in the council register following James’s
assumption of power. Hannay speculated that this might have arisen from
the development of a now lost register.23 I have argued elsewhere that the
decline can indeed be explained by changing record keeping and that a
‘secret council’ remained very much part of James’s regime.24 Many of its
records have subsequently been lost, but there is strong evidence that by
being based part of the time in Edinburgh the group facilitated James’s
peripatetic lifestyle and that they advised on diplomatic relations with
England. This book provides still more evidence for the continued impor-
tance of a council that both counselled and offered administrative support
throughout the personal rule. It is important to stress with all the histori-
ans cited in this paragraph that the council’s advisory role, the

21
Athol L. Murray, ‘Exchequer, Council and Session, 1513–1542’, in Hadley Williams
(ed.), Stewart style, 1513–1542, pp. 97–117.
22
Cameron, James V, pp. 292–4, 342–343.
23
R. K. Hannay (ed.), Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs, 1501–1554. Selections
from the Acta Dominorum Concilii introductory to the register of the Privy Council of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1932), p. xliii.
24
Amy Blakeway, ‘The Privy Council of James V of Scotland, 1528–1542’, Historical
Journal 59: 1 (2016) pp. 23–44.
8 A. BLAKEWAY

development of the session and the appointment of lords of exchequer

were based upon earlier precedents. Even so, these developments provide
a very good example of James’s regime showing a preference for the use
of smaller, specialised, groups to deal with particular specialist tasks. One
of the major contentions of this book is that the type of specialisation
which is so well established as an aspect of legal and conciliar development
in this period is equally pertinent to understanding how James employed
his other central governmental institutions.
Although less full than the studies of James’s court and diplomacy,
together, this research into the administration and organisation of central
government has shown that this was a time when considerable attention
was paid to the organisation of central institutions as well as to sharing at
least some of their activities more widely throughout the kingdom. In this
context, it is surprising that the considerable revisionist scholarship pro-
duced on the late medieval and early modern Scottish parliament has yet
to extend to James’s personal rule.25 For both the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries, the once radical reassessment that parliament was an
important part of political life and, generally speaking, was more than
equal to the task of resisting the monarch is now the new orthodoxy: the
plethora of studies which have cumulatively established this status have
ranged widely encompassing a range of approaches. For the purposes of
the present book, a number of themes are important to drawn out of the
scholarship on the immediately preceding and following periods.
The first is the importance of parliament as a tool for legitimising politi-
cal activity, especially regime change. The parliament of 1488 which
explained away the death of James III as an unfortunate accident, that of
1515 which confirmed John Stuart, duke of Albany as rightful governor,
the assembly of 1525 which declared James V an adult, the meeting of the
estates summoned when James took power into his own hands in 1528,
the March 1543 parliament which confirmed James Hamilton, earl of
Arran, in the regency after his initial appointment in a convention in
January, and the parliament held eleven years later in 1554 when Arran
relinquished the regency to Marie de Guise are the examples which

25
For a helpful overview of these tendencies: William Fergusson, ‘Introduction’, in Clyve
Jones (ed.), The Scots and Parliament, (Edinburgh, 1996), pp. 1–10. For the traditional view
of James’s parliaments: Robert S. Rait, The Parliaments of Scotland (Glasgow, 1924), p. 43.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

immediately bookend our period of study.26 Parliament continued to play

this role until dynastic union in 1603, the 1567 assembly which registered
Mary Queen of Scots’s deposition is probably the most dramatic example,
but Goodare has argued for the importance of parliament as a component
in articulating governmental legitimacy more broadly.27 Crucially, these
assemblies did not actually cause regime change: this had already hap-
pened by the time parliament was summoned and fenced. Rather, they
advertised the fact regime change had occurred, asserted it to be in keep-
ing with the laws by holding the assembly in keeping with parliamentary
traditions, and recorded it. After such a meeting, no one could claim igno-
rance that the ruler had changed and the act of witnessing also served to
endorse and approve the new regime. The political capital to be gained by
the combination of doing something and being seen to do something,
mirrored by the process of witnessing and being seen to witness, was well
understood by James V’s regime and constituted an important factor in
many of the assemblies it summoned.
Whilst parliament allowed new regimes to proclaim their right to rule
and offered opportunities for their policies to be endorsed, this did not
mean that it sat putty-like and pliant in the crown’s hands. Roland Tanner’s
work on the parliaments of the first three James’s in particular has empha-
sised the extent to which the estates could engage in adversarial relations
with the crown, especially on the issue of taxation.28 In particular, Tanner
reassessed the role of the lords of the articles.29 This was the most impor-
tant committee of Scotland’s unicameral parliament, tasked with receiving

26
Norman Macdougall, ‘The estates in eclipse? Politics and Parliaments in the reign of
James IV’ in Brown and Tanner (eds), Parliament and Politics in Scotland 1235–1560,
pp. 145–59; Norman Macdougall, James IV (East Linton, 1997), pp. 58–60; W. K. Emond,
‘The Parliament of 1525’ in Brown and Tanner (eds), Parliament and Politics in Scotland
1235–1560, pp. 160–178; Emond, Minority of James V, pp. 35–6, 246, 262; Cameron, James
V, pp. 38–42; Pamela Ritchie, ‘Marie de Guise and the Three Estates 1554–1559’, in Brown
and Tanner (eds), Parliament and Politics in Scotland, 1235–1560, pp. 179–202; Amy
Blakeway, Regency in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2015) pp. 56, 59–61, 75–83.
27
Goodare, Government of Scotland, pp. 29–31, 37–41.
28
Roland 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 Tim Thornton
(ed.), Social attitudes and political structures in the fifteenth century (Stroud, 2000),
pp. 101–17; Roland J. Tanner, The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: politics and the three
estates, 1424–1488 (East Linton, 2001).
29
Roland Tanner, ‘The Lords of the Articles before 1540: a reassessment’, Scottish
Historical Review 79 (2000), pp. 189–212.
10 A. BLAKEWAY

petitions and suggestions for new laws, drafting potential statutes (the
‘articles’ from which it took its name) and presenting them to the whole
house for discussion and a vote. Traditionally dismissed as the yes-men of
the crown and an effective mechanism by which the crown kept the estates
in check, Tanner’s work on the committee until 1540 and Alan
MacDonald’s on the late sixteenth-century lords of the articles have
cumulatively overturned previous assumptions that the articles stymied
parliament’s activities for the crown’s benefit.30 During the 1530s, there is
little evidence that the lords of the articles forced through unpopular mea-
sures. We will see in chapter 6 a large portion of its work in some sessions
(notably that of 1535) was devoted to selecting acts to be repassed: much
of what this committee did was simply not controversial. On the other
hand, chapter 2 will show that the picture is complex and that Tanner’s
suggestion that the committees of the early sixteenth century do look
more pliant than their predecessors in fact needs to be taken further.31 The
committee of the articles could be managed in such a way as to exclude
some members from politically sensitive discussions whilst temporarily
adding unelected members to their number. Cumulatively, this could
indeed make the articles look very much like the council.
Those members who were excluded on such occasions were invariably
representatives of the third estate: the burghs. This at first glance seems to
suggest the 1530s sat at a considerable distance from the final decades of
the sixteenth century, when, as Alan MacDonald has amply demonstrated,
the third estate was an active and engaged participant in the parliamentary
process which afforded both the burghs as a whole and individual com-
munities considerable opportunities to achieve their aims, largely focused
upon the preservation of their privileges.32 Much of this activity was facili-
tated by meetings of conventions of the burghs, special meetings of the

30
Alan R. MacDonald, ‘Deliberative processes in Parliament c.1567–1639: Multicameralism
and the Lords of the Articles’, Scottish Historical Review 81:1 (2002), pp. 23–51.
31
Tanner, ‘Lords of the Articles’, pp. 210–212.
32
A. R. MacDonald, ‘Uncovering the Legislative Processes in the Parliaments of James
VI’, Historical Research 84 (2011) pp. 601–17; Alan R. MacDonald, ‘The third estate:
Parliament and the Burghs’, in Parliament in Context, 1235–1707 (Edinburgh, 2010),
pp. 95–121; Alan R. MacDonald, The Burghs and Parliament in Scotland, c. 1550–1651
(Aldershot, 2007); Alan R. MacDonald, ‘“Tedious to Rehers”? Parliament and Locality in
Scotland c. 1500–1651: the Burghs of North-East Fife’, Parliaments, Estates and
Representation 20:1 (2000), pp. 31–58.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

third estate summoned to discuss business appertaining to the ‘common-

wealth of merchandice’, but late sixteenth-century burghs also partici-
pated in conventions of the three estates, extra parliamentary meetings to
which representatives of all three estates were summoned.33 Although
chapter 4 shows that conventions of the burghs met more frequently dur-
ing the 1530s in order to discuss the Scottish staple, no extra-parliamen-
tary conventions of the three estates were held during this period.
What, then, was the meeting due to be held after Marie de Guise’s
coronation in 1540? Eure, our informant on this point, was a northern
Englishman who regularly met with Scots and received reports from spies
north of the border: this gathering was obviously so familiar to Eure him-
self and his anticipated reader in the Henrician court that he felt no need
to explain it further. This is deeply frustrating, because taking a longer
view across the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries conventions in the 1530s
were unusual. Alongside their parliaments, councils and courts, conven-
tions offered Scottish monarchs a further way of gathering advice.
Unconstrained by the parliamentary requirements of a forty-day summons
and set invitation list of the clergy (from archbishops to abbots), nobility
(from dukes to lords) and representatives of the parliamentary burghs,
conventions offered the opportunity to consult flexibly with a group
beyond the regular council. Parliament’s form was settled more or less
throughout the sixteenth century (with the notable exception of the
admission of the lairds in the reign of James VI), but conventions changed
considerably between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth centuries.34
Whilst the three estates met outside parliament in the ‘great council’ dur-
ing the fifteenth century and in conventions of the three estates after the
reformation, such meetings did not take place during James V’s personal
rule. The meetings described as ‘conventions’ were, instead, specially

