Scotland’s Two Parliaments

2. The Three Estates — and One Chamber

For most of its existence the Parliament was unicameral: clergy, nobility and burgh commissioners all sat and voted in a single chamber, unlike the two houses of the English Parliament. This is a genuine and frequently cited structural difference, confirmed by the Scottish Parliament’s own historical materials, the RPS academic edition and standard reference works.

A distinct estate of shire commissioners was added following the County Franchise Act of 1587. Some historians treat this as effectively a fourth estate, and a fifth estate of royal officers of state has also been posited — but those later sub-classifications remain highly controversial among parliamentary historians, and the assembly continued to be called the Three Estates regardless.

3. Powers, and the Lords of the Articles

Parliament gave consent for the raising of taxation and exercised strong influence over the administration of justice, foreign policy, war and legislation. The RPS academic introduction describes it in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as “a powerful counter-weight to the power of the Stewart kings”, providing counsel and aid while also successfully opposing unpopular royal policies.

That power was contingent rather than constant. Capable adult monarchs could marginalise the estates: James IV largely avoided parliaments after 1509, and James V managed them firmly. Much legislative business was handled by the committee known as the Lords of the Articles, established by the 1450s–60s, lapsing between 1640 and 1661, and abolished in 1690 as part of the revolutionary settlement.

Here the evidence tiers matter. The early-twentieth-century historian R. S. Rait argued the Articles were a crown-management device that neutered parliamentary independence by burying unwelcome proposals. Recent research — Roland Tanner, Alan R. MacDonald, Alastair Mann — revises this, showing the committee was at best an imperfect tool for the delivery of the court’s agenda: in March 1482 it was taken over by men who were about to stage a coup against the king. The claim that the Articles rendered Parliament a rubber stamp should therefore be treated as outdated scholarship, not repeated uncritically.

4. The Reformation Parliament, 1560

In August 1560 the Parliament adopted a Protestant Confession of Faith, drafted by John Knox and the “Six Johns”, abolished the Mass under the Abolition of Mass Act 1560, and rejected papal jurisdiction under the Papal Jurisdiction Act 1560 — acting in the monarch’s absence and without immediate royal ratification, which did not come until 1567 under James VI. Whatever else it demonstrates, it demonstrates that the estates were capable of decisive independent action on the largest question of the age.

5. The Claim of Right, 1689

After the Glorious Revolution the Convention of the Scottish Estates faced a problem distinct from England’s: because James VII “had not been present in Scotland during the crisis and had not fled from Scottish territory”, the English formula of “abdication” was constitutionally awkward. On 4 April 1689 the Convention voted to remove him, explicitly drawing on George Buchanan’s contractual theory of monarchy.

The Claim of Right received royal assent on 11 April 1689. Its full title is “The Declaration of the Estates of the Kingdom of Scotland containing the Claim of Right and the offer of the Croune”, and it declared that James, “being a profest papist”, had “Invaded the fundamentall Constitution of the Kingdome and altered it from a legall limited monarchy To ane arbitrary despotick power… wherby he hath forfaulted the right to the Croune and the throne is become vacant”. Constitutional historians summarise its effect as bolstering “the position of parliament within the Scottish constitution at the expense of the royal prerogative”.

The comparison with England’s Bill of Rights needs stating precisely. Both documents excluded Catholics from the throne, limited royal power and offered the crown to William and Mary. The genuine distinction is rhetorical and theoretical: Scotland’s text asserted that the king had actively forfeited the throne by breaching a contract, a more overtly contractarian and anti-absolutist framing than England’s language of abdication. That drew on a real native tradition — Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) argued that royal authority rested on popular consent exercised through representative bodies, and the sentiment reaches back to the Declaration of Arbroath (1320).

And a caveat against overstatement: modern academic work, notably by J. H. Burns and Roger Mason, stresses that these ideas were not uniquely Scottish. Buchanan was “clearly influenced by, and contributing to, debates about the limited or absolute nature of royal authority found throughout Europe” and traceable to Roman law. The claim that Scotland invented contractual monarchy is a myth; the accurate claim is that Scotland’s official 1689 constitutional text stated the contractarian case more explicitly than England’s did.

