Sovereignty, counsel, and consent in Scotland

Prefaced with a discussion of the crucial importance of sage counsel in mitigating the debilitating effects of absolutist sovereignty in political theory, political practice and political drama, the second chapter looks at David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre as a departure from the standard pattern of Tudor moralities. It offers a reading of Ane Satyre as a play which attempts to counsel the counsellors of the monarch in political matters and tries to bring about social, political, economic, and religious reform, by exerting its influence on the convention of the three estates rather than the person of the monarch, thereby locating legislative and executive power in that representative body instead of the person of the sovereign.