When Mary queen of Scots met her first Parliament, she encountered an institution that had long played an influential part in Scottish history. The Scottish Parliament was important for its legislation and taxation, but it was even more important as the forum in which the political community assembled to take major decisions about how the government should be configured. This article uses a newly-discovered list of those attending the Parliament of 1563 as the starting-point for an investigation of the political community in Mary's reign.

Although our understanding of sixteenth-century politics has been much enhanced by studies focused on “kingship,” many crucial issues concern relationships among people other than the king. For more than half of the century there was no adult monarch present, and government had to be carried on by consensus between a regent and the nobility. Adult monarchs usually had more power than temporary regents, but they, too, had to seek consensus if they were to rule successfully.

In late 1654, the fate of the Stuart restoration to the British and Irish thrones appeared to rest upon the professed religion of the fourteen-year old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria and brother of Charles II. At Henrietta Maria's instigation, and with the aid of the court of France, serious efforts were undertaken to convert the Protestant duke to the Catholic faith. This attempt, which ultimately failed, preoccupied the English exiled courts in Paris and Cologne for its duration between October and December 1654 and caused scandal and division in royalist circles. It also generated international publicity: as one observer concluded, “this is one of the greatest actions now in foot in Christendome: wherein all Protestants of all countryes will thinke themselves concerned.”

To date the “Gloucester affair” has received little sustained scholarly attention or critical scrutiny, a neglect likely attributable to the tendency among historians to study successes rather than failures. Perhaps for this reason the Stuart courts and royalists in exile have not generated much systematic treatment in the last half-century. In this case, prince Henry remained Protestant, and it would be more than five years before Charles II reclaimed his thrones. The attempted conversion of the duke of Gloucester, however, affords a valuable opportunity to investigate the formation of political and religious policies, along with the conduct of diplomacy, in the exiled courts and within the royalist communities. Charles II essentially was a king in name only: he had scant economic resources, held his court at the pleasure of the rulers in whose territories he resided, and, after September 1651, no longer had his own army. The struggles to recover the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland for the House of Stuart during the 1650s required extensive negotiations for financial and military support from both Catholic and Protestant powers. Charles was forced to balance the demands of Catholic rulers for assurances that Catholics in the three kingdoms would be treated favorably, while simultaneously maintaining and strengthening the support of British and continental Protestants for his restoration.

In 1811, William Robinson, a purser's steward in the royal navy, deserted, having served six long and brutal years at sea. Years later, he wrote his memoirs, under the colorful title of Jack Nastyface. In it he recorded the many indignities inflicted on the sailors of his day. He did so in terms designed to horrify polite men and women, toward which end he dwelled at considerable length on floggings, keel-haulings, and the like. He was, however, perfectly prepared to tolerate the indignities that sailors inflicted on a group even more marginal than themselves: the Jews who made an uncertain living peddling slops and trinkets outside the royal dockyards. In one passage, Robinson fondly remembered how a sailor had avenged himself on one such peddler, known disparagingly as “Moses.” The sailor, assisted by several of the crew, succeeded in appropriating a new suit of clothes; “Moses,” sputtering with rage, was forced to leave the ship “amidst the grins and jeers of the whole crew, who were much diverted and pleased to think that any of their shipmates had tact enough to retaliate so nicely on a Jew.”

The incident, at first blush, bears all the marks of anti-Semitism. It suggests that “Moses” was singled out precisely because he was Jewish; as such, it fits nicely with the claims of a new and very pessimistic generation of scholars. These scholars, in true academic tradition, have expressed a great deal of disappointment over the work of their predecessors.