33
James David Marwick and Thomas Hunter (eds), Extracts from the records of the
Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland (Edinburgh, 8 vols, 1870–1918); Theodora
Pagan, The Convention of the Royal Burghs of Scotland (Glasgow, 1926); Alan R. MacDonald
and Mary Verschuur (eds), Records of the Convention of Royal Burghs, 1555; 1631–1648
(Woodbridge, 2013). For conventions of the three estates: Alan R. MacDonald, ‘Consultation
and Consent under James VI’, Historical Journal 54.2 (2011), pp. 287–306.
34
Julian Goodare, ‘The admission of lairds to the Scottish Parliament’, English Historical
Review 116.5 (2001), pp. 1103–33; Julian Goodare, ‘The estates in the Scottish Parliament,
1286–1707’, Parliamentary History 15 (1996), pp. 11–32; Julian Goodare, ‘Who was the
Scottish Parliament?’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), pp. 173–8.
12 A. BLAKEWAY

summoned meetings of selected members of the first and second estates,

centred on the regular council but bringing in specialist advice from
beyond the usual roster. Eure’s description of the one held in early 1540
as being ‘of the lords’ seems a fitting epithet for these bodies. As we shall
see, however, ‘lords’ was an elastic term which could on different occa-
sions encompass not only the higher nobility and clergy with a right to
attend parliament but also the lords of council, prominent amongst whose
number in this period were burgesses learned in the law.
There is significant debate surrounding conventions in their various
forms. For Robert Rait, the existence of another body able to tax and to
pass temporary legislation helped to build his case surrounding parlia-
ment’s weakness: parliament was beset and successfully undercut by this
‘rival’.35 Irene O’Brien’s exploration of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
‘conventions’ alongside parliaments took a more careful approach.
Highlighting the changes to these bodies over time, O’Brien firmly
rejected claims they constituted a ‘rival’ to parliament—a position on
which Julian Goodare has expanded.36 The conventions encountered in
this book should not be understood as quasi-parliamentary. Conventions
could not try traitors, nor make a permanent law, nor, it seems, did they
offer quite the same quality of endorsement of legitimacy as a parliament.
They were attended by clerics and nobles, always joined by the royal offi-
cers. Their membership was focused around and their authority was ulti-
mately derived from the council—chapter 2 will lay out this case in greater
detail. Their lack of juridical competence alone meant that conventions
could not ‘rival’ parliament, nevertheless, during the 1530s, conventions
of the lords were an important mechanism of government—especially, we
will see, in chapter 3, when facing military campaigns at home or against
the English, smaller conventions proved a helpful way of gaining counsel,
whilst larger meetings served to endorse plans. During James’s personal
rule, conventions of the lords varied considerably in size and this flexibility
allowed them to perform a range of functions. Conventions were a highly
flexible institution, combined with the fact that their authority derived

35
Rait, Parliament, pp. 9–18.
36
Irene O’Brien, ‘The Scottish Parliament in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’
(University of Glasgow, unpublished PhD, 1980), pp. 235–270; Julian Goodare, ‘The
Scottish Parliament and its early modern “rivals”’, Parliaments, Estates and Representation,
24 (2004), pp. 147–172.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

from the council, this made them a useful tool—especially alongside the
council and parliament.
These themes, of flexibility, and of different types of meetings being
summoned to tackle different aspects of the various concerns facing
James’s regime, cut across this book. Chapter 2 explores conventions and
their relationship to the council, identifying when conventions were held
and who attended, demonstrating the way in which the council was cen-
tral to a range of types of meetings (including the curious hybrid group of
‘lords of articles and council’ who occasionally surface in this period). The
considerable variations amongst types of conventions are explored in more
depth in chapter 3, when, in the context of a study of the conventions held
during the overlapping military campaigns of 1530–3, we see that smaller
groups met to offer counsel or plan and larger groups, broadly speaking,
witnessed important events. Having established that the burghs were not
invited to conventions of the lords does not, however, mean that the
burghs never met outwith parliament: chapter 4 turns to the increase in
evidence for meetings of the third estate in this period. A need to discuss
the potential locations for the Scottish staple port exposed a range of posi-
tions regarding when the third estate ought to be consulted. Together
these three chapters build a picture of a political system characterised by
specialised consultation. Although discussion was certainly controlled and
ordered by James’s regime, it is more helpful to think in terms of the selec-
tion of specialised groups to offer specialised counsel than to adopt an
inclusion/exclusion model. Having seen the important role conventions
played in planning for warfare, it is unsurprising to discover that they also
granted James a significant quantity of taxation. The uncontested ability of
conventions to grant a tax is worth stressing at the outset since this was a
distinctive aspect of Scottish taxation and marks a point of contrast with
practices, for instance, south of the border. Chapter 5 shows that parlia-
ment’s role in granting taxation was far less significant either than the
extra-parliamentary taxation which James received from conventions, or
the permanent expansion of the royal patrimony which parliament effected
through confirming the annexation of forfeited lands to the crown. Whilst
chapters two to five emphasise the different and complementary parts
which council, convention and parliament might play in managing differ-
ent facets of the same concern, chapter 6 turns to the two areas where
parliament was distinct from these other governmental institutions: its
role as a court and its legislative activities. Parliament’s activities as a court
where traitors were tried were hugely significant in this period, but rather
14 A. BLAKEWAY

than being a space where punishment was sought, it more often served as
one amongst several places where accused traitors could negotiate with
the regime and, in many cases, ultimately make their peace with the
crown—albeit for a hefty price. Turning to legislation, we see that although
codification of the laws has hitherto been located in the reigns of James I
and James VI, the prevalence of repassing laws in the 1530s suggests that
James V’s regime too devoted considerable attention to reviewing, revis-
ing and repromulgating the law.
Between 1528 and 1542, we find the Scottish crown seeking counsel
frequently, inviting specialist gatherings of its subjects to discuss such
diverse topics as war with England or how international trade should be
managed via a staple port, being granted the taxes for which it asked, seek-
ing reconciliation with its subjects rather than in absentia convictions,
engaging with existing legislation to better organise the law and drafting
new statutes to support these efforts. Building on Cameron’s work on
James’s largely positive relations with his magnates, this transports us a
world away from earlier accounts of James’s predatory kingship. It is
therefore important to emphasise that whilst this book is focused on
uncovering how consultation worked, James and his administrators were
more than able to coerce: indeed, it is possible that the focus of this book
on meetings designed to secure counsel or consensus obscures some of the
regime’s worst coercive excesses. These too however were a component of
control. For example, in 1540, the aged James Douglas, earl of Morton,
was imprisoned without being told the cause—in Inverness ‘in the sesioun
of wynter’, no less, exposed to the ‘cauld and tempestuous air’ and pro-
vided with a diet of only ‘rude and ungangand metis’.37 Forced by James
to resign his earldom, within six months of the King’s death, Morton
sought to have this reversed. Morton’s deposition provided in support of
his case suggested that his situation was not unusual—the elderly earl
recalled that it was ‘weill knawin that our said umquhile Soverane Lord
was Prince of the realme and usit to put his mainisings to execution and
ward his men and leigis at his plesour’.38 Morton got his earldom back—so
at some level, his story must have been credible. It is not hard to see how
such behaviour fuelled James’s traditional historiographical reputation.

37
Cosmo Innes et al. (eds), Registrum Honoris de Morton II (Edinburgh, 1853)
pp. 289–294. See also NRS CS7/1/2 f.281r.
38
Registrum Honoris de Morton II, p. 291.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Morton’s case is a dramatic example, however, throughout this book,

we also see instances of James driving hard bargains with men seeking to
enter his peace, suspending acts of parliament by royal letters, refusing to
repay debts which parliament had told him he ought to and passing this
burden onto the burghs. Indeed, the importance of treason trials to parlia-
ment’s business, and the importance of managing aspects of political life
ranging from domestic military campaigns to conventions, affords us a
glimpse of the iron fist curled inside a (doubtless very stylish and expen-
sive) velvet glove. There is a profound tension between the regime’s
emphasis on consultation and elaborate procedures to perform rituals of
counsel and consent deployed via both parliament and conventions, and
its use of both actual violence and judicial threats. However, the fact that
James’s regime sought to incorporate consultation on some occasions
when it could have proceeded straight to coercion suggests that it did
indeed consider that consultation was important and that consulting, or at
least being seen to consult, had a purpose in helping it to achieve its aims.
Securing buy-in might have been easier than exercising coercive power;
equally, just as Morton’s resignation was technically legal but secured
through threats, we should not discount the possibility that some gather-
ings—probably the larger and more apparently performative ones—were
exercises in informing subjects and securing their acquiescence rather than
gaining advice. Just as the traditional emphasis on James’s coercive activi-
ties should not be allowed to obscure the fact that notions of counsel
remained rhetorically important and had an influence on practice, nor
should an emphasis on consultation allow us to forget occasions when the
crown openly flexed its muscles. The institutional apparatus explored in
this book allowed it to do both.
The sources on which this research is based are familiar to historians:
the parliamentary registers, the register of the lords of council and session
and royal financial materials are supplemented by royal correspondence
and burgh records. Even so, it is helpful to spend a few moments attend-
ing to some of the technical aspects of our three main sources since this
allows us to appreciate what we can and cannot uncover. Turning first to
the parliamentary registers, James V’s personal rule is considerably better
served than his own minority or that of his daughter, since parliamentary
records cover the entire period. Three extant manuscripts traditionally
understood to be ‘official registers of parliament’ now record the activities
16 A. BLAKEWAY