6. The Union of 1707

The Scottish Parliament passed the Union with England Act, ratifying and approving the Treaty of Union, by 110 votes to 69 on 16 January 1707; the English Parliament passed the corresponding Union with Scotland Act. Parliament held its last sitting on 25 March 1707, and the Union took legal effect on 1 May 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Parliament of Great Britain at Westminster. The 45 Scottish MPs and 16 representative peers who went to the first British Parliament were co-opted, not freshly elected.

Outside Parliament the Union was genuinely and deeply unpopular. At least 80 to 90 petitions opposing it arrived between October 1706 and January 1707, and riots broke out in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The pressures running the other way were also real. Scotland’s economy had been devastated by the Darien Scheme: the Company of Scotland’s venture raised roughly £400,000 by public subscription and, per National Museums Scotland, its failure “cost 2,000 lives and lost Scotland a quarter of its liquid capital”. England then applied the coercive Alien Act 1705, threatening to ban Scottish exports and strip Scots in England of property rights unless Scotland negotiated union and accepted the Hanoverian succession.

Article 15 of the Treaty — “the Equivalent”, £398,085 10s sterling — was ostensibly compensation for Scotland assuming a share of England’s national debt, but was largely used to reimburse Darien investors, with about 58.6 per cent of the fund going to shareholders and creditors. The failed colonial venture and the terms of Union are, in that sense, the same story.

7. Bought and Sold for English Gold?

Robert Burns wrote “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” in 1791, printed anonymously in James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum Vol. 4 in 1792, and supplied the refrain that has framed the subject ever since: “We’re bought and sold for English gold — / Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!” Three points have to be held together.

First, the money is documented. A sum of £20,000 sterling(£240,000 Scots) was sent to Scotland for distribution by David Boyle, 1st Earl of Glasgow. The largest share — £12,325, the majority of the fund — went to James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, the Queen’s Commissioner in Parliament; the remainder was shared among roughly thirty other members. The itemised accounting derives from P. W. J. Riley’s article in the English Historical Review Vol. 84 (July 1969, pp. 522–527), reconstructing an allegation that traces to the memoirs of the anti-Union Jacobite George Lockhart of Carnwath (1714), where it appeared only briefly in an appendix.

Second, whether it was bribery, or decisive, is genuinely contested. Christopher A. Whatley — author of Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707 (1994) and The Scots and the Union (2006) — argues that the narrative “seems not to stand up to close scrutiny”: much of the money was salary arrears and pensions legitimately owed, several recipients were long-standing unionists who needed no persuading, and some who took money, such as the Duke of Atholl, voted against union. William Ferguson represents the opposing older view, characterising the Union as a great political job secured by patronage and well-timed payments amounting to bribery. Riley himself reframed the whole affair as squalid factional politics — “made by men of limited vision for very short-term and often contemptible reasons” — rather than a coherent conspiracy. Karin Bowie shifted the debate again, demonstrating through petitions and pamphlets that popular opposition was substantial and genuine whatever the elites’ motives.

Third, the current consensus is revisionist and multi-causal, stimulated by the 2007 tercentenary and the work of Whatley, T. M. Devine and Allan Macinnes: the decisive factors were securing the Protestant and Hanoverian succession against Jacobitism and Catholic France, the desire for free trade and access to English colonial markets, and post-Darien economic weakness. The payments are now widely read as shoring up existing supporters rather than buying decisive votes.

The honest editorial position, then, is not to dismiss Burns but to date him. His line is powerful cultural evidence of an enduring belief, written more than eighty years after the event by a man born in 1759. It is not contemporary documentary proof that votes were bought.

Part Two · 8. Devolution and 1999

After the failed 1979 referendum — a narrow 51.6 per cent Yes that fell short of the 40-per-cent-of-electorate threshold — the 1997 referendum was held on 11 September 1997 under a newly elected Labour government. Per the Scottish Parliament’s own official history, “74.3% of those who voted on the first question backed a Scottish parliament, and 63.5% of those who voted on the second question were in favour of it having tax-varying powers”, on a turnout of about 60 per cent; the tax-powers question recorded 1,512,889 (63.48%) Yes to 870,263 No.

