The book under review is the long-awaited sequel to its author’s influential monograph Noble Society in Scotland: Wealth, Family and Culture, from Reformation to Revolution, first published in the year 2000. As Keith Brown explains in the acknowledgments, the delay in publication of a promised sequel has been due to his shift into university management and the publication of an online edition of the Records of the Parliaments of Scotland, a signal achievement that has transformed the study of medieval and early modern Scottish History. One characteristic of Brown’s work is his rejection of the idea that “the state” transcended the power of the nobility in early modern Europe, including Scotland of course, particularly given its status as a relatively impoverished kingdom on the northern periphery of Europe. This work also generously acknowledges the influence of the great historian of late medieval and early modern Scotland and Britain, Jenny Wormald, and her influence on its “interest in the political role of Scotland’s noble families” in relation to “the core issue of political power and how it was exercised in early modern Scotland” (vii).

Noble Society in Scotland was divided into sections on wealth, family, and culture. Its sequel brackets thematic chapters given the titles “Chiefs,” “Lords,” “Magistrates,” “Soldiers,” “Governors,” and “Courtiers,” with introductory and concluding chapters entitled “Noble Power and Politics, 1560–1603” and “Noble Power and Politics, 1603–37,” respectively. One important theme is how the loss of their own king resident in Scotland affected a nobility whose support made the Scottish Covenanting rebellion possible in 1638. Another is that James VI and I, for all his many faults, was a Scot, or perhaps more accurately was a Scottish king, groomed and educated almost from birth for his destiny. Traditionally, that destiny was an early death, which James avoided even before he succeeded to the English throne. Even after moving on to what he hoped would be a greater destiny as the first monarch of all of the island of Britain, he still in many ways was defined as a monarch by his upbringing and personal rule in Scotland. Ironically, his one return to Scotland after 1603, accomplished in 1617, in many ways marked James’s recognition of the failure of what Brown aptly terms his “British project.”

For the subjects of Brown’s book, the Scottish nobility, the union of the Scottish and English crowns in 1603 meant access through their king to the riches of the English court, but by 1617 they had been marginalized. This was complete by the accession of James’s Scottish-born but English-bred son Charles to both the English and the Scottish crowns in 1625. Like his father, he did return to Scotland, not once but twice. Each visit made manifest his detachment from his ancient birthright, first, in 1633 by his impatience with Scottish exceptionalism and, second, in 1641 by his indifference to the Scottish constitution. Whether Charles was right to embark on a policy of reform in Scotland after he became its king in 1625 may be debated, but for Brown it marked a fundamental break in the relationship between nobility and monarch in Scotland, which he is able to imply, with some justice, was final. The nobility would retain significant influence in Scotland into modern times, but it had become an independent nobility without its own monarch, despite later Scottish Jacobite projects to the contrary. The Scottish constitution, in terms of “the core issue of political power and how it was exercised,” was broken (vii). The Scottish Covenanters introduced the project of correcting this through what in effect was a written constitution, and between 1688 and 1707 the political nation in Scotland returned to that idea. It was a project that combined Stuart ambitions of a broader Britain in which real political power could be exercised over those subject to it with recognition of the tenacious loyalty in Scottish society to Scottish institutions, language, and culture. The nobility as a caste had become part of a Scottish Reformation that they seldom led but that was dependent on the support of a significant number of its members. The idea of Britain and what it represents is still indelibly marked by the legacy of this phenomenon. Noble power and influence in Scotland was tenacious, but after 1625 certainly it was in decline, and those members of the nobility who supported the Scottish Covenanting revolution acknowledged this by that support. Brown observes that “no one wanted to undermine the power structures of noble society,” before adding, significantly, “apart, perhaps, from Charles I” (245). Those who benefited from the support of a significant section of the Scottish nobility during the war of the Covenant and after acknowledge their influence but increasingly came to challenge their power. It was a process that was far from linear but was decisive in the creation of a modern Scottish society that was defined by its political union with England.