of James’s adult parliaments, covering 1524–31, 1532–8 and 1532–42.39

However, I have argued elsewhere that the third volume covering 1532–42
was not produced as a complete register of parliament’s activities but,
rather, as a record of the statutes in preparation for the printed edition of
these which appeared in 1542.40 The manuscript remained in use in the
early portion of Mary’s reign, until 1548, but at some point in the nine-
teenth century, the manuscript was split in two and materials appertaining
to James’s reign were separated from those of his daughter. This has con-
siderable implications for our understanding of the records. First, it allows
us to more accurately identify which material from the 1535 parliament
made it beyond the articles stage to reach the statute books. Secondly, this
means our only record of parliamentary activity between 1540 and 1542
began its life as draft for a printed compilation of statutes. Whilst the draft
and the printed volume did include some non-statute material, it is highly
likely this was not a full record of parliament’s activities—notably, judicial
matters may well have been excluded. Chapter 6 fleshes out these implica-
tions to show the 1535 parliament passed fewer laws than we thought and
presents strong evidence to suggest that other sessions heard judicial busi-
ness which is not in the extant registers.
The volume covering 1532–8 is also not straightforward. This too is
highly unlikely to be a complete record of parliamentary business. It con-
tains numerous blank spaces and incomplete entries. Given this is quite a
neat volume, these omissions suggest it was copied from minutes taken in
the sessions and that this process was incomplete. It is annotated through-
out by the clerk register. This combination of an incomplete record which
was handled by the clerk register suggests that the manuscript may not
have been produced for the crown’s archives but, rather, might have been
the clerk register’s own working copy—as the 1532–48 manuscript
became after 1542. In short, whilst the publication of the printed Actis
that year means it is likely that we have a record of all general statutes dat-
ing between 1535 and 1541 for many other areas of parliament’s business
we are not so lucky. Gaps in the record are particularly marked for the
1533–4 and 1538–9 sessions, for which no business was recorded in the
manuscript and which do not appear in the printed edition. Chapter 5 will

39
NRS PA2/8/I-III.
40
Amy Blakeway, ‘Reassessing the Scottish Parliamentary Records, 1528–1548: manu-
script, print, bureaucracy and royal authority’, Parliamentary History 40 (2021),
pp. 417–442.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

suggest the 1538 parliament granted a tax and chapter 6 posits that both
sessions were summoned to deal with judicial business. In essence, these
parliamentary materials are a lot better than nothing but we still need to
use them with caution and doing so alongside other evidence can yield
new discoveries. These complexities in the manuscript also mean that
despite the existence of three modern editions of these records, there are
a number of questions which can only be answered by consulting the orig-
inal records.41
Despite the complexities of its record, parliamentary activity for this
period is at least recorded in its own register: decisions made by conven-
tions, on the other hand, were sometimes but not always recorded in the
register of the lords of council and session. For our period, this contains a
mixture of ‘public’ business alongside civil legal cases (often related to
property or inheritance) and private contracts, inserted at the behest of the
parties to render the agreement more secure.42 It also contains records of
the exchequer when it sat as a court, and this shared record underscores
the extent to which the three bodies of exchequer, council and session
were intimately related.43 The register also notes, albeit inconsistently,
decisions to summon both conventions and parliaments. Evidently, the
register of the lords of council and session is an important source for this
study, but it too needs to be approached with care. As with the parliamen-
tary materials, the extant registers are not usually the original notes taken
during meetings, but rather were compiled after the event. These were not
always completed: blank spaces left for sederunt lists (recording who was
present) or the contents of meetings remain frustratingly unfilled. Clerks
were perhaps awaiting material not immediately to hand. Equally, material
might arrive with the clerks responsible for the fair copy after they had

41
William Robertson (ed.), The Parliamentary Records of Scotland in the General Register
House 1240–1571 (Edinburgh, 1804); APS; Keith Brown et al. (eds), Records of the
Parliaments of Scotland www.rps.ac.uk. For Robertson and Thomson’s editions see: Julian
Goodare, ‘The Scottish Parliamentary Records, 1560–1603’, Historical Research 72 (1999),
pp. 244–267 at 265–6; Blakeway, ‘Reassessing’; Amy Blakeway and Laura Stewart, ‘Writing
Scottish Parliamentary History, c.1500–1707’, Parliamentary History 40:1 (2021),
pp. 93–112.
42
R. K. Hannay (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs,
1501–1554 (Edinburgh, 1932); Athol Murray, ‘Introduction’ to Alma B. Calderwood (ed.),
Acts of the Lords of Council 1501–1503 (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. xxvi–xxviii; Murray,
‘Exchequer, council and session’; Godfrey, Civil Justice, chapter 5 passim.
43
Murray, ‘Exchequer, Council and Session’, pp. 100–1.
18 A. BLAKEWAY

completed the relevant entry—this would be inserted at the nearest avail-

able gap out of chronological order. We have just seen the parliamentary
registers also contain gaps: this filling-in was usual practice across many
types of governmental records.44 Although widespread, this habit of leav-
ing space in anticipation of interventions which might or might not
­eventuate means that in several instances the dates on which meetings
took place or dealt with particular business need to be worked out quite
carefully, and there are a number of technical interludes dealing with this
in chapters 2 and 3. Summaries of entries from this register are given in
the printed Acta Dominorum Concilii [ADCP], although since this early
twentieth-century work did not include information on sederunt lists, for
any study, such as this one, interested in who decided something, or,
indeed, in seeing a full record rather than a summary, it remains essential
to consult the original manuscript.45 Indeed, the editor of the ADCP him-
self, R. K. Hannay, acknowledged that ‘a close study of the council, much
desiderated and certain to be arduous, cannot be effective without con-
stant reference to the manuscript register’.46
Beyond the need to understand how these volumes were compiled by
their early modern creators, like the 1532–48 parliamentary register now
split at 1542, the register of the lords of council and session has suffered
from nineteenth-century intervention. The present archival organisation
imposes a division amongst the materials in May 1532, when the college of
justice was inaugurated. However, Athol Murray has shown that this divi-
sion was not contemporary: rather, it was created under the auspices of
Thomas Thomson, deputy keeper of the records in the nineteenth centu-
ry.47 In fact, the inauguration of the college marked no change in the record
keeping practices of James’s clerks, and the manuscripts now divided into
CS5, CS6 and CS7 in the National Records of Scotland should be under-
stood as part of the same continuous early modern record series. As James
V’s reign advanced, but particularly from c.1535 onwards, the quantity of
what Hannay described as ‘public’ business in the council registers declined

44
Murray, ‘Exchequer, Council and Session’, p. 100.
45
R. K. Hannay (ed.), Acts of the Lords of Council in Public Affairs, 1501–1554. Selections
from the Acta Dominorum Concilii introductory to the register of the Privy Council of Scotland
(Edinburgh, 1932).
46
ADCP, p. ix.
47
Athol Murray, ‘Introduction’ to Acts of the Lords of Council in Civil Causes, 1501–1503,
iii, ed. A. B. Calderwood (Edinburgh, 1993), p. xiii.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

considerably.48 Hitherto, despite Hannay’s speculation about a potential

lost record, this has been ‘attributed to James V having reached an age
when could take full control of the administration’.49 In fact, this was due
to a change in record keeping p ­ractices, since at some point before
September 1537, a record known as the ‘registri S. consilii’ or ‘secret coun-
cil register’ was begun.50 Sadly, this is no longer extant, and we will have
cause to regret this regularly throughout this book. However, it is likely
that the decline in ‘public’ business in this period in the surviving council
register is because these extant volumes were primarily being used by the
court of session and the ‘public’—or, less anachronistically, ‘common-
wealth’—business was instead recorded in the secret council register.
The fact that two records, not one, were being maintained does not
mean that a completely hard and fast division was imposed between
them—lords of the session remained lords of council and continued in
that capacity to deal with some non-judicial matters. For instance, in
March 1540, James wrote to the council ordering replacements to be
made for all of his seals after one had been ‘stollin’ and this letter was cop-
ied into the register of the lords of council and session.51 It might be
objected that the existence of this and other similar items shows that since
public business was still being recorded in the register of the lords of coun-
cil and session that, therefore, no separate register specifically for these
commonwealth matters existed. However, the register of the lords of
council and session contained ‘public’ materials well into the 1550s—a
decade after the first extant privy (or secret) council register commences.52
This type of archival cross-over should be understood as evidence of a flex-
ible and developing record-keeping culture which reflected a political real-
ity where the council’s authority was central. As for the new seals made up
in 1540—appropriately enough, the council specified that these ought to
feature a symbol of James’s imperial monarchy—‘ane clos croun’.53 This is
nicely symbolic of the extent to which the burgeoning central government
administration enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with blossoming notions
of enhanced monarchical authority.

