Steve Murdoch

The Terror of the Seas

This book places early modern Scottish maritime warfare in its European context. Its formidably broad range of sources sheds light on many previously little known, or unknown, aspects of naval history. It also provides many valuable new perspectives on the importance of the sea to the Scots, and of the Scots to the naval history of Great Britain.

Letters Of Reprisal

Henry VIII and the Count of Holland sometimes issued letters of reprisal in times of war as a primary means of conducting war at sea, effectively treating them the same way as letters of marque. In Scotland greater differentiation was made between the two types of authorisation. Letters of reprisal were issued where an individual or collective group had suffered an illegal loss at foreign hands in peacetime. Before a letter of reprisal was issued, the injured party had to provide proof of injury and loss and have established legal proceedings for recovery but prove he had been faced with a denial of justice. Reprisal wars could be sustained over decades and lead to all-out war when factors such as political alliances, coupled with obvious and genuine commercial grievances, played a part.Keywords: letters; reprisal wars; Scotland

Scottish involvement in the Swedish Riksdag of the seventeenth century: the period from Parliamentarianism to Absolutism, c.1632–1700

SUMMARY This article discusses the role of one migrant ethnic group (in this case the Scots) and follows its involvement in the Swedish Parliament (Riksdag) in the Swedish in the early modern period. It seeks to establish whether the Scots used their ethnicity to form a particular constituency within the Swedish Parliament, or if they had become so well integrated into Swedish society that they sat in the Riksdag as Swedes regardless of their ethnic links. In doing so, this article contributes to a number of areas of interest beyond parliamentary history, not least in the fields of ethnic integration and societal acceptance in early modern Sweden.