Regency in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, by Amy Blakeway

Royal minorities in Scotland have traditionally received a bad press from a largely Anglocentric historiography that equated an infant monarch with a lack of effective government. Such minorities were characterised as faction-ridden, turbulent periods when the administration of justice was thrown into disarray and mighty magnates oppressed the land. As a result, the reputation of the regents that presided over these years was similarly tarnished: ineffective stop-gaps while their royal charges grew to adulthood at best, and at the worst venal, corrupt and prone to partisan factions. More recently, however, minorities and regents have had something of a make-over: Jenny Wormald identified the benefits of regencies in keeping the show going while acting as a stop-valve to relieve increasingly intensive monarchical pressure on magnatial power; and the development of the institutions of government through the sixteenth century during minorities, in their use of councils and parliaments, was traced by Julian Goodare. Amy Blakeway’s important and wide-ranging examination of all the sixteenth-century regencies puts the final nail in the coffin of outmoded understandings of bad regents and destabilising regencies.

Administration (probate law) · Economic history · Economic Justice · Government (linguistics) · Historiography · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Reputation · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy