‘Cleare as Is the Summers Sunne’?

In sixteenth-century Europe, laws of royal succession were frequently presented as virtually inviolable. Attempts to alter them or interpret them in novel ways provoked fierce legal debate. For example, Scottish lawyers questioned an apparent attempt to exclude Mary, Queen of Scots from the English royal succession. In so doing, these lawyers made reference to eclectic sources of legal authority, including Roman law and canon law, but also English law and the positive laws of other nations. Arguably, they regarded all of those sources as potential repositories of legal learning. They also seemed to indicate that that intrinsic learning gave the laws a rather general force in helping to resolve disputes in many different jurisdictions. Here it is argued that this is not to be explained in terms of a nascent ius inter gentes, but rather with reference to the fundamental assumptions these lawyers held concerning the nature of legal authority.