This is both a very narrow and very broad study: narrow as an exercise in urban history, with surprisingly little comparative material – virtually no comment on other Scottish burghs, let alone other British or European cities; and broad in that it offers an account of a centre of government under stresses that relate to its position as a centre of government with an absent head of government, a capital city in a peripheral kingdom, a city disunited in its ecclesiological allegiances, but one in which a majority of those who governed were committed to a religious polity which the absent monarch wished to change.
Dr Stewart has written a study in governance. There is enough social history to give us a sense of those who governed and those who were on the fringes of governance; there is enough sense of economic growth and crisis to help us to understand how Edinburgh could afford its lavish building programme that sought to ensure that all the agencies of absentee monarchy were permanently located in the city and to help us to understand what happened when the money ran out; and there is enough cultural history to make us sense how Edinburgh avoided a growing dependency on England by developing a cosmopolitanism untypical of major regional capitals in England. Edinburgh was more than a provincial capital. But all that said, the social, economic and cultural aspects of this book are at the service of an analysis and narrative of a nation's capital at odds with absentee monarchs with disastrous consequences for its inhabitants.
If there is a historiographical dialectic in the book it is not with other urban historians, whose work is but lightly accommodated. It offers a clear continuation of, and fascinating development from, Michael Lynch's Edinburgh and the Reformation (1981). It holds the new British at arm's length, but is willy-nilly a significant contribution to it, stressing the continuity rather than the discontinuity from James VI to Charles I, and looking at the experience of the war of the kingdoms through the lens of a community who have been much neglected. We know much about the disintegration of noble covenanters and the kamikaze theocratizing of covenanting presbyters; and not enough about those who paid for the war and then found their city occupied by English fanatics who understood them no better than Martians would have done.
The book is in two parts. The first (‘The urban community’) is in three chapters which look first at the burgh and its government, at an urban elite sharing an overcrowded Tolbooth with the king's ministers; second at church government, and the extraordinary physical division of St Giles' kirk to provide space for three separate parish communities (this is a context for the physical as well as the spiritual violations accompanying Charles' determination to convert it back to serve as the cathedral for a new diocese in the 1630s); and third an exploration of the life and self-representation of members of the elite. Here more than anywhere else – for example, in its study of conspicuous expenditure and funerary pomp – a more comparative approach seems called for. These early chapters are linked to some appendices of exceptional interest, not only listing the office holders, ministers and others involved in governance across the period 1617–52, but other relevant matter in tables and maps. This is all admirable historical reconstruction.
The second part of the book is an analysis, in broadly narrative form, of ‘politics and religion’ – that is, civil and religious politics from 1617 to 1653. It begins in 1617 because Dr Stewart (probably correctly, although it is more asserted than demonstrated) sees as a defining moment: James VI's determination in the five Articles of Perth to make the Scots accept what he had found good practice in England, especially the distribution of holy communion by the ministers themselves to a kneeling congregation. There are some splendid set-piece discussions of the reception of and opposition to the Articles; of the creation of the new diocese of Edinburgh; and of the period from the bungled attempt by the king to impose a new prayer book to the subscription of the National Covenant. By comparison the account of the period 1640–52 in a 27-page chapter is disappointingly rushed, and comparatively shallow in its analysis.
In general when Dr Stewart is inside the heads of those who oppose royal policy her writing is deeply impressive. Opposition to royal policy is constantly explored empathetically and indeed sympathetically. The dilemmas of the council men, constantly torn between conscience and self-interest, are well drawn. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the proponents of change. Time and again, those who went along with royal policy are briefly passed over, seen as timeservers or weak-willed. It is never made clear, for example, how James was able to ‘make sure’ that parliament approved the Articles of Perth; nor just how constrained were the four ministers ‘forced to preach’ in favour of the Articles – the four did include a future bishop, a future dean and a member of High Commission. Perhaps they felt more intimidated by the opponents until the king empowered them to speak their minds. This tendency not to think things through from all sides becomes more marked in the rushed account of the 1640s – as in the unsupported statement that the council men ‘had no choice but to support’ Hamilton and the Engagers in 1648. There is, then, some unevenness in the content of the book, and for the price one can expect better on the page illustrations than the dim and cramped images of tombs on p. 129; and an index with fewer unusable strings of page numbers (see the entries for James VI or London or Prayer Book Riots). But it is a really outstanding study of an elite under external and, to a lesser extent, internal stress, and Dr Stewart's gift for aphorism makes it fun to read and quarrel with.
