In her seminal book Lords and Men, Jenny Wormald achieved the important double that great historians accomplish. She both dealt superbly with a particular body of evidence and also revealed an entire world and guided the reader into it and around it. By opening up this new territory of lords, men and their bonds Jenny has given those who follow in her footsteps a chance to explore, to find exciting paths to travel and to discover new ways of examining familiar landmarks. Although the second achievement has probably overshadowed the first one, her classification and explanation of the actual bonds has received the accolade of being silently absorbed into the standard accounts and becoming part of the ‘givens’ for understanding Scotland during the late medieval and early modern period. These days the categories of bonds of maintenance, manrent, friendship and political and religious bonds can be found in historical discussions from school essay to specialist article. This exploration will start with Jenny's list of ‘religious bonds’ and chart how conventional bonds grew into a new type of bonding expressing a profound sense of religious allegiance and identity and flowing into the covenanting tradition.

As Jenny demonstrated, a bond of maintenance reflected the perspective of the ‘lord’, usually a noble overlord or feudal superior. It detailed how the lord viewed his relationship with his ‘man’ and in particular what he would be doing to ‘maintain’ his ‘servitor’. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) defines ‘maintenance’ as:

Bonds of maintenance were typically made up of four discrete sections. First, the preamble explained that it was the ‘bounden duty’ of the lord to help his man. Second came the promise to apply power and strength and ‘very lyves’ in support of the particular people who were named or identified. Third, the actual maintenance clause contained the promise to ‘mantene, nuryss and defende’. Finally, as befitted a legal document, came the subscription by the parties to the bond, along with witnesses, date and place.

After Langside, Scotland slipped further into civil war, its national politics initially splitting into two opposing parties, respectively supporting the king and queen, and then slowly disintegrating into factions with little common focus. As the most powerful magnate in the Queen's Party, Argyll played an important role in these struggles, where regional, Scottish and British strands became tangled together. With the King's and Queen's Parties locked in an uneasy stalemate and political life fragmenting, especially after Moray's assassination in January 1570, he became increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of success. In 1571, with no prospect of Mary's release from her English prison and believing peace to be essential to counter English manipulation, the 5th earl abandoned the Queen's Party. Having made his settlement with the regent, he devoted his energies to reconstructing national political life by reconciling the different factions.

The arrival of the fugitive Scottish queen in England decisively shifted the balance of power within the British mainland, further weighted in favour of the southern kingdom. The revolution that had placed the infant James on the Scottish throne left the new regime heavily dependent upon English good will. With the Scottish queen in her custody, Elizabeth's influence north of the border was further strengthened, giving her the trump cards in Anglo-Scottish negotiations and a decisive voice in Scotland's domestic politics. By sending money and troops, England's intervention eventually broke the stalemate between the King's and Queen's Parties.

On 27 February 1560 in the town of Berwick, on the Anglo-Scottish border, a secret agreement was signed containing a range of unusual and profoundly important clauses. In the first place it constituted a diplomatic revolution. A group of Scots were abandoning their ‘auld alliance’ with France and embracing as allies their long-standing enemies, the English. The central purpose of the Treaty of Berwick was to furnish desperately needed English military aid to the Scottish Lords of the Congregation to prevent them being overrun by the French troops of Mary of Guise, Scotland's regent. From a Scottish perspective, the language employed to describe this diplomatic revolution was equally remarkable. Though exchanging one dominant protector for another, the treaty had carefully avoided any threat to Scotland's independence, in particular making no mention of England's imperial claims that had played such a prominent part in previous Tudor incursions across the Border.

Another unusual feature was that Elizabeth I of England concluded this formal alliance not with a fellow monarch, but rather with those Scots who were fighting against the regent and her daughter, the Scottish queen. In the volatile international situation of spring 1560, aiding rebellious subjects against their lawful rulers was a risky diplomatic gamble for the precarious Elizabethan regime. It also ran counter to all Elizabeth's political and personal instincts, yet the queen had been persuaded of its necessity by her chief adviser William Cecil, supported by her Privy Council.

Between 1566 and 1568, the politics of the British mainland were turned upside down by the disintegration of Mary's personal rule. The Scottish kingdom was rocked by the murders of Riccio and Darnley, the Bothwell marriage, Mary's enforced abdication, the defeat at Langside and finally her catastrophic flight into England. These events splintered Scottish national politics, leaving a divided country slipping into civil war. For Argyll they also brought the bitter split with Moray, his close friend and political partner. At the start of 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots was dominating mainland Britain and threatening the English queen. By 1568 she was a fugitive in England begging Elizabeth for assistance. This dramatic reversal of fortunes shifted the balance of power within the mainland, leading to a major re-alignment of British politics.

The immediate consequences of Argyll's abandonment of an integrated British policy were felt within the Gaelic political world. With the loss of the triangular British link, the 5th earl severed the automatic connexion between his Ulster policies and Anglo-Scottish amity. Instead of co-operating with the English in Ireland, he treated the Dublin and London administrations as a foreign power with whom he needed to bargain. Within Ulster, the idealism of Argyll's British policy was replaced by the pragmatic goal of maintaining his Gaelic dependants. In particular, by re-establishing MacDonald power, he sought to stabilise the North Channel area. He then masterminded a momentous Ulster alliance, binding together the MacDonalds, O'Neills and O'Donnells.

Argyll's political career opens a window onto the ‘British problem’, reflecting in microcosm an image of the world of British politics. It reveals many of the inherent tensions bedevilling the relationships between the three kingdoms, particularly after 1603. In particular, Argyll personified the choice facing Scottish and Irish Gaelic nobles between confrontation or harmonisation of the Anglophone and Gaelic cultures within the Atlantic archipelago. Before mature British politics had been created by the multiple monarchy, the 5th earl confronted the hurdle faced by future British politicians, especially those based in Scotland or Ireland, which was the fundamental conflict of attitudes towards the islands of Britain themselves.

Argyll's British policy contained two elements. The first was its British idiom: the ability to see the interconnections between the three kingdoms and, at the level of conceptual thinking, create a British strategy. The second was a corollary: the capacity to integrate national and regional objectives within a single scheme, unifying the elements in the service of a British goal. His own British perspective had grown out of his experience of moving between the separate political arenas of Gaeldom and Anglo-Scottish relations, where he operated in multiple cultural and conceptual worlds and found solutions to transect frontiers. By contrast, his contemporaries and most future politicians were tied to a single political world, with little understanding or appreciation of other viewpoints.