Andrea Thomas, Princelie Majestie: the Court of James V of Scotland, 1528-1542, (John Donald/Berlinn, Edinburgh, 2005), pp. xiv+272, £25.

This is a lovely book. It is also, in the Scottish historiographical context, a highly innovative one. The early-modern European court has been, for some considerable time, the focus of attention of historians and literary and art scholars; the political importance of the sheer exuberance - and vast expenditure - of court life long recognized; scholars have built their reputations on their studies of the court, and in at least one case, that of the remarkable David Starkey, fame and fortune in a dazzling media career as well; sociological theorizing on its crucial role in the process of civilization, to invoke the title used by one of the most famous and influential of its exponents, Norbert Elias, has had a field day, or perhaps more accurately in the case of Elias, has provided a spring board for often stimulating debate and criticism by later scholars such as Jeroen Duindam. The early-modern court is a many-faceted subject - and great fun - from high and lavish ceremonial to petty and miserable intrigue, lofty moralizing to ruthless ambition and naked pursuit of personal power. No wonder that in its own day, Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), which first appeared in 1528, was one of the great publishing successes of its age. No wonder the court continues to fascinate scholars today.

And where stands Scotland in all this? For modern Scottish scholars, in something of the same predicament which they tend to assume was faced by those great exponents of Scottish court culture, James IV and V, exaggerating the extent to which they were marginal figures, having to fight hard to make their presence felt. Thus in the collection of essays on The Princely Courts of Europe, edited by John Adamson (1999), which covered a fair sweep, the British Isles were represented by ‘The Kingdoms of England and Great Britain: the Tudor and Stuart courts’; the first Scottish king to appear in the index is James VI and I.

Now it is fair to say that there is a long and distinguished wealth of scholarship on Scottish literature, music and architecture, and, more recently, late sixteenth-century ceremonial; and the court has not been neglected in studies of individual Stewart kings. One need only mention the names of Alasdair MacDonald, Sally Mapstone, Norman Macdougall, Helena M. Shire, Kenneth Elliott, Michael Lynch, John Dunbar, Richard Fawcett, as a small, selective, example, and those outwith Scotland who do not know their work should certainly seek it out and that of others; and for the reign of James V himself, there is a valuable collection of essays, Stewart Style, 1513-1542: Essays on the Court of James V, edited by Janet Hadley Williams (1996), and a masterly study of that leading poet, humanist, satirist and statesman, Sir David Lindsay of the Mount, by Carol Edington, Court and Culture in Renaissance Scotland: Sir David Lindsay of the Mount (1993). Yet it is still fair to call Thomas’s book innovative; for this, based on her 1997 thesis (publication of the book being unfortunately delayed through no fault of author or publisher) is the first fullscale study of an early-modern Scottish court.

It was not an easy task. The Scottish records, from household ordinances to narrative account, are notable for their paucity. ‘Pages missing’ are all too frustrating. To tease out what happened at the undoubtedly magnificent, elaborate and dignified funeral of James V on 8 January 1543, she has to build on the payments in the Treasurer’s Accounts with a brief description by the later sixteenth century John Leslie, bishop of Ross, and a poem by David Lindsay on the demands of one ‘Squire William Meldrum’ to his executor for a suitable heraldic funeral, which clearly reflects far more than the burial of a mere laird; Lindsay was in fact in charge of the ceremonial for James V’s funeral. We know that there was an effigy. We do not know what was its exact place in the ceremony. Yet her speculation about what it could have been is an excellent example of one of the real strengths of this book. Her list of primary sources is impressive; her list of secondary sources, which take her far beyond Scotland, formidable. Faute de mieux, she looks abroad, as all court historians have to do, to a greater or lesser extent. She does it superbly, and therefore brings out to the full this most competitive game of kings.

A lovely and innovative book, therefore. My one complaint is that is it also too cautious a book. Her highly effective comparative approach leads her not just to seek to fill in gaps but to create models, mainly French and English, for Scotland to follow. And while she has dug out a huge amount on the personnel of court and household, the figure of the king who presided over it all and created its style, doing far more than just following, is oddly blurred. She is hesitant, for example, about his religious position, though her material enables her to provide nuanced details which could certainly have been used to build up a fuller picture. She correctly points out that he does not seem to have had a particularly impressive education, by the standards of his day. This in fact turns out to be a failure to teach him adequate linguistic skills (and her attempt to excuse his tutor on the grounds that he was removed when James was thirteen hardly works, bearing in mind the child James VI’s complaint that ‘they gar me speik Latin ar I could speik Scotis (they made me speak Latin before I could speak Scots’). But he was certainly a poet, though not all the works attributed to him were by him, a musician, if with an unfortunate harsh voice which he insisted on using, and a patron of moralising and didactic history; he undoubtedly cared about education, choosing the great scholar George Buchanan as tutor for his eldest bastard son; his court contained distinguished poets and scholars; and his passion for glorious architecture meant that he created for it magnificent physical settings, at Linlithgow, Stirling, Holyrood, Falkland. She is right to emphasize that whereas James IV, famed for his court culture, only really got going after 1503, fifteen years into his reign, James V started from the moment he began his personal rule in 1528. James V has, in fact, suffered from comparison with his more charismatic if equally ruthless father. Thomas shows us a gifted, highly talented, impressive and surprisingly attractive personality; and I wish that she had been bolder with her insights.

In her final paragraph, she says that ‘James V....managed to create an exuberant and cosmopolitan court, of some cultural significance....the developments of his court equalled, and in some areas excelled, the cultural achievements of his forbears and are worthy of greater interest than they have attracted hitherto.’ She is far too modest about what James V created, and its interest to modern scholars; and she is far too modest about her own achievement. James V’s court was noted in its day, well beyond his own kingdom. Thomas’s book should equally command attention, well beyond Scotland. It is not just a matter of attracting greater interest. No-one in future will have any excuse for ignoring the undoubted cultural significance of the dazzling court of James V.

Review by Jenny Wormald: Department of Scottish History, University of Edinburgh