ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1606 a serious political crisis engulfed the burgh of Glasgow. It comprised a violent clash between the incumbent provost, Sir George Elphinstone of Blythswood, and the previous one, Sir Matthew Stewart of Minto, and their followers. The confrontation was fuelled by on-going animosity between the town’s merchants and craftsmen, but at its core it was a personal contest between the two men over whether or not the town council should have the right to appoint the burgh magistrates, the provost and baillies who sat as judges on the burgh court. Writing in reference to similar clashes in England, Catherine Patterson has argued that: ‘in the later sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, most of the questions that rocked corporations concerned precedence, honour, office, or even money and property’.1 Glasgow’s crisis embodied the first three of these factors precisely: Minto felt that attempts by Elphinstone and the town to secure municipal independence had damaged him in these terms. The violence escalated over a period of weeks.
