At a local level, early modern government essentially involved the admin - istration of the law during a period that saw the extension of seigneurial jurisdiction throughout much of Europe. Along with the nobilities of Hungary, Bohemia, Austria, Poland, Brandenburg, Sicily, Naples and the provinces of Holland, Zeeland and Utrecht, the Scottish nobility exercised private justice. Private jurisdiction was less common and less powerful in Sweden, Castile, northern Italy and England, but even in England the veneer of royal authority concealed the reality of huge fiefdoms dominated by a handful of magnate families like the earls of Derby in the northwest of the kingdom. Nevertheless, the division of Scotland into powerful private and hereditary feudal jurisdictions was extreme, even more so than the kingdom of Sicily where the percentage of land subject to feudal jurisdiction was a little over half in the late sixteenth century.

Late medieval Scotland developed a system of courts and law that ultimately derived authority from the crown, creating a pronounced legal culture that should not be underestimated. Another legacy of the late medieval era was that as a consequence of warfare, particularly in the fourteenth century, local government was largely in the hereditary hands of the nobility. The advantages to nobles of controlling local justice were a combination of economic, social and political rights in law that underpinned their authority over the common people who lived under their jurisdiction, prestige along with power that conferred advantages over rival noble houses, and important links to royal government at the centre.

The early modern royal court was the most powerful and influential insti - tution in European kingdoms, and while not every aspect of politics and political culture was necessarily embraced within the life of the court, it was more than the royal household and the entertainments that took place in the king's presence. Unfortunately, the Stewart court of the later sixteenth century suffers in contrast to that of England and France, but also in contrast to the glittering courts of James IV and James V when the majesty and wealth of the dynasty attained its heights. Mary's court shone brightly for a few brief years in the 1560s before disappearing with the collapse of her government in 1567. Civil war and a long minority was followed by James VI's struggle to establish his court against a background of political instability and severe financial difficulties. Yet while James VI was con - stantly short of money, and while his court could not compete with the greatest royal courts of Europe, his achievement should not be overlooked, and it was not so different from the Swedish court and in terms of scale, if not wealth, was similar to the ducal court of Bavaria.

Under Mary and James VI the Stewart royal court continued to be a major arena in which high-level politics was conducted, being the principal point of contact between nobles who were attracted there in search of office, patronage and power. The royal court was the major cultural driver in the kingdom, and was a centre of international intrigue.

At the heart of this book lies a question about the continuity of noble power in an early modern society. It is not long since historians saw the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries collectively as a period in which socalled traditional nobilities were pitched into crisis by a combination of demographic change that loosened their social control, economic developments that undermined their financial stability, religious and cultural shifts that challenged their security, technological innovations that eroded their military prowess, and the emergence of dynastic state systems that tamed their political independence. The final collapse of the power of European aristocracies in the half century after 1914 coincided with this historical fashion being at its height. Mid-twentieth-century historians can be forgiven for seeing in early modern society a reflection of the decaying grandeur of country-house culture around them and the emergence of a meritocratic civil service and managerial class they educated. But this was a thesis driven more by contemporary influences and political theory than by sustained empirical research. Ideas about the state and about class required that the nobility be airbrushed out of the picture, and the earlier and more completely this could be achieved the sooner the early modern nation-state could be distinguished from its late medieval predecessor. Those kingdoms, like Scotland, that appeared to remain for longer in the grip of over-mighty baronial families remained stuck on a lower level of evolutionary development. Playing catch-up with the precocious Dutch or English encouraged some Scottish historians, trapped within this paradigm, to privilege evidence of a Stewart monarchical state and of the supposedly more commercially-minded men who served it, while subscribing to the thesis of a declining nobility.

Power can be measured in many different ways and political power is usually an outward expression of deeper forms of power embedded in society. Like nobilities elsewhere in early modern Europe, the Scottish nobility's pre - dominance rested on economic, familial and cultural forms of power, which in the latter half of the sixteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth century faced unprecedented challenges from inflation, massive shifts in land ownership, rising population, educational reform and religious revolution. The response of the nobility was to adapt, initiating the entrepreneurial exploitation of their estates, optimising the deployment of their family members, embracing the new learning and engaging with con - fessional issues. Consequently, while individual noble houses were ruined, noble society shifted and changed but remained intact, rooted in the deep soil of enormous landed wealth, strong family bonds and a pervasive cultural dominance. In this volume the focus is on political power and the functions or roles through which nobles exercised that power. In understanding how nobles acquired, maintained and expressed their power as chiefs, lords, magistrates, soldiers, governors and courtiers it is possible to appreciate the extent, strengths and vulnerabilities of their political power. The interrelated structures, ideas and relationships that wind their way through all of these roles provided the tools with which nobles manoeuvred to seek advantages and enhance the position of their house and lineage. The threats were constant and enormous, not least from other nobles, and some individuals and some lineages played this highly competitive game better than others.

In December 1591 a tired and frustrated James VI complained to his clerk register that he could find no officials, that instructions were not acted upon, meetings were unattended and ‘what is spoken late tonight is forgotten in the morning’. Foreign observers, too, were unimpressed by the effective authority of the Scottish crown. Even in June 1600, at a time when James VI could draw some satisfaction from international recognition, growing domestic stability and relative economic prosperity, the English agent in Edinburgh cited as evidence of the crown's weakness the murder of sir John Carmichael of that Ilk, warden of the west march, the shambolic mis - management of a convention of estates that refused adequate taxes and the factious nature of the court. He commented that James VI presided over a ‘strange government that all things should be thus cast loose’. A few weeks later the Gowrie conspiracy rocked the kingdom; had it succeeded, Scotland would have been plunged into another divisive minority. Years earlier, in 1589, it was observed that the young King's power to take direct military action against rebel lords was restrained by the understandable caution of lesser nobles ‘afraid of a feud hereafter if they touch any great man’. This informal restraint led sir James Melville of Halhill to observe that the crown was ‘mair nor a monarque’ yet ‘les than electywe’. Similarly, that archetypal Tudor royal servant, lord Burghley, argued that James VI's authority was less than that of English monarchs, for ‘the nobiliti ther ar not acqueynted with absolut government of ther King but rather ar them selves in a sort absolut’.

Noble families with their extended networks of kinsmen and their historical lineage formed a series of complex relationships constituting a deep-rooted and pervasive form of cultural power presided over by heads of houses or, in Scotland, chiefs. The task of unravelling those bonds and identifying the meanings of those intersections between people from whom we are separated by centuries and by the vicissitudes of documentary survival is difficult, and the subtle nuances of family organisation, the extent of kinship relations, changing inheritance strategies and forms of ancestral memory are easily misunderstood. Identifying a man's kin varied in European history with time, place and status in society, and the search to uncover the lineage and kindred of early modern Scottish nobles is helped and, occasionally, obscured by a comparative methodology. Even within Scotland it might be argued that there were differences in the importance attached to kinship in the mid-sixteenth century or the mid-seventeenth century, between the Gaelic speaking Highland world and the Scots speaking Lowland society, and between great lords and minor lairds.

Nevertheless, medieval scholars appear to have reached some agreement on the broad trend in the history of noble families, recognising that even before c. 1000 family relationships were relatively fluid and kinship obli - gations were problematic, and that thereafter there was a shift from larger, bilateral descent groups of kinsmen towards patrilineal and more restricted groups. The pace of change varied greatly from one region to another, with frontier societies like Leon and Castile being slower to adapt. Scotland, too, changed slowly, particularly in those parts of the Highlands less exposed to Anglo-Norman customs.

Late medieval Scottish lordship shared many of the features of lordship found elsewhere in the British Isles where Norman ideas encountered native societies, resulting in a range of solutions from the outright imposition of Norman lordship in England to varieties of adaptation to local conditions elsewhere. The survival of lordship in later sixteenth-century Europe has been interpreted as a sign of societal backwardness and of the weakness of royal government. Underlining such analysis is a tendency to approach lordship as a form of power that was anachronistic, in decline and waiting to be swept aside by the forces of the state, religion and commercialisation. Yet while, for example, Scottish nobles did place their estates on a more commercial footing in the early seventeenth century, this did not inevitably lead to a shift in the political usefulness of those long-established power networks created by lord–man relationships. Of course, there were societal changes, but is it possible that in the desire to dismiss lordship prematurely those features which persisted have been overlooked?

In discussing lordship, a simple vertical model of unproblematic con - nections between those exercising power and those subject to that power is inadequate in describing a network through which a range of power relationships were mediated. Undoubtedly, lords exercised power over their men, and that power was exercised differently in relation to different kinds of men, but lords had to negotiate with their men at the limits of that power. The societal values that defined good lordship, the nature of service by a range of men and the dynamics of the lord's affinity contributed to the power of individual nobles and to the collective power of the nobility.

The sixteenth-century French writer, Michel Ey-quem de Montaigne, asserted that ‘the proper, sole and essential life for one of the nobility in France is the life of the soldier’. This statement was true for most European nobilities who largely owed their rank and privilege to their origins as knightly warriors, although it is worth observing that the relationship between nobility, chivalry and military function was not constant throughout the middle ages. While few nobilities might be described as a warrior caste by the late medieval era, that military function remained at the heart of noble identity and self-perception. Changes in military technology and battlefield tactics (the concept of a military revolution remains persuasive) challenged aspects of noble pre-eminence in war, but early modern nobles continued to choose the profession of arms as a route to service, their right and expectation to command other soldiers surviving, often at the king's encouragement. War and martial pursuits generally remained essential in the acquisition of honour, and the conditioning for a martial life began in childhood as male kinsmen and servants used honour and shame to inculcate personal courage and self-discipline, while noble education continued to emphasise military skills and the study of warfare and military history. Newcomers to noble rank often cultivated a martial image to enhance their social acceptability, and the seventeenth century arguably saw a reinvigor - ation of martial ideas among the nobility as escalating warfare stimulated an increase in the military capacity of early modern governments.

Throughout medieval and early modern European history cases can be uncovered in every century of individual noble houses falling into decline, or being extinguished, and of individual kings gaining particular political advances over their most powerful subjects. The longer perspective, how - ever, reveals that, at least until the end of the eighteenth century, many noble houses that underwent episodes of eclipse recovered their fortunes, that those families who disappeared were replaced quickly, and that powerful kings were followed by weak kings. The history of early modern European nobilities is not one of gradual and inevitable decline, and increasingly the question exercising historians is the remarkable success and durability of nobilities. Tudor monarchs, for example, remained dependent on their nobility in war and in the governing of their localities, maintaining a mutual partnership that ensured the preservation of noble power whatever misfortune befell individuals such as the dukes of Northumberland or Norfolk. Even at the outbreak of civil war in 1642 noble power was immense. The French nobility of the late mediaeval period suffered decline in relation to the rural peasantry, only to recover their dominance in the early modern era. Spanish rule in Naples led to an increase in noble power over the rest of the population. In Denmark, in the period from 1536 to 1660 the nobility successfully expanded their power, while at the same time becoming an exclusive and closed caste. Even in Holland where social and economic changes far outpaced those in Scotland, the nobility continued to enjoy remarkable success.