THE tercentenary of the Scottish Parliament’s approval of the Treaty of Union on 16 January 2007 coincided with a regular monthly press conference at 10 Downing Street. Asked why no major celebrations of the anniversary were being held, the prime minister, Tony Blair, replied that ‘the most important thing is not fireworks but … giving a good reason as to why the union of England and Scotland is good for today’s world and the future’.1 Several months later, the tercentenary of the Union coming into force on 1 May was overshadowed in Edinburgh by elections, the following day, to the devolved Scottish Parliament, which—aptly perhaps—returned a minority Scottish National Party administration. Seven and a half years previously, on 1 July 1999, the state opening of the new Parliament was choreographed to incorporate resonant echoes of the ceremonial ‘riding of Parliament’ before 1707, appealing to nostalgic notions that the Parliament was being reconvened, rather than created anew.
Alongside politicians and pundits, historians have been drawn to proposing and refuting ‘good reasons’ for Anglo-Scottish union in 1707 and subsequently. For the Union of 1707 remains the canonical moment in modern Scottish history: an event that ‘casts a long shadow … both backwards and forwards’.2 It is also a uniquely emotive subject, largely due to the irresistible temptation to identify, in circumstances surrounding its eighteenth-century enactment, factors conferring or denying the legitimacy of Scotland’s continued connections with England. Controversial when framed in 1707, the Union has provoked Manichean divisions among eighteenth-century politicians and subsequent critics alike. Accordingly, whilst Allan Macinnes identifies three distinctive features of union historiography—‘its longevity, its partisanship and its ideological fragmentation’—Christopher Whatley regrets Scotland having ‘a historiography of the Union which is scarred by bias’, and has attacked commentators ‘whose error-strewn accounts have followed tortuously illogical paths to their preordained conclusions’.3
Since its enactment, inspiration has been drawn from the rhetoric of contemporary Union commissioners, such as James Douglas, Duke of Queensberry, who confidently reassured parliamentary colleagues in 1707 that ‘we and our posterity will reap the benefit’.4 Another commissioner, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, recorded that Scotland had thereby ‘been led from the political wilderness on to the only true road to happiness and prosperity’.5 Panegyrical paeans thereafter assimilated the Union within a Whiggish trajectory of political liberty and commercial prosperity, informing Hugh Trevor-Roper’s admiration in 1977 for ‘that great, unique and irreversible act of statesmanship, as it has generally seemed’.6 As Tony Claydon has observed, ‘the Union stood as a shining beacon’ for Whig historians, deemed ‘nearly as significant as the Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, the 1688 revolution or the 1832 Reform Act’.7
By contrast, however, equally tenacious support has attached to the private regrets of another union commissioner, Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, that measures deployed to secure its enactment involved ‘bribing a nation to undo themselves’, ensuring that the Union ‘sold and betrayed the sovereignty, liberty, trade, wealth and everything that is esteemed dear and sacred by a free people’.8 Published anonymously by his political enemies, Lockhart’s Memoirs (1714) included allegations regarding sums secretly paid to some of his parliamentary colleagues from Queen Anne’s ministry, which fuelled enduring depictions of the Union negotiations as sordidly corrupt, whereby the Scots were, as Robert Burns memorably claimed, ‘bought and sold for English gold’.9 To explain the Union’s ‘almost miraculous’ enactment, charges of venality, together with claims of threatened English invasion, remain vociferously upheld by the Scottish nationalist Paul Scott, whose strenuous denunciations of the Union explain his inclusion amongst ‘those for whom scholarship comes second to national piety’.10
Whilst the Union’s tercentenary ‘occurred to almost no rejoicing and public ceremonial’, it stimulated ‘a bumper period for the publication of Union-related’ research.11 Nascent consensus was even detected among ‘Scots of all stripes’ that, if nothing else, the Union’s enactment in 1707 was ‘controversial, contingent and ironic’.12 In 1907, by contrast, Peter Hume Brown compiled an essay collection to commemorate the Union’s bicentenary, marvelling that, despite the eight contributors’ different fields of expertise, their articles all ‘converge to one conclusion—that the Union was inevitable, and at the same time, desirable’.13 Until the mid-twentieth century, as Richard Finlay observed, Scotland ‘followed its own peculiar historiographical Sonderweg which has emphasised the inevitability and durability of the Union with England’.14 In the 1960s, however, the ‘inevitability thesis’ was attacked by William Ferguson, who emphasized the unpredictable outcome of negotiations in the 1700s, caustically objecting that few events had been more ‘abused by subjectivity and determinist interpretations’. Viewing English financial inducements as tools of effective patronage, Ferguson’s oft-quoted characterization of the Union as ‘probably the greatest “political job” of the eighteenth century’ articulated a prevalent Namierite tendency to accord primacy to high-political machinations, which was expanded in the 1970s by Patrick Riley, for whom the Union was endorsed ‘by men of limited vision for very short-term and comparatively petty, if not squalid, aims’.15 By the Union’s tercentenary, however, there was broad support for Whatley’s contention that, over the previous generation, ‘the pendulum of historiographical fortune’ had ‘swung excessively in the direction of cynicism and contempt for Scotland’s pre-union politicians’.16
Seeking to steer between the extremes of teleological determinism and short-term opportunism, this chapter supplies a conspectus of Union historiographies three centuries after the Treaty’s enactment. Following a brief account of significant factors influencing events in 1706–7, this chapter first identifies a discernible impetus towards interpreting Anglo-Scottish Union as a rational and principled decision, irrespective of the terms of the actual settlement. Examining lineages of support for closer union, particularly from 1689 onwards, revisionist accounts have emphasized the sheer complexity and interrelated nature of events in 1707, seeking to restore a rationale to the actions of eighteenth-century contemporaries, implicitly denied by derisive denunciations of cynical self-interest. Thereafter, the chapter explores the energetic extent to which parochial preoccupations with domestic considerations have been displaced by scholars keen to contextualize the Union’s enactment in terms of English, Irish, continental, and imperial imperatives.