48
ADCP, p. xliii.
49
Murray, ‘Exchequer, Council and Session’, p. 109. For a similar view: Goodare,
Government of Scotland, pp. 129–131.
50
NRS GD249/2/2/1 f. 76r; LJV, p. 233; Blakeway ‘Reassessing’, p. 440.
51
RSS II, 3444; NRS CS6/12 f.86r-v; ADCP, p. 485.
52
ADCP, pp. 540–639; RPC I.
53
NRS CS6/12 f.86v; ADCP, p. 485.
20 A. BLAKEWAY

The complex system which is beginning to emerge would have cost

money. Payments from the treasurer to messengers delivering summons
offer a valuable form of evidence for both parliaments and conventions,
although clearly this would only reveal those summons issued which
required a messenger to be paid to deliver them: such an expense would
not be requisite for individuals present when a decision to hold a meeting
was taken or those closely nearby. More problematically, on some occa-
sions, such as for the convention of June 1531, payments for summons
cannot be traced.54 Evidently, the treasurers’ accounts, like the parliamen-
tary register and register of the lords of council and session, cannot offer
us a complete picture. Potentially James’s pursemaster paid for some of
these messengers, certainly, the one extant pursemaster’s account shows
this official too paid messengers for both delivering news to the King and
sending royal orders.55 Moreover, dating an event from the treasurer’s
accounts is not simple: this was a record of payments, not when the events
to which the payments related actually took place. For example, a payment
to a crown messenger in 1532 to deliver letters from Falkland to elsewhere
was made only after the court had left Falkland: evidently, this messenger
was paid on his return, not when the letters were despatched.56 The time
lag between the penning of a letter, its arrival with its intended recipient
and the payment for services rendered in its delivery makes information
gleaned from the treasurer’s accounts regarding dates approximate rather
than absolute.57
Despite the need to treat the incomplete extant sources with caution, it
is clear that James V’s regime consulted in a wider range of meetings from
council to parliament with, in between, a wide variety of gatherings almost

54
For this convention: NRS CS5/42 ff.185–190; R. K. Hannay, ‘General Council and
Convention of Estates’, SHR 20 (1923), pp. 232–249 at p. 103. Had the treasurer paid
messengers this would have been noted in NRS E21/24, covering October 1530–
September 1531.
55
A. L. Murray (ed.), ‘Pursemaster’s Accounts’, Scottish History Society Miscellany X
(Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1965), p. 29.
56
Payment was delivered on 13 October, the court left Falkland on 6 October. NRS
E21/26 f. 49v. Andrea Thomas, ‘Renaissance Culture at the Court of King James V,
1528–1542’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1997), p. 402. Thomas’s text is pub-
lished as Princelie Majestie, but the appendix detailing the movement of the royal household
is available only in the PhD.
57
Although these records are published in their entirety, some volumes in this series con-
tain significant inaccuracies in transcription. Again, therefore, consulting the manuscript
is vital.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

all of which could be described as ‘conventions’ of one type or another.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, however, these problems for the historian in
identifying and understanding conventions may be the very reasons which
made them helpful to a busy and ambitious early sixteenth-century regime.
Taken cumulatively, parliament and the whole range of conventions
offered a variety of fora from which monarch and council could select the
most appropriate to meet their needs. As the clear procedures which
existed for parliament and the courts show, when the Scots wanted tightly
defined institutional systems, they created them and, generally speaking,
they worked. This concomitantly suggests that on other occasions when
no such systems were put in place, this was because a lack of tight restric-
tions offered some other form of advantage. This mixture of both closely
defined and more flexible meetings provided an ability to respond to a
range of circumstances. It also means that much of this book does not deal
in absolutes—notably, there is no one-size-fits-all definition of a
convention.
The plethora of meetings of various sizes means that James’s regime
was constantly working with a large cross-section of the polity from
amongst which it efficiently selected groups of people based on interest
and expertise with whom to consult on specific issues. Such consistent
small-group consultation alongside both a regular council and intermit-
tent parliaments and conventions extends Cameron’s argument that
James’s nobles were largely willing to work with their monarch by sug-
gesting that they joined the other estates to do so in a range of institu-
tions. Parliaments and conventions played a significant part in James’s
ability to wage war, conduct treason trials, and offered counsel on a range
of weighty matters. Accordingly, as the challenges the regime was facing
changed so too did its use of these meetings: in particular, when military
activities and matrimonial negotiations declined, so too did the use of
conventions to plan for war, or parliament as a source of cash to fund the
hunt for a bride. Taken together, the following chapters show how institu-
tions adapted to different circumstances in the personal rule. Consultation
was carefully managed by James’s regime—not because the King sought
to avoid it, but, rather, because it was understood to be vitally important
to gather the appropriate opinions and share the right information with
the right people, at the right time. Council, conventions of all kinds, and
parliament, as well as informal relationships and a lively court, functioned
together to make this possible. It is now time to see how this worked in
practice.
 CHAPTER 2

Council and Conventions

Between 7 and 10 November 1530, both archbishops; three bishops; four

other clerics; lords Erskine, Ruthven and Oliphant; and six professional
administrators met in Perth.1 The earl of Montrose joined them for one
day, on 9 November. This was not, however, simply a relaxing jaunt up the
Tay: Thomas Erskine, James’s secretary, had recently returned from France
and brought with him news of potential marriage negotiations between
James and Catherine de Medici, duchess of Urbino. The matter of James’s
future wife was clearly of the highest importance, and the group decided
that negotiations were best delegated to James’s former regent and heir
apparent, John Stuart, duke of Albany, who was Catherine de Medici’s
maternal uncle by marriage. Albany was to act as a go-between with Pope
Clement VII, head of Catherine’s paternal kin-group, who had also writ-
ten to James on the subject of the commonweal of Christendom.
Considering an ‘article’ on the subject of the Isles—an area of the Stewart
realm whose control was perennially problematic—they concluded that
James should ‘pass apon thame [the Hebrides] in propir persoun’ in April
the next year accompanied by the temporal lords and barons, whilst ‘the
prelatis and burrowis that remanyis at hame pay ane certane contributioun

1
NRS CS5/41 f.118r-121v; ADCP, pp. 342–3; R. K. Hannay, ‘General Council and
Convention of Estates’, SHR 20 (1923), pp. 98–115 at p. 103.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2022
A. Blakeway, Parliament and Convention in the Personal Rule of
James V of Scotland, 1528–1542,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89377-4_2
24 A. BLAKEWAY

to the furnissing of the kingis grace thairto’.2 Despite an impressively pro-

ductive few days, the group of seventeen felt that further consultation was
required. Just before the group dispersed, a parliament was summoned to
meet in Edinburgh on 4 May ‘for certane materis’, whilst ‘ane generale
conventioun of all the lords’ was summoned to consider ‘certane greit
matteris to be auisit & consalit’ on 8 January.3 In the end, the convention
would make further provisions for a voyage to the Isles which never took
place, meanwhile, although treason cases were summoned to be heard in
parliament, negotiations outwith either parliament or convention meant
that none of these resulted in a conviction.
The November 1530 meeting is a good place to start this chapter
because it illustrates a number of the characteristics of conventions evident
throughout the personal rule. First, the subject matter with which the
November 1530 convention dealt was entirely typical: war, in this case a
military campaign against the Isles, and foreign relations, in this case, the
royal marriage. Second, this meeting was part of a series—whilst it took
some decisions, others were deferred to two larger future meetings.
Decisions surrounding, for instance, a campaign, were taken, refined and
implemented over multiple gatherings. Parliament, conventions of differ-
ent sizes and the council all worked together as part of the process whereby
this occurred. In our November 1530 example, the convention took a
broad decision surrounding the necessity of a voyage to the Isles, but sum-
moned a larger convention to make further provisions and a parliament to
deal with the anticipated judicial aftermath. Third, James’s absence from
the sederunt, despite the fact he was in the town where the convention
was held, is striking. Sederunt lists were not always accurate; certainly
James’s mother was occasionally left off these during her regency, but it
seems unlikely that if the King participated in decision making only the
lords would receive credit.4 As we shall see, it is very hard indeed to find
evidence of James attending many conventions at all, and this fits into a
broader picture of his absence from council and meetings of the lords of
the articles. James V, it seems, was not a meetings man, but this pattern
prompts questions about how he was appraised of the discussions held in
his absence, as well as raising important comparisons with his successors.
Finally, this convention imposed a tax on the third estate even though no

2
NRS CS5/41 f.118v; ADCP, p. 342.
3
NRS CS5/41 f.121v; ADCP, p. 343.
4
Amy Blakeway, Regency in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Woodbridge, 2015), p. 72.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 25

burgh representatives had been summoned. Nevertheless, several bur-

gesses, namely the comptroller, Robert Barton, and the future clerk regis-
ter, James Foulis, were present in their capacity as members of the council.
The presence of burgesses in such prominent roles, even if only from
Edinburgh, marks a sharp point of contrast with the ‘minor posts’ they
had occupied in the relatively recent past.5 The prominent role of burgess
councillors attending this and other conventions cannot be construed as
equivalent to summons being issued to representatives from all or even
some of the burghs—conventions which included burgess councillors
were not equivalent to meetings of the three estates. However, the pres-
ence of Edinburgh men, albeit wearing different hats, would have facili-
tated contact with the third estate and allowed the regime to test the
waters of the capital’s opinion.
The November 1530 meeting is also a good place to start because it
exposes some of the methodological and conceptual difficulties which
need to be addressed in a study of conventions in James’s personal rule,
and some of the historiographical assumptions which require interroga-
tion. Conventions in this period are a tricky subject because, firstly, no
contemporary definition exists. Secondly, the Scots employed a range of
terms to describe meetings and it is not immediately clear how they related
to each other, to the terms employed in the late fifteenth and late sixteenth
centuries, or to the names chosen by historians to describe these meetings
at various times—terminology will therefore be an important recurring
theme throughout this chapter. In the case of November 1530, there is no
hint this meeting was special in the register of the lords of council and ses-
sion, where it was recorded. Yet, the payments for messengers charged
with issuing invitations refer to the meeting as a ‘convention’.6 On this
basis, it was included in the one serious study of conventions in James’s
personal rule to date, by R. K. Hannay.7 Hannay considered that two
meetings were held in quick succession at this juncture since two sets of
summons were issued—the first was held ‘at the secretatis first hamecum-
myng’ summons for which were issued on 1 October and another to be
held ‘in Sanct Johnstoun’ summoned on 31 October. However, since the
secretary’s mission was discussed in detail on 9 November in Perth—the

