As Marischal's feud with Huntly drew to a close, his participation in court politics declined sharply. He continued to attend court, but, with the threat from the centre lifted, Marischal concentrated the majority of his time and effort in the localities and, as we will see in chapter five, increasingly delegated his responsibilities to his son and heir. There would be other feuds, detailed in chapter four, but none would draw him into high politics in the same way. Most of the earl's activities at the royal court and centre of government therefore concerned his relationship with the king and his services to the state, the focus of this chapter. ‘Services to the state’ in this context refers to positions of power that Marischal held from the crown, such as his positions as marischal, as a member of the privy council or as hereditary sheriff of the Mearns.

There is a broad consensus that the reign of James VI saw far reaching changes in the relationship between the nobility and the state, as well as in the overall nature of government. Julian Goodare's study of the mechanisms of the Jacobean government perceived a growing intensification in the processes of state-building between 1560 and 1625, exaggerated by the Union of the Crowns, where the nobles were increasingly confined to advising the king or serving a more centralised royal government, rather than governing the localities on behalf of the king. This shift was achieved through interventions into the nobles’ old mechanisms of power, such as reforming sheriff courts. The nobility still retained a central role in the government of Scotland, while also maintaining their strong regional powerbases, meaning that the state was still essentially aristocratic, but their autonomy and power had been fundamentally eroded. Although this is largely seen as the outcome of James’ reign, its causes are more debatable. Julian Goodare emphasised the intentional development of government, while continuity has been stressed by Jenny Wormald and Keith Brown, who saw these changes as more to do with the end of a period of disruption caused by royal minority and civil war. For them, these changes were reactive and incremental, and not part of a self-consciously designed plan.

During James VI's minority the nobility of Scotland were encouraged to donate books to the young king's library to aid his education. William Keith, Master of Marischal (George's father), donated the Cosmographie Universelle of Andre Theuet. His brother Robert Keith, Commendator of Deer, gave Les Offices de Cicero, which was in both Latin and French. The selection of these specific books would suggest that they were important, or at least familiar, to the Keiths giving them. If these volumes were suitable gifts for the education of young James, then they would presumably have been suitable to give to young George, and both seem to have had an influence upon the boy.

As a scholar he was keenly interested in the themes of the Cosmographie and especially its related field of chorography. Finding evidence for the influence of Cicero's De Officiis on George is less easy. In broad terms and as part of a wider European phenomenon, there had developed in Scotland a system of neo-stoicism that was heavily influenced by the works of classical authors, especially Cicero's De Officiis. This philosophy carried notions of practical civic virtue, where the virtuous man, trained and improved by philosophy, became actively involved in the public and political life of his community. The movement was pioneered by men such as Justus Lipsius, with whom Marischal was familiar, as he possessed a handwritten copy of one of Lipsius’ smaller philosophical treaties, De Bello De Pace. Certainly later generations of the family remembered George as a reformer of both ‘the country and citizenry’, citing his efforts in the foundation of Marischal College, but also in estate improvement.

In De Officiis, Cicero gives advice on how a rich man should best spend his wealth. The greatest way, he says, is to spend money on works useful to the community, such as city walls, dockyards, harbours and aqueducts. Less appropriate are theatres, colonnades and temples. It is remarkable, and perhaps a small contributing factor to the fact that George would build three harbours and found two port-towns. These projects provide the focus for this chapter, which will assess the available evidence for Marischal's economic self-interest and ascertain how this interacted with his noble identity and whether there is any hint at Ciceronian benevolence behind it.

The aftermath of the Ruthven Raid saw George Keith, Earl Marischal, thrown into the depths of factional court politics. The following years saw a series of intense struggles, pitting the earl against his great territorial rival, George Gordon, earl of Huntly, and for a time in a lull in this feud, with the Chancellor of Scotland, John Maitland of Thirlestane. Marischal's own disputes became intimately caught up in the backdrop of wider and larger Scottish court struggles, such as those between Huntly and Maitland at court, or Huntly and his other territorial rivals; international diplomacy with England, Spain, France, Denmark and Sweden; and sectarian conflict between the Kirk and the perceived Catholic threat. Despite the high politics, shifting alliances and even violence, this period of activity came to a sudden and abrupt end for the earl in 1595, when these disputes seemed to largely resolve themselves.

This is a long and complicated chapter in the earl's career, taking in almost all of his activities, political, religious and even economic, at court, in the locality, within his lordship and within his close family. But this period is worth exploring in detail, to reveal the fine, interrelated mechanisms that made up the essence of his lordship. Through his actions and reactions we find his motivations and priorities, as well as the nature, extent and limits of his power. The period can be divided into three largely distinct periods, focusing on three of the earl's feuds. The first covers the period 1582 to 1589, and an essentially territorial dispute, with a major courtly element, with the earl of Huntly, centred around that earl's jurisdiction as Lieutenant of the North. The second period, 1589 to 1591, sees a shift to a mostly court-based feud with Chancellor Maitland, focused mainly upon the earl's loss of influence at court during and following his ambassadorial mission to Denmark. Finally, the third period, 1591 to 1595, sees a return to the feud with Huntly, albeit the emphasis this time being upon wider political coalitions, rather than immediate territorial concerns.