The Scotland Act 1998 established the Parliament. The first elections were held on 6 May 1999; the Parliament first met on 12 May 1999; and it was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 1 July 1999, when it assumed full legislative powers. Until 2004 it met in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on The Mound.

9. The Holyrood Building

The building was designed by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles — born in Barcelona on 12 February 1955, died 3 July 2000 aged 45, before completion — with his firm EMBT and RMJM. The cost overrun is real and large: an early consultant’s estimate of about £40 million, which Lord Fraser’s inquiry found was never realistic for anything more than a basic office block, became a final cost of £414.4 million, reported to MSPs in February 2007 and described by Presiding Officer George Reid as roughly ten times the original estimate.

The Fraser Inquiry — established in 2003, chaired by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, reporting in September 2004 — concluded that the “original sin” was the choice of a fast-track “construction management” procurement route that removed fixed-price certainty, and criticised how the £40m figure had been presented to the public. It found no evidence of criminal corruption, attributing the debacle to optimism bias and management failure. The building was inaugurated on 9 October 2004 and won the 2005 RIBA Stirling Prize; the jury member Charles Jencks called it “a tour de force of arts and crafts and quality without parallel in the last 100 years of British architecture”. Both halves of that record belong in the same paragraph.

10. Electoral System and Powers

Elections use the Additional Member System, a form of mixed-member proportional representation: of 129 MSPs, 73 represent single-member constituencies elected by first-past-the-post, and 56 are elected from eight regional lists, seven per region, as a proportional top-up. This is genuinely distinct from Westminster’s pure first-past-the-post and deliberately makes single-party majorities harder — though not impossible, as the SNP’s 2011 majority, won on about 45 per cent of the constituency vote, demonstrates. Changes to the franchise or the electoral system require a two-thirds super-majority of MSPs.

Powers have expanded twice in significant steps. The Scotland Act 2012 devolved the power to set a Scottish Rate of Income Tax, effective April 2016, and to introduce Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and Scottish Landfill Tax, replacing UK Stamp Duty Land Tax and Landfill Tax from April 2015 — described by the Scottish Government as “the most significant legal transfer of power since devolution in 1999”. The Scotland Act 2016, following the Smith Commission after the independence referendum, went further, giving the Parliament power to set the rates and bands of non-savings, non-dividend income tax, a share of VAT receipts and additional welfare powers.

11. The 2014 Referendum — and What It Settled

The independence referendum was held on 18 September 2014 under a Section 30 order temporarily transferring the power to hold a legally binding vote to the Scottish Parliament, following the Edinburgh Agreement of 2012. It asked: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” The result was 55.3 per cent No (2,001,926) to 44.7 per cent Yes (1,617,989), on a record 84.6 per cent turnout — the highest for any UK-wide election or referendum since universal suffrage.

The procedural point matters as much as the result. The need for a Section 30 order confirms that Holyrood cannot unilaterally hold a binding independence referendum: matters affecting the Union as a whole are reserved to Westminster, as the UK Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2022. That is the sharpest available illustration of the difference between the sovereign Parliament that dissolved itself in 1707 and the devolved Parliament that met in 1999.

Timeline

1. 1235

   First documented Scottish parliament

   A colloquium at Kirkliston under Alexander II, with political and judicial roles

2. Feb 1293

   Earliest surviving parliamentary roll

   From John Balliol's parliament

3. 1326

   Burgh commissioners attend

   The third estate completes the Three Estates under Robert the Bruce

4. 1450s–60s

   The Lords of the Articles emerge

   A committee handling much legislative business; abolished 1690

5. 1560

   The Reformation Parliament

   Protestant Confession adopted; the Mass abolished; papal jurisdiction rejected

6. 1587

   County Franchise Act

   Shire commissioners added — sometimes called a fourth estate, controversially

7. 11 Apr 1689

   The Claim of Right receives royal assent

   James VII declared to have “forfaulted” the crown

8. 1698–1700

   The Darien Scheme fails

   About £400,000 raised by public subscription; a quarter of Scotland's liquid capital lost

