Parliament and society in Scotland, 1560-1603

Scottish government, with parliament at its centre, was reconstructed in this period in a more centralized, absolutist mould. This led to a rejuvenation of parliament, which had been declining in the early sixteenth century. However, it also led to the growth of a parliamentary opposition that increasingly hampered the government. Parliament was a forum for the governing class to make policy, and for lobbying by interest groups, especially the three traditional estates. Burgesses, nobility and church all had their own assemblies feeding demands into parliament. Lairds (who entered parliament in 1587) and lawyers also developed lobbying mechanisms. Lobbying meant that private and public acts of parliament became inextricably interlinked. Administration and implementation of laws depended more on central institutions, bureaucratic and professional, like the emerging exchequer; these often conflicted with traditional local agencies of government. Statute law superseded the old medieval law codes; attempts to codify the latter failed. Inflation, and social trends like feuding, defeated attempts to reverse the decline in the crown's landed income. Parliamentary taxation became regular and far heavier, but attempts to revise the outdated assessment system failed, leaving tax rates hopelessly unequal. An increasing proportion of crown revenue was drawn from the commercial classes. Fiscal crises became regular and crown indebtedness desperate; the crown exploited a newly-emergent financial sector. Intervention in the economy continued to shore up the regulated, open market. Most laws regulated producers and merchants in the interests of the ruling class as consumers, focusing on an export licensing system; but there were moves (in policy on debt and usury, for instance) to encourage production and commerce. Social control was maintained, in a society increasingly divided ideologically, by official propaganda and new forms of censorship. Military policy was oriented towards suppressing internal dissent. A standing army was beyond the state's means, but with the decline of the old 'common army' there was an active quest for alternatives. Parliamentary action highlighted the periods shifting class divisions. With growing poverty and unemployment, the social threat of large-scale vagrancy led to the enactment of a poor law which, though ineffective in many ways, did allow the urban vagrancy problem to be tackled. However, despite parliament's ambivalence about the feuding that was undermining the feudal property structure, nothing effective was done to curb the resulting evictions or rent rises. The nobility's financial problems were alleviated by crown pensions, though they found it hard to abandon their traditional semi-independent status; but these pensions rested on the insecure basis of parliamentary taxation. Government was increasingly active - but increasingly unpopular