Marischal and Huntly, 1582 to 1589

The period between the political crises of the Ruthven Raid in 1582 and the Brig o’ Dee rebellion in 1589 saw Marischal come into direct and bloody conflict with the earl of Huntly.

The origins of the Keiths are obscure. All that is known for certain is that they took their name from the lands of Keith in East Lothian and that the oldest traceable ancestor is Hervey de Keith in the reign of David I in the twelfth century. Hervey was in possession of lands at Keith by 1159, the previous owner there having been Gilbert de Umfraville. The current theory is that Hervey was of Norman or French origin. Regardless, George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, had no doubts about his ancestry: he believed he was descended from the Germanic Chatti described by Tacitus, who, having been conquered by the Romans, had fled to Scotland and eventually established themselves as noblemen of the Scottish kingdom. Whatever the truth of this, before examining the fifth earl's early career, some account of the history of the Earl Marischals in general is essential, especially the careers of his grandfather (the fourth earl) and father (referred to below as the Master of Marischal).

The Earls Marischal

All extant records indicate that the Keiths always held the office of king's marischal, later great marischal of Scotland, then Earl Marischal. This role initially comprised little more than acting as the king's farrier, but developed during the medieval period into having responsibility for the victualling of the king's hall, military justice and organising tournaments. There is some suggestion that the office entailed command of the royal cavalry and, jointly with the constable (exercised by the Earls of Erroll), had jurisdiction over chivalric courts. By the sixteenth century it had developed into a largely ceremonial role. Contemporary details are frustratingly vague. George, the fifth earl, described the office only as Regii Architriclini, vulgo Marischalli ‘the royal master of feasts, commonly known as Marischal’. The 1699 genealogist of the Keiths is likewise light on detail, saying only that it was ‘an office of great dignity and eminence, and of great power in peace and war, foreby one of the chief ancient offices of the crown’. In the eighteenth century, Alexander Nisbett noted that the marischal was responsible for the maintenance of order within whatever building parliament was being held, ensuring both the safety and dignity of the monarch. It came with high ceremonial importance, processing to the left of the king (or his commissioner) in the riding of parliament.

On 2 April 1593, a month into his frustrating stint as Lieutenant of the North, George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal, signed the foundation charter of what became Marischal College. A little over a year later (20 September 1594) this document, now ratified, was handed to the first principal, Robert Howie, completing the process. Marischal College is the best known of the earl's achievements, and the most visible, its grand Gothic Revival building being the centrepiece of modern Aberdeen. As such, the creation of the college has been relatively well discussed compared to the rest of Marischal's life. Yet the existing interpretations of the college largely fail to understand Marischal's own motivations and especially his motivations as a nobleman. It is within this context, of Scottish lordship and patronage, that the foundation and subsequent history of Marischal College makes the most sense. Marischal College is thus an excellent and well-documented case study of how the Earl Marischal approached matters of lordship.

That said, the work that has been done on the creation of Marischal College is very important. The college's creation was first understood as a reaction to Aberdeen's other university, King's College in Old Aberdeen. The idea that Marischal College was somehow a Protestant tank on the lawn of Catholic King's has been thoroughly debunked – King's was Protestant by the time Marischal College came into being. However, a refinement of this initial idea is that Marischal College was a result of the failure of King's to modernise. First set forward by Robert Sangster Rait in 1895, this interpretation sees the college as a direct response to the failure of King's College to adopt its nova fundatio ‘new foundation’, a series of teaching and administrative reforms inspired by Andrew Melville's successful re-establishment of Glasgow in 1577. This would have rejected Bishop Elphinstone's original ambitious foundation of 1495 and turned King's into a liberal arts college on the Genevan model. The Earl Marischal had been involved with these failed reforms and is therefore seen as seeking to address this failure through founding a new institution.

Others have turned away from this idea and sought to see the founding of Marischal College as the result of the earl's other preoccupations.

We have already seen Marischal's major conflicts with the earl of Huntly and Chancellor Maitland, both of which were intimately tied to court politics and resolved by 1595. Beyond these major disputes, which encompassed court and locality, Marischal pursued a series of lesser local clashes with several individuals right up until his death. Whereas most studies of feuding and conflict in Scotland concentrate on larger specific feuds, or explore one particular type of conflict, few have considered the individual perspective, which puts the larger struggles in context and gives a greater sense of the full spectrum of dispute. So, while Marischal's feud with Huntly up to 1595 is the most sensational conflict, the underlying root of that struggle being the jurisdiction of the Lieutenant of the North, it can be better understood if we look to Marischal's lesser disputes, in terms of both their underlying principles and the resulting conduct. These feuds cast useful light on the running, exercise and priorities of his lordship, as they show what kinds of issue provoked the earl into action. In particular, they show the severe problems arising from disputed boundaries of varying sorts: not only those of land and property, but also of jurisdiction and authority.

