Scottish Historical Review - 1907 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Scottish Parliament, 1560-1707 PROFESSOR TERRY in his recent treatise has ably elucidated the form and working of the Scottish Parliament during the last ... more »century of its existence, and has traced the rise in earlier times of its burgh and shire members. He confines himself, however, to constitutional developments as they appear in the records, and does not include in his survey the external causes to which these effects were due. In this paper I propose to view the subject from without rather than from within, and to sketch in outline the action of political and ecclesiastical forces in moulding Parliament from the Reformation to the Union. The Scottish Parliament was a feudal, not a national, legislature, and its three estates—prelates, barons, and burgesses—sat together in one House, as it was natural that they should, since t1ll the reign of James VI. their right of attendance was one that was common to them all as the King's vassals. Lands held of a subject superior conferred no such right, and the only burghs represented were, in virtue of their charters, the ' free burghs royal.' The Reformation did not directly affect this system, but it set in motion certain tendencies which in the course of half a century were to alter materially both the constitution of Parliament and its relations to the Crown. The barons, and not, as might have been supposed, the prelates, were the first of the Estates to be re-organised under the new conditions. All freeholders or tenants-in-chief had legally the right—it was regarded rather as an irksome obligation—to attend the King's court, but the privilege was exercised almost exclusively by those of their number whose fiefs, without altering their parliamentary status, had been erected into earldoms or lordships. James I., in order t...« less