9. 1705

   The Alien Act

   England threatens Scottish trade and property rights unless union is negotiated

10. 16 Jan 1707

    The Union is ratified

    The Scottish Parliament votes 110 to 69

11. 25 Mar 1707

    The last sitting

    The Union takes legal effect on 1 May 1707

12. 1791–92

    Burns writes “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation”

    Printed anonymously in the Scots Musical Museum, Vol. 4

13. 1 Mar 1979

    First devolution referendum

    51.6% Yes, short of the 40%-of-electorate threshold

14. 11 Sep 1997

    Second devolution referendum

    74.3% for a parliament; 63.5% for tax-varying powers

15. 1998

    Scotland Act 1998

    Creates a new devolved Parliament and Executive

16. 12 May 1999

    The Parliament first meets

    On The Mound; Winnie Ewing declares it “hereby reconvened”

17. 1 Jul 1999

    Officially opened

    By Queen Elizabeth II; full legislative powers assumed

18. 9 Oct 2004

    Holyrood inaugurated

    Final cost £414.4m; wins the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2005

19. 2012 & 2016

    Scotland Acts

    Substantial tax powers, then rates and bands of income tax and welfare powers

20. 18 Sep 2014

    Independence referendum

    55.3% No to 44.7% Yes on an 84.6% turnout

Did You Know?

• The first identifiable Scottish parliament met at Kirkliston, now beside Edinburgh Airport, in 1235.
• All three estates sat in a single chamber — Scotland never had a House of Lords of its own.
• The 45 Scottish MPs who went to Westminster in 1707 were co-opted from the old Parliament, not elected.
• “The Equivalent” — £398,085 10s — was mostly spent reimbursing investors in the failed Darien colony.
• Burns wrote “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” in 1791, more than eighty years after the Union he was describing.
• The Duke of Atholl took money from the Union fund and then voted against the Union.
• Holyrood's architect, Enric Miralles, died in July 2000, four years before the building he designed was inaugurated.
• The building that cost ten times its first estimate won the RIBA Stirling Prize the year after it opened.
• Changing Holyrood's electoral system needs a two-thirds majority of MSPs — a safeguard Westminster does not have.
• The 2014 referendum's 84.6% turnout is the highest for any UK-wide vote since universal suffrage.

Honest Caveats

• The dissolution date depends on what is being dated. The last sitting was 25 March 1707; the Union took legal effect on 1 May 1707; some reference works list “disbanded 1 May 1707”. State the distinction rather than silently picking one.
• The 1997 figures differ slightly between the two ballot questions — about 60.1 and 60.0 per cent turnout, 74.3 and 63.5 per cent Yes. Cite the specific question.
• The £20,000 and £12,325 figures rest on a chain of evidence. A hostile primary source (Lockhart, 1714) reconstructed by Riley (1969). They are the best available accounting, interpreted very differently by different historians, and should be presented as documented sums whose significance is contested — not as proof of decisive bribery.
• William Ferguson’s “political job” characterisation is well attested in the historiography, but a precise verbatim quotation could not be independently confirmed; it is presented here as a faithful paraphrase of his position, not a direct quote.
• “Oldest parliament” claims are unreliable in either direction. The accurate statement is that the Scottish and English parliaments were of comparable thirteenth-century antiquity.
• The fourth and fifth estates are contested categories, not settled ones, and the assembly continued to be called the Three Estates throughout.
• Continuity between the two Parliaments is symbolic. Anyone asserting legal continuity is making a claim the Scotland Act 1998 does not support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Cards

• The Scottish Office

  How Scotland was administered between the two parliaments.

• Scotland's Supreme Courts

  The other institutions Article XIX of the Treaty of Union preserved.

• Convention of Royal Burghs

  The burghs' own representative body, alongside the third estate.

• Bank of Scotland

  The Darien Scheme, the Equivalent, and Scottish capital in 1707.

• Registers of Scotland

  Rooted in a 1617 Act of the pre-Union Parliament.

• National Records of Scotland

  Where the parliamentary record is kept.

• Royal Society of Edinburgh

  The intellectual world of Buchanan's successors.

• NHS Scotland

  One of the largest responsibilities Holyrood inherited in 1999.