Royal Court of Scotland: Difference between revisions

[[File:Restored ceiling of the King's Chamber, Stirling Castle.jpg|thumb|300px|The Stirling Heads, carved roundels on the roof of the King's Chamber in [[Stirling Castle]], include many members of the court of James V]]

 

The '''Royal Court of Scotland''' was the administrative, political and artistic centre of the [[Kingdom of Scotland]]. It emerged in the tenth century and continued until it ceased to function when [[James I of England|James VI]] inherited the throne of England in 1603. For most of the medieval era, the king had no "capital" as such. The Pictish centre of [[Forteviot]] was the chief royal seat of the early Gaelic Kingdom of Alba that became the Kingdom of Scotland. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Scone was a centre for royal business. Edinburgh only began to emerge as the capital in the reign of [[James III of Scotland|James III]] but his successors undertook occasional royal progress to a part of the kingdom. Little is known about the structure of the Scottish royal court in the period before the reign of David I when it began to take on a distinctly feudal character, with the major offices of the [[Steward of Scotland|Steward]], [[Chamberlain of Scotland|Chamberlain]], [[Constable of Scotland|Constable]], [[Marischal of Scotland|Marischal]] and [[Chancellor of Scotland|Lord Chancellor]]. By the early modern era the court consisted of leading nobles, office holders, ambassadors and supplicants who surrounded the king or queen. The Chancellor was now effectively the first minister of the kingdom and from the mid-sixteenth century he was the leading figure of the [[Privy Council of Scotland|Privy Council]].