The subject of this chapter is the Scottish response to the challenge offered by George Buchanan's radical political doctrine in De jure regni apud Scotos. It is both true and important that the debate precipitated by Buchanan's dialogue was in the nature of the case European, not merely national – both the wider political significance of the deposition of Mary Queen of Scots, which Buchanan sought to justify, and the celebrity of the man who advanced that justification ensured this. It is also both true and significant that each of the three writers dealt with here was a Scot in exile, having had substantial experience of a wider intellectual and political world than was afforded them in their native land. Two of them, indeed – Adam Blackwood and William Barclay – spent so large a part of their lives outside Scotland as to be, arguably, more French than Scots in formation and outlook. Scots however they were and remained, and they were acutely aware of the specifically Scottish dimensions of the polemical controversy in which they chose to become engaged.

It is to be borne in mind that the precipitating cause of this particular flurry of controversial activity was the eventual publication of Buchanan's Dejure regni in 1579. It is true that the dialogue had been written about a dozen years before that, and quite soon after the political events in Scotland which culminated in the deposition of Mary Stewart and her replacement by her infant son as James VI. The book did, to be sure, circulate quite extensively in manuscript in the late 1560s and the 1570s. We know this from Buchanan's correspondence and from other sources.