The General Assembly of the Kirk as a rival of the Scottish Parliament
Abstract
The accompanying thesis forms a study of the General Assembly as an influence not only upon Scottish
Politics but upon Scottish Representative Institutions.
The majority of writers upon the history of the Scottish
Church stress the private influence of individuals, which while interesting in itself was in many cases extraneous to the general movements both in the Kirk and in the development of the representative principle both as applied
to Kirk institutions and to Parliament and Conventions.
Several writers have seen in the General Assembly
a thoroughly democratic institution, which represented all
classes of social life and which prepared the way for the
ideal of a universal franchise. I have endeavoured to show
that the General Assembly for the greater part of its
development had little of this universal character and
was rather the expression of an "Opposition" which was
no more democratic in actual composition than the Parliament
itself.
The period 1560-1618 represents only part of the
period upon which I originally began investigation. To cope
with the century 1560-1660 I found that it would have been
necessary to omit much manuscript material which was
valuable for purposes of detail. I therefore limited the
present thesis to the 58 years after the Reformation
which saw the rise of the Assembly to full power 1592-96
and its subsequent decline, both as a political force and as a representative institution.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.