At the start of the eighteenth century, closer political union with England represented one possible means of addressing serious and interrelated concerns facing Scotland. Following the Williamite Revolution of 1688, the dynamics of Stuart multiple monarchy had altered decisively, as ecclesiastical pluralism within Britain was created by the re-establishment of Presbyterianism, whilst the abolition of the Lords of the Articles removed royal control over the Scottish Parliament’s proceedings. From the mid-1690s, domestic economic conditions deteriorated amidst harvest failures and famine, while Scottish mercantile networks were disrupted by English involvement in the Nine Years War (1688–97). Frustrated by restrictive English trade tariffs and export prohibitions, an attempt to establish a separate Scottish trading colony at Darien, on the Panamian isthmus, dramatically failed, involving the loss of up to one-quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital. In 1700 the death of Queen Anne’s last surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, provoked dynastic insecurity, to which the English Parliament’s Act of Settlement (1701), entailing the succession in the House of Hanover, was regarded by the Scots as an unacceptably unilateral response. Further afield, the death in 1700 of the last Spanish Habsburg monarch, Charles II, prompted the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), which unleashed the alarming spectre not only of a Franco-Spanish global hegemony but potentially also a British War of Succession, since Louis XIV favoured restoration of the Catholic Jacobite dynasty to the British thrones. Abortive discussions regarding possible renegotiation of the Anglo-Scottish regal union of 1603 were convened at Whitehall between November 1702 and February 1703. The Scottish Parliament’s Act of Security (1704), defending Scotland’s right to choose an alternative monarchical successor unless Anglo-Scottish trade inequities were redressed, provoked retaliatory legislation by the English Parliament in March 1705 stipulating that, unless the Scots confirmed the Hanoverian succession, they would be declared aliens in England, and their coal, cattle, and linen exports prohibited. Pending repeal of the ‘Aliens Act’, the Scottish Parliament voted in autumn 1705 to invite Queen Anne to nominate commissioners to enter renewed negotiations for closer Anglo-Scottish union. A Treaty of Union was agreed by Scottish and English commissioners between April and July 1706, and debated by the Scottish Parliament between October 1706 and January 1707. It was approved, with minor amendments, by 110 votes to 67 with 46 abstentions, before debate and ratification by the English Parliament in February, receiving royal assent on 6 March, to take effect from 1 May 1707.
