Chapter 4 - Scotland sui juris? Scottish Literature and the Marian Constitutional Crisis, 1567–1573

Summary

English critics know Mary Queen of Scots as a foreign, Catholic threat to England. Yet Mary’s deposition in 1567 was a Scottish constitutional crisis. It resulted in a war from 1567 to 1573 managed by William Cecil, who appealed to the Galfridian overlordship arguments of the 1540s invasion to justify England’s right to decide the Scottish succession. Chapter 4 traces English government involvement in Mary’s deposition and English military support for the King’s Men versus the Queen’s Men. It contrasts Scottish nationhood as portrayed in George Buchanan’s anti-Marian writings with the poetic collections and compositions of the Maitland family of Lethington. Buchanan’s justification of Mary’s deposition and forensic proof of Mary’s tyranny implicitly ceded an English jurisdictional right to decide Mary’s fate and Scotland’s succession. By contrast, the poetry of the Maitlands – both Thomas Maitland’s neo-Latin poems and Scots vernacular poems in The Maitland Quarto – articulated a commitment to Scotland’s sovereign autonomy and gave voice to the suffering of the Scottish commonweal and people through the wars of 1567-1573.