This book, based on a fresh understanding of Scottish governmental records rooted in extensive archival research, offers the first study of these important institutions in a period of revived royal authority. The regime which emerges from these records is one which understood the power of consultation, adroitly using a range of groups from full parliaments to conventions of specialists and experts selected to deal with the matter in hand. Policies were crafted through not one single meeting but several types of gathering, ranging from small groups when secrecy was of the essence or complex details required to be hammered out, to elaborate large gatherings when the regime employed a performative strategy to disseminate information or legitimise its policies. Still more impressively, much of this was managed in the King's absence - James remained at a distance from many of these gatherings, relying on key officials such as the Chancellor or Clerk Register to relay counsel and the royal will. This emphasis on specialised, frequent consultation reflects concurrent developments in the council, whilst relocating debate surrounding the development of state and administrative structures in Scotland traditionally located in the late sixteenth-century into the 1530s. In tackling the development of parliament in Scotland and placing it in its proper context amongst many different forms of consultative meeting this book also speaks to subjects of European-wide concern: how far early modern Parliaments were used to impose or resist religious change, the pace of state formation, monarchical power and relations between monarchs and their subjects.

A study of the actions and responsibilities of those taking temporary power during the minority of a monarch. Three monarchs of Scotland (James V, Mary Queen of Scots, and James VI/I) were crowned during the sixteenth century; each came to the throne before their second birthday. Throughout all three royal minorities, the Scots remained remarkably consistent in their governmental preferences: that an individual should "bear the person" of the infant monarch, with all the power and risks that entailed. Regents could alienate crown lands, call parliament, raise taxes, and negotiate for the monarch's marriage, yet they also faced the potential of a shameful deposition from power and the assassin's gun. In examining the careers of the six men and two women who became regent in context with each other and contemporary expectations, Regency in Sixteenth-Century Scotland offers the first study of regency as a political office. It provides a major reassessment of both the office of regency itself and of individual regents. The developments in how the Scots thought about regency are charted, and the debates in which they engaged on this subject are exposed for the first time. Drawing on a broad archival base of neglected manuscript materials, ranging from financial accounts, to the justiciary court records, to diplomatic correspondence scattered from Edinburgh to Paris, the book reveals a greater level of continuity between the personal rules of the adult Stewarts and of their regents than has hitherto been appreciated. AMY BLAKEWAY is a Lecturer in Scottish History, University of St Andrews.