Contextualizing the Union in terms of the intensity and longevity of Anglo-Scottish interactions need not denote resurrection of discredited Whig shibboleths. Rather, it explores the experiences of two independent early modern kingdoms sharing a discrete geographical space within which rich amounts of argumentation and constitutional experimentation occurred. Whilst early modern Scottish authors were predominantly concerned to defend the nation’s autonomy as a sovereign and independent kingdom, Colin Kidd has nevertheless insisted that ‘unionism also has an impeccably Scottish pedigree’ and should not be axiomatically discredited as a ‘lap-dog ideology’ that is ‘un-Scottish and inauthentic, a form of false consciousness which is passively derivative of English values, aims and interests’.17
For early modern Scots, some form of peaceful, negotiated alliance with their southern neighbour remained a long-standing option, however attractive or repulsive. As Roger Mason has shown, visions sporadically mooted included expansionist English imperialism during Henry VIII’s ‘Rough Wooing’ in the 1540s and a language of godly concord and Protestant providentialism following the Scottish Reformation in the 1560s.18 Meanwhile, James VI’s accession as James I of England in 1603 was accompanied by ambitions to achieve closer political, ecclesiastical, and economic union. Although James’s aspirations were frustrated by English antagonism, Jenny Wormald has suggested that, by elevating the rhetoric of Anglo-Scottish amity over precise practicalities, royal union plans may have been intended to provoke ‘a subtle shift in mental perceptions which in the long term would have its effect’.19 During the mid-century civil wars, the ecclesiastical export of Presbyterianism also underpinned the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) concluded between Scottish Covenanters and English Parliamentarians, which did not involve explicit political incorporation, but undertook to bring Scotland, England, and Ireland into the ‘nearest coniunction and [u]niformitie in religione’ and to maintain a ‘firm peace and union’.20 Whilst visions of negotiated settlements foundered amidst the brutal realities of Cromwellian military occupation and enforced union during the 1650s, renewed discussions regarding incorporating Anglo-Scottish union in 1670 were more pragmatic and circumscribed. Prompted by pressures to remove mutually hostile trade restrictions, the constitutional proposals discussed in 1670 bear a striking similarity to those eventually concluded in 1707.21
Whilst the experience of regal union entailed diverse, contingent, and often short-lived expedients, historians increasingly regard the Williamite Revolution of 1688–9 as a watershed in focusing debate about its future feasibility. With hindsight, Clerk of Penicuik claimed that the Revolution conferred on ‘Scotland its best chance ever for an agreed union with England’.22 Following James VII and II’s flight to France, the Convention of Estates drafted legislation insisting that, without a union of ‘the bodys politick of the [two] nations’, Scotland would revert to its previously ‘deplorable condition’, and it optimistically appointed union commissioners, three of whom would later serve in the same capacity in 1706–7.23 Despite vigorously opposing Union in 1706–7, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun admitted in January 1689 that he could not conceive ‘any true settlement but by uniting with England in Parliaments’, while recognizing that closer religious and legal union remained unfeasible.24 Although the Scots’ decision to settle the Crown on William and Mary eclipsed demands for union, Whatley and Derek Patrick have argued that its subsequent enactment in 1707 derived as much from ‘persistence and principle as patronage and prostitution’.25 Some form of renegotiated union with England was thus perceived to offer the most effective means of guaranteeing the Revolution’s gains: a Protestant monarchy, the re-establishment of Presbyterianism, and legislative independence in the Scottish Parliament.
If substantial numbers regarded Anglo-Scottish union as a way of securing the ‘Revolution interest’, reconsideration of perceived alternatives is also required. In Scotland, both the replacement of James VII and II as monarch with his daughter and son-in-law and Presbyterianism’s re-establishment were opposed by the former king’s adherents. Historiographically, Macinnes has argued that Jacobitism’s political potency has often been ‘presumed rather than substantiated’, arising from disproportionate interest in its literary, symbolic, and cultural resonances, and international diplomacy surrounding the Jacobite courts-in-exile, reinforced by credulous acceptance of Whig propaganda. He nevertheless acknowledges Jacobitism’s capacity ‘to represent an alternative national interest’ in Scottish politics from 1689 onwards, combining ancien régime attachments to dynastic legitimacy, divine-right monarchy, religious confessionalism, and patriotic independence. Since the Stuarts’ unswerving adherence to Catholicism deterred most Scots from supporting their cause, securing the ‘Revolution interest’ thereby rendered attractive measures that would constitute a bulwark against a Jacobite restoration, such as closer Anglo-Scottish union.
‘Revolution interest’ was not, however, necessarily synonymous with ‘national interest’. Closer Anglo-Scottish union might prevent a Jacobite restoration and preserve Presbyterianism, but material conditions also demanded attention. Historiographically, the significance attached to economic factors in enacting Union has fluctuated. Older Whiggish accounts emphasized the fact that fifteen of the Treaty’s twenty-five articles related to economic provisions which, together with Scotland’s commercial prosperity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seemingly rendered the economic rationale for union axiomatic. In 1907, for example, Hume Brown claimed that, throughout the seventeenth century, Scotland was ‘a severed and withered branch, and her people knew it’.26 Accounts acknowledging a case for closer Anglo-Scottish union still attract criticism as ‘a sort of Marxist determination without the Marxism, in other words, a reiteration of the idea that Scotland’s economic woes made Union inevitable’.27 Yet such censure is undeserved. For while there is broad acceptance that ‘the economy and economic issues lay at the heart of contemporary thinking and debates about union’, historiographical fissures remain concerning the ‘condition of Scotland’ in the 1690s and 1700s and the extent to which increasingly qualified assessments of the actual economic benefits derived from Union, especially in the pre-1750 period, may illogically have deflected attention away from the optimistic aspirations of contemporaries regarding anticipated gains.
