page_title: Royal Court of Scotland
section_title: General council
hierarchical_section_title: Royal Court of Scotland / Composition / General council
caption_attribution_description: English: Detail from the so-called 'Hertford sketch' of Edinburgh in 1544, showing Holyrood Palace, described as 'the kyng of Skotts palas', Arthur's Seat and the Canongate The earl of Hertford led a punitive expedition against Edinburgh on the orders of Henry VIII, following the Scots' repudiation of the Treaty of Greenwich by which the infant Mary, Queen of Scots, was betrothed to Prince Edward of England.
context_page_description: The Royal Court of Scotland was the administrative, political and artistic centre of the Kingdom of Scotland. It emerged in the tenth century and continued until it ceased to function when James VI inherited the throne of England in 1603. For most of the medieval era, the king had no "capital" as such. The Pictish centre of Forteviot was the chief royal seat of the early Gaelic Kingdom of Alba that became the Kingdom of Scotland. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Scone was a centre for royal business. Edinburgh only began to emerge as the capital in the reign of James III but his successors undertook occasional royal progress to a part of the kingdom. Little is known about the structure of the Scottish royal court in the period before the reign of David I when it began to take on a distinctly feudal character, with the major offices of the Steward, Chamberlain, Constable, Marischal and Lord Chancellor. By the early modern era the court consisted of leading nobles, office holders, ambassadors and supplicants who surrounded the king or queen.
context_section_description: After the crown, the most important government institution in the late Middle Ages was the king's council, composed of the king's closest advisers and presided over by the Lord Chancellor. Unlike its counterpart in England, the king's council in Scotland retained legislative and judicial powers. It was relatively small, with normally less than 10 members in a meeting, some of whom were nominated by parliament, particularly during the many minorities of the era, as a means of limiting the power of a regent.
  The council was a virtually full-time institution by the late fifteenth century, and surviving records from the period indicate that it was critical in the working of royal justice. Nominally members of the council were some of the great magnates of the realm, but they rarely attended meetings. Most of the active members of the council for most of the late Medieval Period were career administrators and lawyers, almost exclusively university-educated clergy. The most successful of these moved on to occupy the major ecclesiastical positions in the realm as bishops and, towards the end of the period, archbishops. By the end of the fifteenth century, this group was being joined by increasing numbers of literate laymen, often secular lawyers, of which the most successful gained preferment in the judicial system and grants of lands and lordships.
caption: Detail from the so-called 'Hertford sketch' of Edinburgh in 1544, showing Holyrood Palace, described as 'the kyng of Skotts palas' and the main site for council meetings
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "26"}