3 - Careers in the Household

Summary

The household imposed a structure on the court, and this structure broadly corresponded with a real group of people at court and a range of services they performed. This chapter examines how the people filling these roles entered the household and how they progressed within it. It looks at the careers of these people collectively by building up a picture of the overall composition of the household and how and why it changed across the reign. The household emerges as a key focus for those seeking the political, social and financial advantages that could come through attendance and association with the court.

The Composition of the Household

There must have been a variety of ways in which someone could become a member of the royal household that are invisible in surviving sources. It is, however, possible to speculate upon some of the most common means and how they varied between different groups with the wider definition of the household. The secular and ecclesiastical magnates of the lords temporal and spiritual must have owed their formal position as part of the household, in theory at least, to their role as the king's natural counsellors. The men holding the key offices in the administration of the realm were likely to have been appointed either due to political favour or administrative competence, or, in some cases, the holding of a hereditary office. Lower down in the hierarchy of the household, it appears that individuals could hold office based on a variety of criteria, such as political favour, personal favour or competence. However, in most cases the reason for someone's appointment either is not recorded or is hard to discern amidst formulaic language. Excellent work has been done by Norman Macdougall and others to discern the lines along which Scottish elite politics in this period were drawn, and thus provide logic for the directions in which power and patronage, including household office and membership, flowed. However, the purpose here is not to study that logic in detail for each member of the household. Rather, it is to study the broader patterns of household composition, looking at periods of sweeping change in the make-up of the household as well as the ways people entered and left the household or moved through different positions within it.