Whilst the economic case for union was once a casualty of a preference for high-political interpretations, Whatley has rehabilitated arguments advanced by Christopher Smout and Roy Campbell in the 1960s and 1970s.28 Structural economic weaknesses, including an adverse trade balance with every nation except England, a lack of manufacturing capacity, limited domestic demand, and an endemic shortage of specie, combined with short-term pressures such as international warfare, extensive famine, and the Darien scheme’s failure in the mid-1690s, ‘tipped Scotland over the edge of an economic abyss’ and, psychologically, unleashed a ‘near chiliastic language of despair’ amongst its inhabitants.29 The extent to which Scots were intent on remedying their plight was reflected in the centrality accorded to economic incentives by pamphleteers and the fact that Article IV of the Treaty, guaranteeing limited free trade, secured the highest majority of votes of any article in 1706 (154 to 19). Such an interpretation has, however, been criticized as unduly pessimistic. T. M. Devine, for example, has termed the so-called ‘ill’ or ‘lean’ years of the 1690s ‘an aberration, a reflection of an especially severe but essentially short-lived spell of climatic deterioration’ that should not obscure Scotland’s fundamental economic resilience, entrepreneurship, and keenness to develop new trading networks and colonial ventures from the 1680s onwards.30 Claiming that ‘a nationwide recovery was well under way’ by 1702,31 Macinnes has likewise queried the attractiveness of union for Scottish merchants with extensive continental networks, a lucrative trade in carrying goods between countries, and effective stratagems for evading the English Navigation Acts.
Whereas older analyses of the Union’s enactment emphasized high political machinations, the role of religion has recently been rehabilitated, with increased prominence placed on the severity of Presbyterian opposition to union. In the 1970s, by contrast, Riley contended of Scotland’s statesmen that ‘their professed religious affiliations could be modified’ and were easily eclipsed by ambition and avarice.32 Sectarian divisions generated in 1690 by episcopacy’s disestablishment and Presbyterianism’s re-establishment nevertheless remained so sensitive that ecclesiastical and theological matters were specifically excluded from the bilateral union commissioners’ remit in summer 1706. An ‘intrusion into the voting agenda’ on the Articles of Union occurred, however, when the Scottish Parliament was obliged to respond to pressure from the Kirk’s Commission of the General Assembly and pass the Act for Securing the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government on 12 November 1706.33 As Clerk of Penicuik recalled, ‘the trumpets of sedition began to fall silent’ as the Act allayed most Presbyterian fears, despite residual concerns including the presence of twenty-six Anglican bishops in the English House of Lords.34 Although Devine described the Act as ‘a master stroke which immensely weakened one of the key elements in the anti-union campaign’, Jeffrey Stephen disagrees, claiming that its belated inclusion into the union debates was ‘an attempt to rectify the major blunder’ in having originally omitted ecclesiastical discussion from the Treaty negotiations; the Act was therefore ‘a master stroke of the church not the political ministry’.35 In forming a stance on union, both Presbyterians and Episcopalians thus needed to adjudicate between securing Protestantism through Anglo-Scottish union or risk encouraging a French-sponsored pro-Catholic Jacobite restoration. Presbyterians particularly needed to judge whether Protestant security with ecclesiastical pluralism justified jettisoning mid-seventeenth-century visions of a pan-Britannic Presbyterian union as outlined in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. A united British Parliament, especially under an English Tory majority, might not only grant religious toleration to Scottish Episcopalians but also jeopardize the Presbyterian establishment. Ultimately, however, legislative provision to protect Presbyterianism’s establishment revealed irreconcilable aspirations of Episcopalian Jacobites and radical Cameronian and Hebronite Presbyterians. Addressing his Jacobite colleagues in opposing the Treaty, Robert Wodrow acknowledged it to be ‘a lamentation that our road and y[ou]rs lyes now together, but I am persuaded we will not go far together’.36
Since principled support for the Treaty within Parliament House contrasted starkly with hostile crowds assembled outside, historians have become interested in calibrating the effects of public opinion on the Treaty’s enactment. In 1714 Lockhart of Carnwath’s Memoirs recalled an atmosphere in 1706–7 wherein travellers would ‘find everybody enraged and displeased’, sporadic acts of mob violence serving to remind parliamentary colleagues that ‘the union was crammed down Scotland’s throat’.37 Amidst interest in emerging ‘public spheres’ in early modern England and Continental Europe, Karin Bowie has denied the making of the Union to be ‘a simple story of coercion, betrayal and Scottish impotence’ by examining instances of collective resistance to the Treaty, such as crowds, demonstrations, and bonfires alongside a burgeoning print media of pamphlets, periodicals, broadsheets, songs, and verse. Insisting that ‘public opinion helped to create the union crisis’, Bowie has examined petitions submitted to Parliament—mostly opposing the Treaty—from national institutions such as the Commission of the General Assembly and the Convention of Royal Burghs, alongside 79 petitions from 116 individual shires, burghs, parishes, and presbyteries, bearing the signatures of over twenty thousand Scots.38 Whilst the scale of external pressure might justify earlier interpretations that focused on the stratagems deployed to secure the Treaty’s legislative approval, it also explains significant amendments and concessions, including Article XXIV, confirming that the national regalia and public records would remain in Scotland.
