Who ruled sixteenth-century Scotland? Scottish monarchs were inadvertently unavailable for a full half of the century, mainly through youth. James V's nominal reign was 1513 to 1542, but he began to rule personally only in 1528, at age sixteen. His daughter Mary, succeeding to the throne at the age of six days, was sent to France in 1548 and remained there even after she came nominally of age in 1554; she eventually returned in 1561. Finally, James VI succeeded in 1567 but emerged gradually as a personal ruler in about 1585, aged nineteen. Thus, for about fifty-one years of the century, someone else had to steer the body politic through an eventful period that included several traumatic wars as well as switches of foreign policy and religion.

That “someone else” was usually a regent. Amy Blakeway's excellent new book, Regency in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, looks at the various regents who tried to lead the Scottish political community during these three periods of monarchical unavailability. Actually the regencies collectively lasted for only about thirty-seven years, the regents being Margaret Tudor (1513–14), the Duke of Albany (1515–24), the Earl of Arran (1543–54), Mary of Guise (1554–60), and the earls of Moray (1567–70), Lennox (1570–71), Mar (1571–72), and Morton (1572–78). It is on these regents and their activities that Blakeway concentrates her attention.

Blakeway's book is not a political narrative but something more interesting: an analytical account of the kinds of things that regents did and the ways in which they ran their government. She begins with the law of regency, effortlessly overturning previous assumptions that there was a definite “law” governing the question of who should be regent—justifications of regency varied through political expediency—but showing that a regent, once in power, could do pretty much anything that a monarch could do. The exception was Mary of Guise, who ruled for her absent but nominally adult daughter (and, from 1558, her daughter's husband) and occasionally had to refer decisions to her.

How did regents exercise their powers in practice? Blakeway takes us through various topics that interested the regents themselves—beginning with money. It is one of the many strengths of her thoroughly researched book that she has combed through the accounts of the crown in detail and compiled a mass of valuable data. The chapter “Regency Finances” is supported by three appendices and several tables and graphs (the latter unfortunately printed in a barely legible format). Blakeway confirms that the last regent, Morton, swindled the crown by diverting sums from the mint into his own pocket, but she argues that even Morton generally pursued a public-spirited fiscal policy. Arran, indeed, is largely exonerated of shady financial dealing—part of a general revaluation of his period in office that runs through the book. It is true that Blakeway has been unable to trace what happened to James V's “boxes” of treasure, despite looking more carefully than anyone else; we still do not know how much was in them when they disappeared in 1543, nor who benefited. Overall she posits a “tipping point in Scottish crown finance” (124) in the 1540s, after which deficits became more common, evidently through the wars of that decade.

Given the significance of Renaissance courts as political and cultural centers, we may ask whether Scottish regents had “courts.” Blakeway devotes a chapter to showing that they did, and that they even exercised cultural patronage—especially Arran, whose court was the grandest. Albany was often absent in France, and the regents of James VI had more modest courts, perhaps through financial stringency. Regents gradually concentrated their activities in Edinburgh, a finding that supports other evidence for governmental centralization.

Contemporaries wanted rulers to exercise “justice,” usually meaning active and impartial criminal justice. Gathering further statistics, Blakeway presents much detail in this field—one of several in which comparisons between minority and majority periods shed valuable light on the latter. She focuses particularly on justice ayres, traveling courts roughly comparable to English assize courts. Regents held fewer justice ayres than did adult monarchs, but they were not personally idle; indeed, they participated personally in more ayres than did adult monarchs. However, several regents were criticized for appearing to prosecute their defeated political opponents, especially Morton, whose regency followed a period of civil war.

The final area of interest to regents was diplomacy. Scottish diplomacy in this period was exercised in concentric circles. Most immediately, there were concerns with the political stability of the violent Anglo-Scottish frontier zone. Beyond that, relations with England as a whole (and sometimes Ireland) were of compelling importance. Then there was Scotland's “Auld Alliance” with France, which until its collapse in 1560 was supposed to shield Scotland against English hostility—though it sometimes provoked English hostility. Scottish regents rarely looked further afield than this, though they sometimes corresponded with Denmark. Blakeway expertly elucidates the degree of influence exercised by various English and French monarchs and the room for maneuver possessed by particular regents.

Overall, then, did Scotland's regents rule differently than did its monarchs? They may have been less ambitious and indeed more prudent. Blakeway quotes with approval my own phrase about the “problem of royal majorities”—the “problem” being adult monarchs who threw their weight about in an unsettling way (4). But she persuasively argues for considerable continuity and similarity between majority and minority periods. Her book will surely inspire further research, perhaps of a comparative nature: From the nobles’ point of view, was having a regent like having a viceroy? Indeed, was Mary of Guise a viceroy in the same way that, say, Margaret of Parma was a viceroy in the Spanish Netherlands? In the meantime, Blakeway has enabled us in some ways to understand more about how Scottish regents ruled than about how monarchs did. It is a remarkable achievement.