ABSTRACT
In 1542, when the infant Mary Stuart was crowned Queen of Scots, Scotland was an independent monarchy, nominally Catholic and structured around a medieval system of personal bonds. Print was a new and rare technology there, and popular sovereignty a meaningless phrase. By 1689, when a revolutionary Parliament gave her great-great-granddaughter Mary and her husband William an integrated English-Scottish throne, Britain had begun to identify itself as a Protestant nation ruled by a limited constitutional monarchy. Both Scotland and England supported vibrant presses whose writings nurtured and shaped a public opinion that had real consequence in the political life of the nation. This transition from a feudal monarchical order to a modern constitutional order remains to this day one of the most contested issues in British historiography. It will be one of my book’s main arguments that the meaning of that history and Mary’s place in it was debated from the beginning as the two nations experienced the revolutions of the Reformation and Civil War. The history of Scotland was thus central to how the English and British understood the long transitions and sudden revolutions of the time. This debate shaped modern ways of addressing and imagining the public.
