6 December 2010
How the Scots gave voting to the English
Voting was a Scottish import that the English adopted wholeheartedly following the 1603 Union of the Crowns - that is the conclusion of new research carried out by a University of Dundee historian.
However, it is not the case that late-medieval Scotland, rather than ancient Athens, was the cradle of democracy, but that its terminology was closer to that of today than its neighbour.
Dr Alan McDonald has found that, whilst the concept of voting was widely used in the English parliament prior to the beginning of the 17th centrury, the word itself did not enter the English political lexicon until James VI of Scotland took it south with him when he became James I of England.
The resulting paper, entitled ‘Voting in the Scottish Parliament before 1639’, has been published in the most recent edition of ‘Parliaments, Estates and Representation’, a multilingual journal that examines the nature and development of representative government across the world.
Dr McDonald's paper challenges conventionally held assumptions about the power of the Scottish parliament. Traditionally, historians have been dismissive of the significance of voting in the Scottish parliament before the Covenanting revolution of 1638, viewing it as a largely ineffective body that passed the King’s legislative programme en bloc, and without question.
However, Dr McDonald found detailed evidence undermining many previous assumptions about the nature and procedure of parliament prior to 1639.
'What I was taught as a student was that the Scottish Parliament was not a powerful check on the monarchy,' he said. 'The King was essentially able to do as he wanted, with the decision making process amounting to nothing more than the rubber stamping of a series of measures that the King put before the Parliament.
'What I found was, contrary to this traditional view, each individual draft contained in the programme was debated quite extensively before being voted on.
'When carrying out this research, I found that there were lots of different references to voting in letters, memoirs etc. A lot of times, these amounted to throwaway remarks which suggested that voting was quite normal rather than being an exceptional event.
'It also emerged that, in England, prior to c.1600 there are no references to votes, only ‘voices’ when it came to the decision making in the English parliament.
'Thereafter references to votes and voting began to appear, which is too neat a coincidence when you consider James VI became James I in 1603 and came from an environment where voting was well established as part of the political lexicon.
'The Oxford English Dictionary shows virtually no citations of ‘vote’ in England until after 1603, whereas it shows citations appearing in Scotland from the mid-15th century. After 1603 we see an increasing number of references to voting in England until it replaced ‘voice’ completely to refer to the counting of opinions in a decision making process.'
England has long been seen as having a powerful and effective parliament that stood up to the King. The history of political power in England has been regarded as a continuous process of the monarchy ceding more and more authority to a parliament that incrementally increased its significance. Dr McDonald’s research suggests the situation in Scotland may be more similar to this narrative than previously thought.
Drawing upon local and national records, his article explores the evidence for the incidence of enumerated divisions as part of the decision-making process. It demonstrates that there is evidence for voting from as early as the fourteenth century.
The conventional wisdom was that it was not normal for acts to be put to the house individually but that the entire legislative programme was passed in a single vote. Dr McDonald believes misconceptions may have arisen as a result of a lack of research into the old Scottish parliament.
'There have been hundreds of books dedicated to the history of parliament in England but, between 1929 and 1992, not one book dealing with the Scottish parliament was written. The Scottish parliament became a more popular research subject from the 1980s onwards, perhaps as a result of the 1979 devolution referendum.
'I've been carrying out research for the past few years and, along with a number of other historians, have been seeking to overturn the view that the Scottish parliament was inconsequential compared to its Westminster counterpart.
'Delving into a wide variety of primary sources and records told me something different to what has traditionally been thought. The laws of Scotland were negotiated between parliament and King.
'This makes sense because parliament consisted of nobles, bishops, shire and burgh representatives. These were powerful people who would have been unlikely to meekly bend to the will of the King every time. Why would they have bothered to attend parliament if it was an impotent institution?'
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