Renewed interest at events in Parliament House has partly arisen in response to stimulating research findings by the Scottish Parliament project, established at St Andrews University in 1997. Whatley and Patrick’s prosopographical and psephological studies of voting patterns among members of the post-Revolution Parliament revealed considerable correlation between a ‘Revolution interest’ and supporters of the Union in 1706–7, including not only a ‘court’ interest of around ninety politicians, but another group of around twenty-five, known as the squadrone volante, whose conversion to the pro-union parliamentary lobby proved critical.39 Elsewhere, Ian McLean and Alistair McMillan found that anti-union petitions were more likely to be submitted from constituencies whose parliamentary representatives consistently opposed the Union, suggesting that ‘petitions reflected rather than induced voting behaviour’. Assessing the potential influence of pecuniary incentives, they detected ‘surprisingly little direct association’ between support for the Union and ownership of stock in the failed Darien venture, but nevertheless acknowledged more compelling potential for inducements to have influenced support for Article XXII determining Scotland’s parliamentary representation in a united Britain. With 112 out of 157 burgh and shire commissioners voting to have their representation reduced from 157 members to 45, and 144 out of 166 noble members likewise supporting their representation falling from 166 to just 16 peers in a united House of Lords, McLean and McMillan observed ‘an early case of … turkeys voting for Christmas (albeit with many receiving a huge stuffing)’.40
Revisiting the influence of public opinion in the Union’s enactment has also opened up intriguing avenues for future research, some of which may prove intractable, given the vagaries of source survival. As Bowie acknowledges, she focuses on lowland opinion, having found little surviving evidence of petitioning or crowd activity in Gaelic-speaking areas. Nevertheless, room remains for more systematic investigations of the social composition of those featuring in anti-union crowd agitation, whilst regrettably little is known about female involvement, since women were often barred from signing addresses and petitions, despite featuring prominently in contemporary anecdotes. Observing anti-union opposition among devout Presbyterians, for example, Daniel Defoe surmised that ‘the women are the instructers and the men are meer machin[e]s wound up’.41 We also lack detailed quantitative information indicating the size of pamphlet print runs, numbers of editions, estimated readership, and sale prices.
Such considerations matter, since the reinstatement of principle in union historiographies has simultaneously depended on rehabilitating ideological argumentation. A bibliography of publications concerning Anglo-Scottish relations during Queen Anne’s reign, compiled in the late 1970s, enumerated over five hundred items, whilst essays edited by John Robertson in the mid-1990s attested to the qualitative and cosmopolitan richness of constitutional theorizing prompted by debates surrounding the Union of 1707.42 Whilst Robertson accorded Fletcher of Saltoun primary credit for the sophistication of the debates over union, Fletcher is no longer lionized as a lone authority. Rich insights have been gleaned from reconsidering the writings of numerous authors including Lord Belhaven, Francis Grant, James Hodges, George Mackenzie (Earl of Cromarty), William Paterson, George Ridpath, and William Seton of Pitmedden, whilst John Kerrigan regards Defoe’s contribution to the union debates as ‘drastically underrated’.43
One striking aspect of these discussions was the sheer heterogeneity of constitutional futures mooted, which supplied ‘a genuine alternative to the offer of incorporation emanating from London’. Fletcher, for example, held the optimum outcome of a renegotiation of the existing regal union to be a confederal union of equal partners which, by creating ‘a sort of United Provinces of Great Britain’, would necessarily require the division of England and other parts of the British Isles into smaller entities, potentially supplying an attractive model for imitation throughout Continental Europe.44 In the Rights and interests of the two British monarchies (1703), James Hodges addressed the merits and demerits of incorporating union, but also discussed alternative arrangements, including the ‘Auld Alliance’ between Scotland and France and versions derived from the federal union between Lithuania and Poland, and unions among the Dutch states, thirteen Swiss cantons, and ancient Greek republics. Far from falling simply into rival pro-union and anti-union constituencies, the diversity of deliberations has led Kidd to allege ‘the discreet irony that the Union debates of 1698–1707 … largely took the form of an intra-unionist conversation’.45
Whilst the Treaty’s eventual form may not have attracted universal acclaim, a principled intellectual case for supporting union gained increasing ground, drawing on combinations of arguments outlined above. Interestingly, despite the significance Ferguson attached to magnate strategies, coalition politics, and financial inducements in securing the Union’s enactment, he also drew attention to the ‘imperial crowns debate’ that emerged during the 1690s amidst English attempts to revive medieval claims to suzerainty over Scotland.46 Whilst the Scots constructed convincing counter-arguments, dynastic uncertainty provoked by the English Act of Settlement rendered it difficult for Scottish sovereignty to be defended in terms of unbroken dynastic continuity without admitting the Jacobites’ hereditary claim. Hence Robertson has emphasized ‘the elusiveness of Scotland’s sovereignty, understood as the kingdom’s historic independence’, recognizing that, for early eighteenth-century writers, it was ‘a sovereignty almost impossible to put into a viable constitutional form’.47
Moreover, the extent to which loss of a separate Parliament necessarily entailed abandonment of Scottish nationhood resurfaced in 1706 when English union commissioners insisted on incorporating union, categorically refusing to countenance federal or confederal alternatives. As the Earl of Cromarty had asked in Parainesis Pacifica (1702), ‘Doth the Change of Governments, or Form of Constitutions of Government, annihilate the People or the Nation?’48 Patriotism did not thereby become an exclusively anti-Union preserve, since supporters and opponents alike predicated their positions on calculations of long-term utility and how best to preserve the salus patriae.49 With the Kirk’s establishment secured by separate legislation, a committed Presbyterian, such as Francis Grant, Lord Cullen, could style himself The Patriot resolved (1707) and support the Union since it protected Presbyterian Protestantism and promised prosperity.