5
Roland Tanner, ‘The Lords of the Articles before 1540: a reassessment’, Scottish Historical
Review 79 (2000), pp. 189–212 at p. 198.
6
NRS E21/24 f.36r.
7
Hannay, ‘General Council and Convention of Estates’, p. 103.
26 A. BLAKEWAY

meeting for which the 31 October summons was issued—and there is no

record of earlier discussions of his mission, it is unclear if we are indeed
looking at two meetings or one. Since the 9 November meeting was, as we
shall see, relatively small for a convention, if there had been an earlier
meeting to plan for this, it must have been very exclusive indeed. Our
problems with establishing the order of events are exacerbated since
Albany’s commission to negotiate for Catherine’s marriage and participate
in discussions at Rome regarding recent incursions in Hungary by the
Turks—in other words, the documents apparently arising from the con-
vention—are dated 2 November, a week before the convention discussed
this on 9 November.8 There are two possibilities to explain this. It could
have arisen as a result of a record-keeping error: either the letters were
misdated when copied into the royal letter book in which they survive or
the council register recorded the meeting on the wrong date. Alternatively,
it is possible that the ‘convention of the lords at the secretaries first hame-
cummyng’ made a decision and began the paperwork on 2 November, for
approval by the ‘convention of the lordis in Sanct Johnestoun’ on 9
November.9 Regardless of the actual order of events, this illustrates the
significant difficulties in pinning down when exactly things happened.10
The size and composition of the meeting also raises important ques-
tions. The group comprised just shy of twenty men, all of whom were
regular councillors, this, combined with the fact its activities were recorded
in the council register, fits neatly with Hannay’s broader assessment that
conventions were ‘extensions of the standing or privy council in various
degrees’.11 This statement raises two points about the relationship between
conventions and council. The first is constitutional: conventions derived
their authority from the council. Throughout this book, we will see
instructions issued by conventions described as coming ‘from the council’.
Indeed, in 1529, a royal letter making an appointment to the council
explained that the new appointee would ‘be ane of oure cunsale and haue
place thairof in oure sessioune chekkir general counsale and all uthir tymis
as accords’.12 General council, another term for a convention, was here

8
LJV, pp. 181–183.
9
NRS E21/24 f.36r.
10
For this convention: NRS CS5/41 f.119r. The only obvious misordering in the register
in this portion is f. 120r when details of a private legal matter heard on 31 October in Stirling
are inserted in the midst of materials dated from the convention in Perth. ADCP, pp. 342–3.
11
Hannay, ‘General Council and Conventions of Estates’, p. 102.
12
NRS CS5/39 f.155r; ADCP, p. 307.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 27

classed with the session and exchequer as groups which ultimately derived
their authority from the council.
The fact conventions derived their authority from the council of course
meant that councillors were entitled to attend. However, this raises
another, practical, concern: the issue of attendance. Even though council-
lors often attended in large numbers they did not necessarily dominate
attendance at a convention since these meetings could sometimes match a
parliament in size. This means that despite the close connections between
convention and council, in terms of overlapping personnel, the roots of
their authority and shared record keeping, the largest of James’s conven-
tions cannot be characterised as their namesakes later in the century were,
as comprising ‘the privy council augmented by whoever happened to be at
court, or by one or two magnates who had been specially summoned’.13
They were varied beasts and, at their largest, were carefully planned
national-sized gatherings. Indeed, whilst the November 1530 convention
was a slightly augmented regular council in terms of size, the convention
it summoned for the following January was attended by thirty-five, the
size of a small parliament. Both of these conventions are listed, alongside
parliaments, other conventions and conventions of the burghs in table A1,
whilst attendance at conventions is broken down by social group and indi-
viduals in tables A2 and A3, all of which appear in Appendix A.
The November 1530 convention summoned the January 1531 con-
vention on fifty-five days’ notice. This points to another area where previ-
ous claims about conventions require revisiting. To date, explanations of
the ways in which conventions were useful to government have laid signifi-
cant emphasis on the fact conventions were flexible and did not share the
parliamentary minimum summons period of forty days.14 In James’s per-
sonal rule, some conventions were indeed summoned at short notice but
others were carefully planned far in advance—these were actively chosen
instead of a parliament, and were not a faut de mieux second-choice sub-
stitute convenient for their flexibility. Observing that conventions were

13
Alan R. MacDonald, ‘Consultation and Consent Under James VI’, Historical Journal 54
(2011), pp. 287–306 at p. 289.
14
Hannay, ‘General Council and Convention of Estates’, pp. 109–110; R. K. Hannay, ‘On
“parliament” and “general council”’ SHR 18 (1921), pp. 157–70 at p. 166; Norman
Macdougall, ‘The Estates in Eclipse? Politics and Parliaments in the Reign of James IV’ in
Keith M. Brown and Roland J. Tanner (eds), Parliament and Politics in Scotland: 1235–1560
(Edinburgh, 2004), pp. 145–159 at 156–8; Irene O’Brien, ‘The Scottish Parliament in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Glasgow, 1980), p. 159.
28 A. BLAKEWAY

held on both short and long notice and might themselves summon parlia-
ments allows us to explore the relationship between these different sorts
of bodies and their roles in the Scottish polity whilst sidestepping out-
moded, and now overturned, understandings of the two bodies as ‘rivals’.
In exploring these relationships, we should not expect them to be set in
stone since the practice and structure of Scottish government changed
substantially between the late fifteenth and late sixteenth century. Even so
the fulcrum on which it turned was always the council. The first section of
this chapter briefly explores the changes to the royal council in this period
and reminds us of its central role in government before turning to the
mysterious committee of ‘lords of the articles and council’ whose activities
can be found in the records of both parliament and council. Despite recent
scholarship emphasising the independence of the committee of the articles
from the crown in other chronological contexts, the existence of this
group affirms that during the 1530s, the committee of the articles could
on occasion closely resemble the council. This meant that parliament
offered a space for secret as well as open discussions. Having shown that
the council could shape shift and manifest itself in the committee of the
articles in parliament, we move on to see the central role it occupied in
conventions. The middle section of this chapter therefore asks, given
Hannay’s observations about the close relationship between council and
convention, how we might identify conventions as distinct from a normal
council meeting. Two methods of delineation emerge—nomenclature and
size in comparison to other types of meetings. These two sections provide
the basis for the third and final portion of the chapter which moves on to
identify when conventions occurred and, briefly, why they were sum-
moned—building on Macdougall’s observation that the great councils of
James IV were summoned to deal with a ‘specific business’ or ‘affairs of
state’ it becomes apparent that this was also true of the variously named
conventions of the 1530s.15 Taking both these ‘old’ and ‘new’ conven-
tions together it is clear that conventions were held very frequently in the
early years of the personal rule, especially during the Anglo-Scottish war of
1532–3, but evidence for them declines after that. There is not sufficient
evidence to offer a definitive explanation for this, but possible reasons
include a decline in the activities for which conventions were needed in the
early years of the personal rule, changes to the structure of the council and
changes in record-keeping practices. Whilst providing a final answer on

15
Macdougall, James IV, p. 191.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 29

this question is impossible, it is amply clear that consultative processes

were taken very seriously in the Scotland of James V and that conventions,
both in their form of augmented council gatherings and in their other
manifestation as national-sized gatherings, were a central component of
government. Even so, James himself was only very rarely in attendance at
such meetings, and the final section of the chapter considers why this was
the case. James’s absence in itself points to an important distinction
between the process of obtaining counsel, which emphasised listening to
diverse voices, and the practicalities of converting this into governing,
which required a single decision and a unified approach to its implementa-
tion. It also hints at the importance which James’s closest councillors must
have assumed as they facilitated contact between the monarch and the
range of consultative fora which they coordinated.

Lords of Council and of the Articles

The giving and receiving of counsel was a central facet of political life in
numerous early modern European polities and Scotland was no exception.
Nobles were understood to be possessed of a natural right to counsel their
monarchs and they, in their turn, took counsel on how to exercise their
lordship well.16 For example, James’s half-brother Moray requested his
own council of four or six ‘wyse men and of experience in weir’ to advise
on the military campaign against England when he took on the position
of lieutenant in January 1533.17 To this, the King’s council (on which
Moray himself sat) readily acquiesced, allowing Moray to choose four or
five men from each quarter of Scotland to serve in succession, to whom
the King would make additions. Whilst defined groups were an important
way of giving and receiving counsel, this activity did not automatically
necessitate an institutional framework. John Mair and Hector Boece prof-
fered their Latin histories as a source of exemplar to James, Bellenden’s
translation of Boece was likewise intended to edify and inform, and Sir
David Lindsay’s poetry mingled humour with clear directions on the
desirability (or otherwise) of various monarchical behaviours, as well as

16
For an example of a noble taking counsel, J. E. A. Dawson, The Politics of Religion in the
age of Mary, Queen of Scots (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 64–5, 104.
17
NRS CS6/2 f.38r.
30 A. BLAKEWAY

reflecting on the correct comportment for a counsellor.18 These performed

and printed works were widely shared addresses to the monarch—when it
came to in-person advice-giving, however, counsel was by its nature a
secret activity, designed to aid the monarch in decision making, which
might take place within or outwith the institution of a council.19 James’s
regime appears to have got the message—the need to consult with the
magnates served as a handy excuse to delay responding to the papacy on a
request for contributions to a crusade, conciliar anxiety was cited as a rea-
son for James declining Henry VIII’s invitation to visit him at York, and
even the matter of the Scottish staple port might be deferred until ‘the
magnates and those interested’ had been consulted.20 On all these occa-
sions, delay or avoidance offered James clear political advantages, but the
fact this excuse was deployed at least shows the regime talked the talk. The
fact the excuse was considered believable suggests it also walked the walk.
In the context of a broader study of ideas surrounding counsel in the
early sixteenth century, Roger Mason has observed how striking it is that
during the reigns of James IV and James V, a broad agreement that coun-
sel was important did not lead to the development of a constitutional
model with a clearly delineated built-in place for counsel—even when con-
temporaries were faced with the ‘aggressively predatory kingship’ of these
two monarchs.21 This failure to develop notions of the importance of
counsel into the basis of system for controlling Kings, Mason further sug-
gests, was not only a mark of contrast with the later sixteenth century, but
actually a sign that the existing system was working well. Because James IV
and James V understood their duty to take counsel, utilising both a rela-
tively flexible institutional context and advice giving outwith institutions,

