2 - Sovereignty, counsel, and consent in Scotland: Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis

Summary

Addressing King James IV of Scotland, the erstwhile English poet laureate John Skelton wrote:

Kynge Jamy, Jomy your Joye is all go

Ye summoned our kynge. Why dyde ye so?

To you no thyng it dyde accorde

To sommon our kynge your soverayne lorde. (lines 1–4)

It was 1513, the year of the Scots’ historic and devastating defeat at the Battle of Flodden, and James, according to Skelton, had made the cardinal mistake of putting the interests of the French and Danish kings before those of his ‘lorde and brother’, the Tudor monarch of England. James died in the Battle of Flodden, but the cultural and political destinies of Scotland and England continued to be dynastically and bloodily intertwined until the succession of the Stuarts to the English throne bound the two kingdoms together permanently. In particular, it was the rather catastrophic career of the Scottish monarch Mary Stuart that not only complicated the relations between the two kingdoms but also etched out the issues of tyranny and usurpation in sharp relief. This chapter, and the next, will focus on the development of political thought and political dramaturgy in Scotland both before and after the brief but tumultuous reign of Mary Stuart. I will analyse the question of tyranny and the radical construction of political counsel in Sir David Lyndsay's political morality Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Unlike English allegorical plays of the period, Lyndsay's play privileges the representative body of the people of Scotland over any abstract ideal of counsel. Alone among the writers of political moralities, Lyndsay locates legislative power in the three estates of Scotland collectively, and in so doing prises open the closed ranks of the privileged few endowed with political agency—at least within the space of the play. Thus, it provides a rather striking moment of prolepsis with respect to the later English play Gorboduc, which achieves this sort of widening of the political nation in the English context by including the Inns of Court within its purview.

Counselling the counsellors: Sir David Lyndsay's Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis

Near the end of the first part of Sir David Lyndsay's political morality play Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, Divine Correction, the divine agent sent by God to chasten the tyrant Rex Humanitas, declares:

I will do nocht without the conveining

Ane Parleament of the Estait[i]s all (1585–6)