Indeed, Grant’s confident characterization of the Treaty of Union as ‘an unchangeable contract’50 was not only disputed by contemporaries but also illustrates the extent to which, as Kidd has shown, the ‘constitutional dilemmas which arose out of the Union of 1707 … remain a matter of intense debate’.51 Alongside uncertainty as to whether the Union was actually a treaty, justiciable in international and/or domestic law, divisions of opinion have long subsisted as to whether its provisions were fundamentally constitutive of a new British state or whether they were open to reversal by a majority vote in a united British Parliament. At the Treaty’s enactment, arguments advanced by the Earl of Cromarty’s cousin, and former Lord Advocate, Sir George Mackenzie of Rosehaugh, were posthumously revived by Presbyterian opponents of union to deny that the Scottish Parliament had the right to vote itself out of existence by a simple majority vote.52 In the 1670s Mackenzie had insisted that ‘parliaments cannot overturn fundamentals’; indeed, the commissions entrusted to Members of Parliament ‘presupposeth, that there must be a Parliament, and consequentlie, that they cannot extinguish, or innovate the Constitution of the Parliament of Scotland’.53 Nearly three centuries later, the jurist T. B. Smith invoked similar language to describe the Union as a ‘fundamental law’ of the British state and thus of greater authority than individual acts of the British Parliament.54 Smith’s opinion was directed towards a rival constitutional orthodoxy, associated with the English jurist A. V. Dicey, who strenuously defended the doctrine of unlimited parliamentary sovereignty at Westminster and famously claimed that ‘neither the Act of Union with Scotland, nor the Dentists Act, 1878, has more claim than the other to be considered a supreme law’.55 The Union’s constitutional status thus remains a fertile subject for deliberation, not only in courts of law, as in cases such as MacCormick v. Lord Advocate (1953), Gibson v. Lord Advocate (1975), and Robbie the Pict v. Hingston (1998), but also among constitutional lawyers keen to revisit the Treaty’s provisions amidst subsequent constraints on the Westminster Parliament’s untrammelled sovereignty, most notably those arising from British membership of the European Community.
If incorporating union was a contingent matter for Scottish contemporaries, it was not an issue of exclusively domestic preoccupation. Across Europe, unions were a ubiquitous feature of early modern politics as the number of independent polities fell from just under 500 in the early sixteenth century to fewer than 350 by 1800. Whilst pamphleteers invoked a rich range of different constitutional types of union, Macinnes has shown how broader concerns about French and Dutch views of Anglo-Scottish union prompted the Scottish Privy Council to authorize the translation and publication of excerpts from the Paris Gazette and Haarlem Courant at the beginning of 1706.56
Historiographically, the tercentenary of the Williamite Revolution in 1988 saw a discernible shift away from Whiggish narratives of domestic Providential Protestant rescue to evaluating events from a European perspective.57 A similar historiographical adjustment has informed analyses of events in 1707 with Robertson claiming that, in ‘its principles as well as in its circumstances, British union was a thoroughly European event’.58 In an explicitly comparative investigation, Robertson juxtaposed the experiences of early eighteenth-century Scots with those of contemporary Neapolitans who found themselves unexpectedly subsumed within the Habsburg monarchy in July 1707 and thereafter ruled from Barcelona by Archduke Charles of Austria. Recognizing that, by 1700, ‘the Scottish elite had every reason to feel frustrated, both economically and politically’, Robertson described the dilemma posed to Scots and Neapolitans alike as subjects of ancient monarchies which had now become absentee monarchies.59 As Fletcher of Saltoun had lamented in 1703, Scotland ‘was totally neglected, like a farm managed by servants, and not under the eye of the master’.60
Three years later, however, the farm master had certainly taken an interest in his northern kingdom, even if Fletcher himself opposed the Treaty. A tercentenary after its formulation, historians are increasingly interested in establishing whether, as Macinnes argues, ‘England became the driving force for the Treaty of Union’.61 Endorsing claims for a reservoir of pro-union support within Scotland, David Hayton also suggested that, after the Williamite Revolution, ‘the Scots could probably have been brought to agree to a treaty at any time’.62 If so, attention needs to be directed towards discovering why the English suddenly became converts by 1706.