18
J. H. Burns, True Law of Kingship: concepts of monarchy in early modern Scotland
(Oxford, 1996), pp. 54–92; A. A. MacDonald, ‘William Stewart and the Court Poetry of the
reign of James V’ in Janet Hadley Williams (ed.), Stewart Style: essays on the court of James V
(East Linton, 1996), pp. 179–100 at pp. 184–192; Janet Hadley Williams, ‘David Lindsay
and the Making of King James V’, in Stewart Style, pp. 201–226; Carol Edington, Court and
culture in renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (Amherst (MA), 1994).
19
Claire Hawes, ‘Community and Public Authority in later fifteenth-century Scotland’
(unpublished PhD thesis, St Andrews, 2015), pp. 91–5; Roger Mason, Kingship and the
Commonweal (East Linton, 1998), pp. 15–19.
20
LJV pp. 212, 152. Blakeway, ‘Privy Council of James V’, p. 36.
21
Roger Mason, ‘Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath: kingship, counsel and consent in
late medieval and early modern Scotland’, in Stephen Boardman and Julian Goodare (eds),
Kings, lords and men in Scotland and Britain, 1300–1625: essays in honour of Jenny Wormald
(Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 265–282 at 278–9.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 31

father and son consulted their way to contentment. Such (literally) off-­
the-­record counsel is notoriously tricky to recover, yet hints and gaps in
institutional records allow us to half-glimpse some of the conversations
which must have taken place outwith minuted meetings.22 The summons
to small groups or individuals which litter the treasurers’ accounts can
reveal requests for ad hoc advice just as they help expose conventions. For
example, a letter delivered to Moray in January 1534 summoned him ‘to
avyse apon the ambassatoris depesche’, and it is possible that in cases
where no reason for a summons was given, such as the three bishops sum-
moned in August that year, that an advisory purpose was also intended.23
Small meetings between James and an individual or small groups would
have offered the advantages of swift, secret and specialised counsel. Much
historiographical emphasis has, rightly, been placed on the significance of
such extra-institutional counsel—especially in an English context as part
of a broader revisiting of the central place accorded to the privy council in
G. R. Elton’s ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ thesis—and the focus on
institutions in this book is in no way an attempt to sideline the important
counsel which James must have received as he hunted or hawked, gambled
or dined.24
Nevertheless, the royal council was consistently available to offer advice,
and this body changed significantly during the course of the sixteenth
century. Fifteenth-century monarchs were equipped with relatively small
‘daily’ councils responsible largely for patronage and administration which
constituted the ‘core’ of a larger body which met more occasionally.
Chalmers shows this larger body was known as a ‘secret council’, whose
membership was a slightly slimmed-down version of the ‘great council’ of
all tenants in chief and had taken an oath to give true counsel. This secret
council met only at the King’s specific command and hardly ever, if at all,
22
For the difficulties of extra-institutional counsel: Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Problem of
Political Counsel in Medieval and Early Modern England and Scotland’ in Jacqueline Rose
(ed.), The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286–1707 (Oxford, 2016),
pp. 2, 9–10.
23
TA 6, pp. 219, 223; NRS E21/28 ff. 53v, 55v.
24
The following is a small sample of a large literature: Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, The Tudor
revolution in government: administrative changes in the reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge:
1953); Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, ‘Tudor government: the points of contact, 2: The Council’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 25. (1975) 195–211; DeLloyd J. Guth
and J. W. McKenna (eds), Tudor rule and revolution; essays for G.R. Elton from his American
friends (Cambridge, 1982); Christopher Coleman and David Starkey (eds), Revolution reas-
sessed: revisions in the history of Tudor government and administration (Oxford, 1986).
32 A. BLAKEWAY

as a whole group.25 Whilst Chalmers saw that the daily council, whose
membership included royal officers, might offer some advice, he consid-
ered that this was largely administrative in nature as opposed to political.26
More recently, Claire Hawes has offered an important corrective and
shown that the daily councillors are also likely to have offered political
advice.27 Indeed, given that offering counsel was an activity best under-
taken away from prying eyes and listening ears, even, perhaps, on an indi-
vidual basis, daily councillors were well placed to offer it.28 Certainly, by
Mary’s personal rule, the group met regularly, embraced its advisory role
and, indeed, developed more agency to act on its own.29 Hawes’s com-
ments allow for greater continuity between the Marian council and its
predecessors.
James V’s personal rule was an important stage on this journey of con-
ciliar development. In 1532, the college of justice was endowed. Although
the details of this and its implications for various judicial and political
developments have long provoked debate, for our present purposes what
matters is the consensus surrounding the changes to the council which it
entailed.30 The foundation of the college of justice effectively segregated
the council’s judicial business from its other duties. Thereafter, individuals
outwith the specifically selected group of legally qualified clerics and lay
lawyers were debarred from the council’s judicial sessions.31 Although its
origins lay in the council’s judicial sessions, the court of session was hence-
forth separate and enjoyed a jurisdiction as Scotland’s supreme central civil
court which it exercised as distinct from the council.32 At least at first,
however, the two bodies continued to share a register. Indeed, the changes
to the session in May 1532 were not even marked by a new book—as
Athol Murray has shown, record keeping continued uninterrupted in the
same volume, and the current archival organisation was created as a result

25
T. M. Chalmers, ‘The King’s Council, Patronage and the Governance of Scotland,
1460–1513’ (unpublished PhD, Aberdeen, 1982), pp. 18, 90–1.
26
Chalmers, ‘King’s Council’, pp. 90–2.
27
Hawes, ‘Community and Public Authority’, p. 114.
28
Hawes, ‘Community and Public Authority’, pp. 94–95.
29
Goodare, Government of Scotland, pp. 131–2.
30
For a summary of these debates see: A. M. Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland:
the Origins of a Civil Court (Leiden, 2009), pp. 94–105.
31
Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland, pp. 131–4.
32
Godfrey, Civil Justice in Renaissance Scotland, chapters 5–7.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 33

of nineteenth-century interventions.33 Nevertheless, what has not been

sufficiently appreciated to date is the way in which types of business could
be distinguished within the same register—both before and after the foun-
dation of the college of justice. During the early years of the personal rule,
the non-judicial business in the council register often appears in a different
hand, with the entries further demarcated by subtle differences in layout.
More space was taken by scribes, with a clearer, less squashed layout on the
page.34 Sometimes, such entries are identified in the left-hand margin by a
small circle: these may have been for speedy identification or provide evi-
dence of a more ambitious type of administrative project which required
their extraction and copying out.35 Such alterations in layout suggest
either different clerks associated with the entries, or a deliberate attempt
to distinguish types of activities from each other, or both. Either way, this
is more evidence for the distinctive identities held by each portion of the
council.
The picture of the council which the session left behind is murkier but
nevertheless one of change. At the start of James V’s personal rule, a series
of attempts were made to provide the King with a group of councillors to
accompany him on a personal basis and these appear to have begun as an
attempt to manage the transition from the Douglas regime to James’s own
rule.36 Between 1532 and 1534, there is no evidence for conciliar reorgan-
isation, but in 1535, parliament passed an act creating a council for the
commonweal. The term commonweal had, as Mason has shown, multiple
layers of meaning in 1530s Scotland.37 It appeared with frequency in the
translation of Hector Boece’s history which James V had commissioned
from John Bellenden amongst other literature of the period, and was used
to mean either the welfare of a community under discussion or that

33
Athol Murray, ‘Introduction’ to Alma B. Calderwood (ed.), Acts of the Lords of Council,
1501–1503, iii, (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. xiii-xv. See also: Margaret D. Young, ‘The age of the
Deputy Clerk Register, 1806–1928’, SHR 53 (1974), pp. 157–93 at pp. 162–6.
34
For a change of layout on the same date see NRS CS6/1 ff. 117v–118r.
35
Amy Blakeway, ‘Reassessing the Scottish Parliamentary Records, 1528–1548: manu-
script, print, bureaucracy and royal authority’, Parliamentary History 40 (2021),
pp. 417–442 at p. 441.
36
Blakeway, ‘Privy Council of James V’, pp. 30–2.
37
Mason, ‘Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath’, pp. 275–6; Roger A. Mason, Kingship
and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East
Linton, 1998), chapters 2–3. For this in an English context see: P. Withington et al.,
‘Commonwealth: the social, cultural, and conceptual contexts of an early modern keyword’,
Historical Journal 54: 3 (2011) pp. 659–87.
34 A. BLAKEWAY

c­ ommunity itself.38 In Bellenden’s translation ‘commonweal’ and ‘impe-

rial’ appeared alongside each other: this fact draws our attention to the
point that, as in the fifteenth century, notions of the common good
emerged in tandem with claims to enhanced royal authority.39
The exact remit envisaged for this council is unclear, but perhaps sur-
prisingly in 1536, the rebels participating in the English Pilgrimage of
Grace nearly echoed the language when they called for ‘a [council] be had
for the cummunwelthe’.40 The Pilgrims clearly conceptualised their coun-
cil for the commonwealth as a body which would give advice for the good
of the country and its people staffed by noble-born councillors who would
value ‘the communwelth abuffe their princes lo[ve]’. This, then, was a
rejection of the small group of (low-born) councillors which had coalesced
about Henry VIII and, the Pilgrims perceived, usurped the places of the
ancient nobility. Scotland, however, was not their inspiration, since they
explained their point of comparison was ‘the cunsell off Parys in France’,
a body which likened itself to the Roman senate and as such saw itself as a
check on crown power.41 It seems unlikely that comparable concerns to
those of the Pilgrims lay behind the Scottish council for the common-
wealth, and a more plausible interpretation is that the council was set up
to deal with concerns relating to the commonwealth—in other words,
either to Scotland as a country or to the common good of the people who
inhabited it.42 Its activities were recorded in its own, no longer extant,
register.43 The existence of this register suggests that, like the session, the

