Kingdom of Scotland - Union With England

Union With England

Scotland's monarch, James VI, King of Scots, succeeded to the throne of the Kingdom of England in 1603, becoming King James I of England, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I of England. This was merely a personal union: the two nations shared a head of state but retained their own separate parliaments and administration.

While there had been three earlier attempts (in 1606, 1667 and 1689) to politically unite the two countries by Acts of Parliament, these were the first Acts which had the will of both political establishments behind them, albeit for rather different reasons. In the English case, the purpose was to establish the Royal succession along Protestant lines in the same manner as provided for by the English Act of Settlement 1701 rather than that of the Scottish Act of Security. In the Scottish case, the purpose was partly to use English subsidies to recover from the financial problems caused by the failure of the Darién scheme and partly to remove English trade sanctions put in place through the Alien Act to force the Scots Parliament into compliance with the Act of Settlement.

A major feature of British politics from 1702 to 1707 was the necessity of securing the Hanoverian Succession. The death of King William in 1702 resulted in the succession of Queen Anne to the crowns of England and Scotland. Anne's last surviving child had died in 1700 and the English Act of Settlement had passed the English Succession over to the Protestant House of Hanover. Since it was unthinkable that Scotland and England should again have separate monarchs, the securing of the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland became the primary objective in British strategic thinking towards Scotland. By 1703 the Anglo-Scottish dynastic union, the Union of the Crowns, was in crisis. The Scottish Parliament was pursuing both an independent dynastic and foreign policy and the Scottish Act of Security allowed for the Scottish Parliament to choose a different monarch to succeed to the Scottish crown from that of England, if it so wished. Many in Scotland saw this as a desirable position given that the Parliament of England had executed King Charles I during the English Civil War without any reference to the Scottish Parliament, despite Charles also being King of Scots. This meant that the Act allowed for the Scottish Parliament to initiate an independent foreign policy during an era of major European warfare like the War of the Spanish Succession and the Great Northern War. From the English political perspective, this opened up the possibilities of the restoration of a Jacobite on the Scottish throne or a Scottish trading and/or military alliance with another power in Europe like France or the Dutch Republic. Such an alignment could result in attacks from Scotland, Ireland and the continent and compromise England's interests abroad. Equally, the Darien scheme left Scotland badly in need of investment. Hence the political union was pursued by both parliaments, albeit for different reasons.

The Kingdoms of Scotland and England ceased to exist on 1 May 1707, following passage of the Acts of Union, which merged Scotland with England thereby creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. The Acts incorporated provisions for Scotland to send representative peers from the Peerage of Scotland to sit in the House of Lords. It guaranteed that the Church of Scotland would remain the established church in Scotland, that the Court of Session would "remain in all time coming within Scotland" and that Scots law would "remain in the same force as before". Other provisions included the restatement of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the ban on Roman Catholics from taking the throne. It also created a customs union and monetary union. The Act provided that any "laws and statutes" that were "contrary to or inconsistent with the terms" of the Act would "cease and become void." So the Scottish parliament succeeded in getting a number of concessions.