Whilst the War of the Spanish Succession provided a catalyst for substantive constitutional reorganization throughout Europe, its exigencies also rendered security of England’s northern border a key military priority. Whilst historians disagree over whether deteriorating Anglo-Scottish relations between 1703 and 1705 raised a realistic spectre of armed hostilities, the English would clearly have been reluctant to withdraw troops fighting in Flanders and Spain to quell Scotland by force.63 Threatened English invasion has been cited as crucial in securing the Treaty’s parliamentary passage in Scotland by those nationalists who steadfastly deny any domestic support for union.64 Adverse memories of the Cromwellian version of union imposed on Scotland during the 1650s certainly meant that latent fears of armed conquest remained ‘an unavoidable, intrinsic dimension of Anglo-Scottish relations’ thereafter.65 As diplomatic relations deteriorated in 1705, the English Treasurer, the Earl of Godolphin, warned the Earl of Mar that, unless the situation improved, England had ‘the power, and you may give us the will’ to impose a forcible solution at a time when the Scots would be unable to rely on French military assistance.66 The following year, English troops were mobilized northwards to Berwick and the north of Ireland as the Treaty was debated in Edinburgh.
From a different perspective, Macinnes has identified principles of political economy as influential in reversing traditionally indifferent or antagonistic English attitudes towards closer Anglo-Scottish union. Insisting that the Scots regarded the ‘targeted pursuit of colonies as the commercial alternative to union’ from 1660 onwards, Macinnes has shown how Scottish commercial networks succeeded in circumventing the English Navigation Acts via legal loopholes, specific exemptions, smuggling, collusion, the disguised ownership of vessels, and other stratagems that an overstretched imperial infrastructure was unable to prevent. Such activities severely depleted English colonial customs returns at a time when the Treasury relied heavily on such revenue to fund the country’s emergence as a fiscal–military state. Fears of domestic demographic stagnation simultaneously challenged England’s ability to resource both its continental military activities and its global imperial ambitions. Accordingly, Macinnes argues that Scottish commercial networks were ‘transformed from being viewed as significant disruptors of trade to a new role as potential pillars of Empire’ while, more generally, ‘Scotland came into the position of favoured nation’.67
Accession to the Treaty of Union was not, however, universally popular in England, and nor did the manner of its negotiation imply spontaneous Anglo-Scottish accord. Indeed, the extent to which the Treaty’s provisions reproduced terms agreed during earlier rounds of union negotiations was reflected in the fact that, in 1706, the Scottish and English commissioners required only one plenary meeting in the Cockpit at Westminster to discuss the extent of Scottish parliamentary representation in a united Britain. As one Scottish commissioner rued, ‘none of the English during the Treaty had one of the Scots so much as to dine or drink a glass of wine with them’.68 Inevitable resentment surfaced in England that terms of ostensible equality had been agreed between two parties who were, economically at least, conspicuously unequal. For although Scotland’s allocation of forty-five MPs in the House of Commons (one-twelfth of the total) was denounced as a demographic under-representation, alternative calculations confirmed that Scotland’s land-tax assessment was one forty-fifth the size of England’s. Meanwhile, although parallel legislation to that agreed for the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland was also passed confirming the established status of the Episcopalian Anglican Church, fears arose regarding the possible insinuation of Presbyterianism through union. During debates in the House of Lords in February 1707, Lord Hailsham insisted that the Union would join ‘such jarring incongruous Ingredients’ that he deemed necessary ‘a standing Power and Force, to keep us from falling asunder and breaking in pieces every Moment’.69
Albeit refreshingly counter-intuitive, Macinnes’s inference that ‘England was as much if not more in need of a stable political association’ as Scotland in 1707 remains debatable.70 Increased attention to England’s instrumental role as the regal union’s stronger partner does, however, resonate with arguments of political scientists pondering the Union’s future. Drawing potential parallels with the ‘velvet divorce’ between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993, McLean and McMillan envisage a possible ‘tartan divorce’ wherein the weaker partner in a union ‘has routinely and noisily complained for decades’ about its subordinate status, ‘only to be taken by surprise when the larger partner suddenly offers’ independence.71
Reappraising English motivations for incorporating union in 1707 has, in turn, ignited interest in Irish dimensions to Anglo-Scottish union as Irish parallels were regularly invoked by eighteenth-century Scots, whilst ‘the Anglo-Scottish union constitutes an event in Irish history’ in stimulating simultaneous alterations in attitudes regarding possible Anglo-Irish union.72 Examining the emergence of unionist ideology in Ireland from the 1690s onwards raises the counter-factual question of why Anglo-Scottish union was concluded in 1707, whereas concurrent calls for Anglo-Irish union went unheeded.