38
Ryoko Harikae, ‘Kingship and Imperial Ideas in the Chronicles of Scotland’, in Janet
Hadley Williams and J. Derrick McClure (eds), Fresche fontanis: studies in the culture of medi-
eval and early modern Scotland (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013), pp. 217–29.
39
Ibid.; Ryoko Harikae, ‘Daunting the isles, borders, and highlands: Imperial kingship in
John Bellenden’s Chronicles of Scotland and the Mar Lodge translation’, in Joanna Martin
and Emily Wingfield (eds), Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance 1420–1587
(Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 159–70; Hawes, ‘Community and public authority in
later fifteenth-century Scotland’, p. 136.
40
L&P XI no. 1244; John Guy, ‘The rhetoric of counsel in early modern England’, in Dale
Hoak (ed.), Tudor political culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
pp. 292–310 at p. 297.
41
John Guy, ‘The King’s Council and Political Participation’ in Alistair Fox and John Guy,
Reassessing the Henrician Age (Oxford, 1986), pp. 121–47 at p. 138.
42
Mason, ‘Beyond the Declaration of Arbroath’, pp. 275–6.
43
LJV, p. 233; Blakeway, ‘Reassessing’, p. 440.
 2 COUNCIL AND CONVENTIONS 35

advisory/administrative council was developing over this period, but its

loss means that the contours of this change remain obscure.
During the very early years of the personal rule, a series of lists outlined
who was to sit upon various iterations of the secret council, but no such
provisions were made to accompany the parliamentary act of 1535. This
distinction might point to the increasing personal authority of the King as
he grew older and more established, equally, it is possible that James made
his appointments to this council in consultation with the men who advised
him to create it. If their names were noted anywhere, the record which is
most likely to have been employed is the now lost secret council register.
For comparison, the latest dated extant secret council list, dating from
June 1531, appointed five bishops and two abbots, one earl, three lords
and ten individuals without a major ecclesiastical or lay title but who had
accrued either one of the crown offices or a role as a legal expert.44 Whilst
all of these men did appear regularly on council sederunts, there are some
surprising omissions—notably William Graham, earl of Montrose. Even
so, this gives us a rough sense of what James’s secret council was like. The
prominence of secular men, whether lairds or burgesses who may have
become lairds, fits neatly into Roger Mason’s broader observations sur-
rounding the ‘laicisation’ of culture, the law, and administrative activities
in this period.45 Mason has already shown how the educational pathways
which these men followed facilitated the development of a robust sense of
Imperium in Scotland in this period and has pointed to the influence of
the secretary, Sir Thomas Erskine, on the specific development of the col-
lege of justice project. Sir James Foulis of Colinton’s career offers some
parallels in another sphere—as clerk register Foulis worked under Erskine
in maintaining the crown’s records. However, this extended to developing
those records—including responsibility for the new secret council register,
compiling loose diplomatic correspondence into letterbooks and prepar-
ing the printed edition of parliamentary acts.46 Foulis also delivered letters
on James’s behalf to the council and spoke for him in parliament.47 Himself
a burgess, he acted as James’s envoy to Edinburgh burgh council.48 These
services rendered are shadowed in the registers of the seals by grants to

44
NRS CS5/42 f.185v.
45
Mason, Kingship and the Commonweal, pp. 104–38.
46
Blakeway, ‘Reassessing’, pp. 440–1.
47
NRS CS5/42 f.4v; RPS, 1540/12/27. Date accessed: 21 August 2020.
48
Edin. Recs. II, p. 109.
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Title: Am Rhein

Author: Heinrich Hubert Kerp

Release date: February 5, 2024 [eBook #72878]

Language: German

Original publication: Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1908

Credits: Peter Becker, Marc-André Seekamp and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AM RHEIN

***
Land und Leute
Monographien
zur Erdkunde
 Land und Leute
Monographien
zur Erdkunde
In Verbindung mit Anderen
herausgegeben von A. Scobel

10

Am Rhein

1908
Bielefeld und Leipzig
Verlag von Velhagen & Klasing
 Am Rhein
von H. Kerp
Mit 192 Abbildungen nach photographischen
Aufnahmen und einer farbigen Karte
Zweite Auflage

1908
Bielefeld und Leipzig
Verlag von Velhagen & Klasing
Druck von Fischer & Wittig in Leipzig.
 Inhalt.
Seite
I. Einleitung 3
II. Zur geologischen Einführung 6
III. Das Mainzer Becken, der Rheingau und der Taunus 18
IV. Das Rheintal von Rüdesheim bis Coblenz 48
V. Der Hunsrück nebst dem Nahe-, Saar- und Moseltale 78
VI. Das Rheintal von Coblenz bis Bonn 110
Der Westerwald nebst dem Sieg- und Lahntale und das
VII.
Siebengebirge 130
VIII. Die Eifel 157
IX. Die Kölner Bucht und das Bergische Land 164
X. Der rheinische Weinbau 185

Literatur 193
Verzeichnis der Abbildungen 194
Register 197
Karte der Rheinlande.
 Abb. 1. Rolandseck, Nonnenwerth und Siebengebirge.
Nach einer Photographie von Stengel & Co. in Berlin. (Zu Seite 123.)
 I. Einleitung.
Am Rhein! Welche Fülle von Vorstellungen, von
Gedanken und Empfindungen wird beim Klange Einleitung.
dieses Wortes in uns geweckt! Das Auge schaut
herrliche Landschaftsbilder, die neben dem Schönsten auf Erden
noch in Schönheit strahlen; das Ohr lauscht den weihevollen
Rheinliedern, die von dem Tiefsten, was die deutsche Brust gefühlt,
sprechen, die bald von klagendem Schmerz, bald von stolzer
Siegesfreude erzählen oder in den Traum der Sage den Übermut
eines fröhlichen Lebens mischen; und der Geist, der die Spuren des
Raumes und der Zeit gleich schnell durchmißt, faßt all das Große
und Schöne, das Ernste und Heitere, was die Vergangenheit
brachte, was die Gegenwart bietet und die Zukunft zu erhoffen läßt,
zusammen und weiht den Strom, der Deutschlands Stolz und seines
Landes Schönheit ist, zu einem Sinnbild, das alle deutschen Lande
und alle deutschen Bruderstämme mit dem Bande ewiger Einigkeit
und Treue umfaßt. Das ist der Rhein, und das bedeutet sein Name,
und so wird auch sein Name überall, nicht bloß im deutschen
Vaterlande, sondern auch in der übrigen Welt verstanden und
gedeutet. Darum lockt er die Menschen, führt fröhlich sie von Ort zu
Ort, von Stadt zu Stadt und läßt traurig sie weiter ziehen. Für
Tausende und Millionen aber bleibt er ein ewiger Traum, der nie sich
erfüllen ließ, ein Traum, der selbst bei anderen Völkern lebt, zu
denen die Wellen der geheimnisvoll plaudernden Myth’ und Sage,
der laut redenden Geschichte schlugen und des schönen
Rheinlands begeisternde Kunde drang. Davon ein Beispiel!
Es war am Empfangsabende des Internationalen Geologen-
Kongresses zu Petersburg im Jahre 1897. In einem großen
Restaurant in der Demidowstraße hatten sich die Teilnehmer aus
aller Herren Ländern eingefunden. Das war für viele ein frohes
Wiedersehen! Das Stimmengewirr der zahlreichen Gruppen, die sich
an den Tischen und dem reichgedeckten Büfett gebildet hatten,
durchdrang die gastlichen Räume. Im frohen Austausch der
Reiseerinnerungen und der weiteren Reisepläne und im Auffrischen
früherer Lebensbeziehungen vergingen schnell, nur zu schnell, die
schönen Stunden. Meine älteren deutschen Reisefreunde wollten
sich nun, gegen Mitternacht, verabschieden, und den
protestierenden jungen russischen Herren, die in liebenswürdiger
Weise uns an unserem Tische Gesellschaft geleistet hatten, wurde
ich als jüngster zurückgelassen, als das Opfer einer angenehmen
Pflicht. Wir rückten die Stühle näher zusammen und plauderten
weiter. Ich pries die gastliche Aufnahme, die uns in Rußland bereitet
wurde, und meine frohgestimmten Tischgenossen wollten wissen, in
welchem Teile Deutschlands ich wohne. Und als ich sagte: „Ich
wohne am Rhein!“ da riefen alle wie aus einem Munde: „O, so
erzählen Sie uns vom Rhein!“ Und ich erzählte von meinem
Heimatlande mit der Begeisterung, die der Vater Rhein mir in das
Herz gelegt hat, und mit dem Feuer, das ich in den Augen der
jungen Russen auflodern sah. Ich pries den stolzen Strom mit seinen
grünen Wellen, die Berge, die, rebenbekränzt, die alten Burgen
tragen, die rheinischen Städte, deren gewaltige Dome im Rheine
sich spiegeln, die freundlichen Dörfchen, die überall, manche
umschattet von Obsthainen, die Ufer des Stromes säumen, und
auch die rheinischen Mädchen und Frauen, die den fremden
Wanderer von der hohen Burgruine herab grüßen, wenn er muß
scheiden aus solchem Paradies. Als die Begeisterung überquoll, da
erklangen Rheinlieder, fern am Strande der Newá, beim lustigen
Klang der Gläser, die mit kaukasischem Wein gefüllt waren.
Wir saßen noch lange. Als wir endlich schieden, da fühlten auch
die jungen Russen etwas von jener Sehnsuchtsstimmung nach dem
Vater Rhein, die jeden Rheinländer erfaßt, wenn er in anderen
Erdenländern weilt. So oft ich noch von einer weiten Reise
zurückkehrte, war es mir beim Anblicke des stolzen Stromes, wenn
wieder die Türme des Kölner Doms vor mir erschienen und der Zug
polternd über die Rheinbrücke fuhr, als hätte ich etwas Verlorenes
wieder gewonnen. Und nach meiner Ankunft in Bonn war gewöhnlich
mein erster Gang an den Rhein und auf den Alten Zoll, wo ich die
Sieben Berge grüßen konnte. Am ersten freien und schönen
Nachmittage aber fuhr ich auf einem der stolzen Rheindampfer
stromaufwärts, als müßte ich mich überzeugen, ob all die
Herrlichkeit noch da wäre.

