3 - The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Monarchy

Summary

Charles II’s return to power was accompanied by a widespread determination that political authority should never again be allowed to disintegrate in the fatal manner that had unleashed the miseries of the recent civil wars. A renewed political Augustinianism dictated that government was essential to ‘bridle the Extravagancies of restless Mankind’, in the words of Mackenzie of Rosehaugh. Preaching a thanksgiving sermon to celebrate the restoration in 1660, the Aberdeen minister, Alexander Scrougie, confirmed that magistracy was so indispensable that ‘better no Creation, then no Government; better not to be at all, then not to be under Rule’. Since government represented the ‘vital spirits of humane Societies’, Bishop Andrew Honyman of Orkney therefore insisted that keen attention be paid to those ‘Nerves and Sinews’ in the body politic ‘without which there could be no right motion’.

Believing themselves to be subjects of the most ancient monarchy in the world, early modern Scots universally identified the monarch as the political authority to whom obligation was owed. In the 1580s, the absolutist lawyer, Adam Blackwood, had celebrated the Scottish monarchy’s antiquity and integrity by wondering if any other royal dynasty existed in the world that, having begun ‘nineteen hundred years ago in one nation, survives among them even today?’ Charles II’s restoration prompted the reiteration of such claims by royalist pamphleteers, eager to extol the fact that monarchy had been ‘the form of State Policy in Scotland neer these 2000 yeers’. In similar vein, Sir James Dalrymple, Viscount Stair, dedicated his weighty Institutions of the Law of Scotland to Charles in 1681, acknowledging that although Scotland might not rank among the most rich and potent kingdoms in the world, he doubted that any nation could rival the Scots’ adherence to ‘one blood and lineage, without any mixture … above 2000 years’.

Attachment to the Stuart monarchy could thus be perceived as axiomatic. As Mackenzie later observed of the Scots nation in his Restoration memoirs, ‘so remarkable was our loyalty to the world’, that it was ‘believed and presumed in all places where our nation travelled, whither in England or beyond Sea, that a Scot was still a Royalist’. In 1682, Alexander Mudie published an account of Scottish political affairs that he dedicated to Charles II’s natural son, the ten-year-old duke of Richmond, who had been appointed Governor of Dumbarton Castle the previous year.