In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was a movement towards more centralised control of the administration of justice. What was remarkable was the apparent lack of local resistance to the intensifying presence of the king's government. The crown had made the regional elites feel part of this evolving structure of government by including them within it, not only in their own regions but within government at its highest levels as well. This seems particularly true of the Middle March. This chapter looks at how figures from the region participated in the government of the kingdom, and how they themselves embodied the governmental connections between Edinburgh and the march. Traditionally, such men were used to being involved in government in Edinburgh in a representative or advisory capacity, in being called to account by the privy council and the admission of some to the council itself, as representatives to parliaments, or as allies of court factions, or as members of the royal household. A number of them owned townhouses in Edinburgh. As Julian Goodare observes, the participation of the political elite of the borderers in national politics was noticeable, even though it may have been less than that of the elite of the central Lowlands. But these men were not merely operating at the ‘centre’ of government: they were providing a direct link between that centre and their ‘localities’, the regions in which they already held authority and continued to do so.

Political or court life was therefore not alien to the lairds of the Middle March. The march's proximity to Edinburgh, and the routes provided by the rivers of the Tweed basin, enabled relatively easy communication. The West March was not so accessible, being significantly further from Edinburgh, with the hills separating Nithsdale, Annandale and Eskdale impeding communication across the region. Of the two main places used by the crown for musters or judicial courts in the Middle March, Peebles was only a day's ride, whilst Jedburgh was less than fifty miles from Edinburgh. In 1576 the council met in Edinburgh on 8 November and at Jedburgh four days later. A messenger sent on a round of the East and Middle March towns was paid virtually the same as one sent to St Andrews or Perth. Whilst these lines of communication could be used by the crown aggressively on a judicial raid, they equally facilitated the lairds’ involvement with central government.