Abb. 2. Das Kölner Dombild. Altargemälde von Meister Stephan. (Zu Seite 5 u. 171.)

Diese einleitenden Worte mögen dem freundlichen Leser sagen,

mit welch freudigen Gefühlen ich der Aufforderung, für die
Sammlung geographischer Monographien die Bearbeitung des
Rheins und des Rheinischen Schiefergebirges zu übernehmen,
nachgekommen bin. War ich doch durch den Stoff ausgezeichnet vor
allen anderen! Durfte ich doch den Strom schildern und preisen, um
den zwischen den Völkern so oft und so heiß gestritten worden ist,
der durch die Weihe der Geschichte für jeden Deutschen zum
heiligen Strom geworden ist, so daß der Klang seines Namens heute
das Losungswort, das Triumphgeschrei deutscher Einigkeit, Freiheit
und Stärke bedeutet.
 Abb. 3. Frankfurt im 17. Jahrhundert (nach Merian). (Zu Seite 20.)

Wie ich an jenem Abende in Petersburg in einer frohen Stunde

den jungen Russen — es waren Studenten der Bergakademie und
Anthropologen — von der Herrlichkeit des Rheines erzählen durfte,
so möchte ich auch dem freundlichen Leser von Land und Leuten
am Rhein wenn auch kein vollständiges, so doch ein in seiner
Eigenart ausgeprägtes Bild zu geben versuchen. Es ist das Bild
einer ruhmreichen Vergangenheit und einer nicht weniger
glanzvollen Gegenwart, ein Bild, dessen einzelne Züge durch Sage
und Dichtung so verklärt sind, daß uns Wonne umgibt fast überall,
wohin wir schauen. Wir sehen in den Städten die herrlichen Dome
ragen, und andachtsvoll betreten wir die Stätten, wo hochvollendete
Kunstschöpfungen zu Thronen des Himmlischen und Göttlichen
wurden. Wir durchwandern die einzelnen Blütezeiten der rheinischen
Kunst, im Geiste und in der Wirklichkeit. Aus den Gräbern steigt das
glänzende Bild der römischen Kultur mit seinen Lagern, Kastellen,
Brücken, Straßen, Wasserleitungen, Tempeln und
reichgeschmückten Landhäusern; wir schauen das Bild der
Frankenzeit mit seinen Königshöfen oder Pfalzen und den ältesten
christlichen Gotteshäusern; reicher, in staunenerregender Fülle
entfaltet sich uns der Kulturschmuck des eigentlichen Mittelalters,
der Zeit, die die herrlichen Dome schuf, die von dem gemütvollen
romanischen Baustile nach interessanten Übergängen fortwanderte
zur stolzen, himmelanstrebenden Gotik, die auch die prächtigen
Burgen auf die Rebenhöhen setzte und die reichgeschmückten
Rathäuser in den Städten baute, die ferner durch Künstlerhand
wertvolle Skulpturen und geschätzte Malereien (Abb. 2) entstehen
ließ; endlich, nach einer Zeit traurigen Verfalls, sehen wir, in einer
glücklichen Gegenwart, eine neue Blütezeit der Kultur anbrechen,
eine Zeit, die mit Verständnis das Alte durchforscht und wie ein
Schatz hütet und wahrt, die zugleich neue Züge dem Gesamtbilde
zufügt und es besonders mit den menschenbeglückenden
Wunderwerken der neuzeitlichen Technik ausstattet. Einem kräftig
pulsierenden Leben sind diese Neuschöpfungen menschlichen
Könnens vornehmlich gewidmet, einem Leben, in dem ein rühriges
Streben mit rheinischem Frohsinn so glücklich sich paart, wie es
wohl auch in den früheren Kulturzeiten, die das rheinische Land
schaute, gewesen ist und in dem sonnigen Lande der Reben auch
nicht anders sein kann. Dorthin mögen die freundlichen Leser froh
mit mir wandern, möge auch der rheinische Dichter Karl Simrock
zurück uns winken mit den launigen Worten:

„An den Rhein, an den Rhein, zieh’ nicht an den Rhein,

Mein Sohn, ich rate dir gut!“
 Abb. 4. Frankfurt, von Sachsenhausen gesehen.
Nach einer Photographie von Sophus Williams in Berlin. (Zu Seite 20.)

Von der alten Kaiserstadt Frankfurt am Main und vom alten

goldenen Mainz soll die Wanderung uns führen durch die
Rebengefilde des Rheingaues, durch das herrliche Rheintal selbst
und durch die nicht minder schönen Nebentäler der Nahe, der Saar,
der Mosel, der Lahn, der Ahr, der Sieg und der Wupper, sowie durch
die schönsten Gegenden des Rheinischen Schiefergebirges, durch
das jene Täler tiefe Furchen gezogen haben, bis hin nach
Düsseldorf, der jung strahlenden Kunststadt am Rhein, und nach
Aachen, der alten Kaiserstadt.
 Abb. 5. Der Kaisersaal im Römer zu Frankfurt.
Nach einer Photographie von Ludwig Klement in Frankfurt. (Zu Seite 20.)
 II. Zur geologischen Einführung.
Zwar bedarf es nicht unbedingt der Führung
eines Naturforschers, um die Schönheit, mit der die Geologische
Oberfläche der Erde geschmückt ist, zu empfinden Einführung.
und zu genießen. Anderseits bin ich auch nicht der umgekehrten
Ansicht, daß beim Genießen des Schönen der Verstand fernzuhalten
sei als ein Störenfried, der manche Empfindungen, naive des Volkes,
die aber von der Poesie geliebt werden, verscheuchen könnte. Herz
und Verstand vertragen sich in den meisten Menschen recht gut
miteinander, und für Empfindungen, die beim Fragen nach
verborgenen Ursachen flüchten, melden im Herzen sich andere, die
sicheren Ursprung haben und unser Gefühlsleben noch wärmer
anhauchen. Auch die Geologie oder Erdgeschichte, die manches
Überlieferte, so auch den Drachen, der einst am Drachenfels hauste,
zur Fabel macht und manches Teufelswerk in der Natur einer
phantasieärmeren Wirklichkeit zurückgibt, entschädigt uns reichlich,
indem sie uns in dem Antlitz der Erde lebensvolle Züge zeigt, die wir
vorher nicht kannten, nicht sahen und nicht suchten. Es wird uns, als
wenn ein Marmorbild zu leben begänne. Der starre Fels, er haucht
Leben, indem er uns sagt, wie er geworden, seine Schichten, so
innig sie verbunden sind, entfliehen in verschiedene, weit
voneinander entfernte Zeiten, das verbrannte Gestein des Kraters
beginnt zu glühen, und Kiese und Sande, Lehm und Ton, die so wohl
gebettet sind, beginnen zu wandern und werden ein Spiel der Fluten.
Durch die unermeßlichen Räume der Zeiten eilt der Geist, die
Phantasie beginnt großartige Bilder der Vergangenheit zu gestalten,
zu denen der Verstand die Grundlinien eines Planes fand, und unser
Herz wird erfüllt von jenem Empfinden, das dem Werden alles
Großen sich beugt.
Wenn wir so auch das Antlitz unseres schönen
Rheinlandes, wie es aussah in früheren Erd- Die Variskischen
Alpen.
Epochen, im Geiste zu gestalten suchen, geleitet
von namhaften geologischen Forschern, so schauen wir ein
riesenhaftes Gebirge, ein Hochgebirge, das an die heutigen Alpen
erinnert. Von dem Ostende der mittelfranzösischen Gebirgsscholle
zog es sich in einem gewaltigen Bogen über Vogesen und
Schwarzwald, durch Süd-, West- und Mitteldeutschland, um den
Nordrand Böhmens herum bis zu den Karpathen hin. Nicht bloß
diese Hauptrichtung hatte es mit den ebenfalls bogenförmig
verlaufenden Alpen gemein. Es war wie diese auch ein einseitig
aufgebautes Kettengebirge, das auf der konvexen Südseite, wo die
höchsten Gipfel lagen, eine kristallinische Hauptzone, auf der
konkaven Nordseite eine breite Zone mächtig entwickelter
Sedimentgesteine besaß. Von dieser letzteren Zone des früheren
mitteleuropäischen Hochgebirges, das Sueß nach dem Lande der
alten Varisker, dem heutigen Vogtlande, Variskische Alpen genannt
hat, ist das Rheinische Schiefergebirge, durch welches später der
Rhein und seine Nebenflüsse ihre tiefen Furchen gezogen haben,
der Rest eines kleinen Gliedes, ein recht armseliger Rest; denn nur
das Fundament, der Sockel der einstigen Hochgebirgsfalten, blieb
unserer Zeit erhalten, genug noch, um daraus die Schönheit des
heutigen Rheinlandes zu gestalten.