Defining and categorising conflict in this period is difficult. Keith Brown highlighted how contemporary definitions of feuding were unhelpfully vague, so bloodfeud is best thought of as being only one facet of a range of disputes and modes of dispute resolution. Marischal conducted his quarrels within the context of a transitional period, when the informal framework of the Scottish bloodfeud – essentially ritualised violence supported by a kin network to achieve dispute settlement – gave way to a more legalistic court-based system of dispute settlement and corrective justice. Whether Marischal's case corresponds to this decline in violence and out-of-court mediation in favour of legal recourse is inherently difficult to answer; the evidence is naturally skewed towards the latter owing to the records it generated. No doubt there were several confrontations, meetings and settlements throughout the earl's life that went unrecorded. The major problem in assessing Marischal's feud with the earl of Huntly in the previous chapters was the lack of detail; from contemporary reports we know that it was happening, but we do not know exactly how.

George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal (1554–1623) is known, if at all, principally as the founder of Marischal College in Aberdeen. He is perhaps sometimes recognised as King James VI's ambassador to Denmark in 1589, when he married Princess Anna as James’ proxy, and maybe, occasionally, as the founder of the towns of Stonehaven and Peterhead. Yet he had a much richer and more distinguished life and career than just these fleeting moments. As well as being a key agent in, and witness to, the political struggles in the early part of James’ reign, he is a fascinating case study of noble power and, in particular, Protestant noble power. This is especially so at this crucial time of change, when the Scottish nobility had to cope with the long and contested aftermath of the Protestant Reformation of 1560, combined with the rule of a highly intelligent and somewhat unusual king, as well as the loss of that king to England in 1603. Rather than a narrow biographical study of one forgotten rich man, this book aims to be a study of the management of the earldom that man represented. This will be explored from three particular perspectives: the political, the religious and the regional. In the broadest terms, this book aims to explore the strategies behind long-term, stable, Protestant lordship in Scotland during the reign of James VI. The primary aim is to explore how an earldom was managed in this period, and what that entailed. The secondary aim is to see how this fits into the wider trends we know about Scottish noble power at this time.

A number of factors make Marischal worthy of further exploration. He appears regularly in contemporary records, across a broad range of spheres. From about 1544 the Earls Marischal were identified as Protestants: remarkably early converts and especially so for noblemen of the north-east, which is usually characterised as religiously conservative and Catholic. Because of his Protestantism, Marischal was keenly observed by the English ambassadors to Scotland, whose dispatches provide a wealth of evidence for his activities, albeit sometimes coloured by court gossip, misinformation and rumour.

Aside from lands, legal status, jurisdiction and influence, the earldom headed by the Earl Marischal, of course, was also made up of people. Unfortunately, they are perhaps the hardest part of the earldom to delineate. While the lands held by the Earl Marischal were often described in great detail in charters, no similar sort of documentation survive to say who was part of this, or what their roles were. As such, this chapter will attempt to make some comment on the earldom's allies and the wider Keith kindred. Given the dearth of material, it will then move on to firmer historical ground, to see what the earl's close family can tell us about his strategies of lordship, succession and family alliances, and what these examples can shed light on. As will be seen, and has already been seen at points in chapter two, the close family relationships at the top of the earldom could often resemble something of a soap opera, containing a fair dose of intrigue, adultery and quarrels, which, at times, could be more bitter than anything seen in the previous chapters with the earl's disputes with his fellow noblemen.

The Keiths

We have little firm knowledge of Marischal's network of allies and dependents. Although we have many mentions of Marischal being allied to other noblemen, these tend to all be in relation to specific events. So, as we saw in the previous chapter, he might be allied to the earl of Erroll in mutual protection against the earl of Huntly in 1589, but also in an army opposing Erroll in the same year, during the Brig o’ Dee rebellion. In chapter two we saw Marischal temporarily cease his feud with Huntly when Chancellor Maitland became his more pressing opponent, and Huntly even mediated between Marischal and Erroll during their later feud. Noble relationships were fluid and circumstantial.

We can get a faint sense of some of the lairdly families with close associations with the Keiths. The Arbuthnotts, for example, regularly intermarried with the earl's close family. Yet we have no formal evidence to describe the nature of their relationship. This is perhaps not surprising. Again, relationships between houses were likely to be informal for most of the time, only needing more detailed arrangements, through bonds of protection or bonds of manrent, during political crises.