5 - Justice and Regency

Summary

On 5 August 1568, a proclamation was issued in an attempt to reassert Moray's authority. The regent and council were concerned that disobedience was increasing, including, most perturbingly, amongst those who had previously accepted the regent's authority, ‘alsweill in jugement as out with sitting in place of judgement, execut and judgment to his Hienes subjectis’. This concern neatly underscores the importance of justice to early modern regimes; since justice was rulers' paramount duty, it was vitally important that they were seen to dispense it. On the other side of the coin, subjects' participation in the judicial process revealed, at the least, that the state successfully exerted de facto coercive power. Moreover, in an age when alternatives to the courts existed, participation could also demonstrate a belief in the efficacy of a ruler's justice, and, by inference, an acceptance of the ruler's legitimacy as a de jure governor. When, as occurred in August 1568, subjects refused to engage with the judicial process this exposed limitations to a regime's ability to coerce. Perhaps more worrying still, however, such refusal to participate could reveal a rejection of a regent's right to dispense justice and so, by extension, a rejection of their right to rule.

The sentence of doom pronounced upon the justice dispensed during royal minorities in Ecclesiastes 10:16, ‘Woe is the land where the King is a child, for there never peace nor justice reigned’, was pounced upon by fifteenth and sixteenth-century chroniclers such as Walter Bower and Adam Abell, whence it has developed into a trope. Nevertheless, the applicability of these plaintive cries to the sixteenth-century regencies can be called into question. Abell's own prophecy of woe stands at a considerable distance from his praise for Albany's rule, and the friar's critique of James' minority was largely directed towards the Douglas regime, not Albany's governorship, a prudent reflection of James' own perception of distinctions between his minority regimes.