Following the Williamite Revolution, Ireland faced a similar predicament to Scotland. English legislation directed towards eliminating economic competition included two Irish Cattle Acts in the 1660s, but intensified with the Irish Woollen Act (1690), banning the export of Irish wool, and the Resumption Act (1700). Although no Irish Parliament convened between 1666 and 1689, its legislative subordination to the English Privy Council thereafter ensured that ‘the constitutional fiction that [Ireland] was an autonomous kingdom … appeared increasingly threadbare; the colonial dependency more naked’.73 Nevertheless, the demographic imbalance in favour of Catholics explained the markedly more propitiary response to the English Act of Settlement from the Irish Parliament than that of its Scottish counterpart. Within a broader ancient constitutionalist rhetoric demanding restoration of Irish legislative independence, William Molyneux’s Case of Ireland (1698) contained a quiet allusion to incorporating Anglo-Irish union as an outcome ‘we should be willing enough to embrace; but this is an Happiness we can hardly hope for’.74 Thereafter, abortive negotiations for incorporating Anglo-Scottish union, starting in 1702, prompted both Houses of the Irish Parliament to submit addresses to Queen Anne requesting ‘a more firm and strict union’ with England, while the Parliament’s formal congratulations on the Anglo-Scottish union of 1707 were accompanied by subtle appeals for ‘a yet more comprehensive union’ to encompass all her kingdoms.75
Among early eighteenth-century Scots, attitudes towards Anglo-Scottish union were thus conditioned by the essential need to differentiate Scotland’s sovereign independence from Ireland’s provincial relegation and ‘slavery’. As the failed Darien venture’s chief promoter, William Paterson, insisted in 1706, ‘nothing in the world can be a greater argument for the Union of this Kingdom, than the present practise [sic], sense and disposition of Ireland’.76 Moreover, the model of Anglo-Scottish union was thereafter regularly invoked as the most satisfactory means to defuse destabilizing tensions in eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations. Convinced of the rationale for Irish incorporation in the 1790s, the British government commissioned the Keeper of the Records in Scotland, John Bruce, to publish records outlining various Anglo-Scottish union initiatives between 1603 and 1707. Ironically, however, the unstable nineteenth- and twentieth-century legacies of the Irish Act of Union of 1801 generated ‘the historiographical eclipse of unionism with Unionism’. As Kidd has argued, most analyses of unionist argumentation in Scotland hitherto had ‘relatively little to say about the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 compared to the British-Irish union of 1800 and the problems of Irish home rule’.77
As the Irish parallel implies, recognizing English motivations for Anglo-Scottish union involves reappraising imperial ramifications of the seventeenth-century regal union and qualifying the credence axiomatically attached to the deceptively attractive claim that, through Anglo-Scottish union, the Scots abandoned hope of founding independent colonies, but gained a global empire. Whilst revisionist accounts of the Union have seen ‘a marked reduction in the perceived importance of empire’,78 the rationale that overseas colonies could stimulate Scottish economic regeneration and also offset the adverse effects of English mercantilism was nevertheless logical. Colonial possessions and commercial profits had assisted both the Dutch United Provinces and Portugal in attaining, or retaining, independence from the Spanish Habsburgs.79 Moreover, the Darien settlement was—ironically—first envisaged as a joint-stock venture, equally open to English and Scottish investors seeking to evade the East India Company’s monopoly before resistance from the latter Company rendered it a solely Scottish project. Although £400,000 was successfully raised in domestic subscriptions between February and August 1696, untrammelled excitement was converted into equally acute despair by the project’s failure, traditionally blamed on English sabotage, deliberately sanctioned by King William. Recent accounts have, however, instead emphasized the misguided confidence and broader incompetence of the Company of Scotland’s directors in seeking to settle a radically inhospitable environment that remained strategically important to Spain.
In psephological terms, McLean and McMillan deemed the lack of correlation between investment in the Company of Scotland and parliamentary support for union significant since ‘it destroys the Namierites’ central contention’ that those who had lost large amounts of money in the failed venture would invariably support the Treaty.80 For within the Treaty’s provisions, Article XV supplied an undertaking that the English would pay the Scots an ‘Equivalent’ of £398,085—representing around £55.5 million in current values—as compensation, inter alia, for the Company’s dissolution, with an accrued interest rate of 5 per cent. Rather than representing a cynical inducement to secure support for union, historians now emphasize the payment’s unexpected and curious character, with Douglas Watt deeming it ‘an unusual departure in corporate history: a shareholder bail-out with cash provided by a foreign government’.81
As discussions concerning its imperial parallels illustrate, the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707 remains an enduringly resonant reference point, endowed with what Kerrigan has termed ‘terminal-inaugurative status’ in determining not only how historians choose to characterize the pre-1707 Scottish past, but also Scotland’s experiences thereafter.82 Discussions of how and why Anglo-Scottish Union occurred in 1707 must therefore be separated from analysis of its subsequent effects, both beneficial and deleterious. As Sir Walter Scott confessed to Maria Edgeworth in 1825, for example, had he been alive in 1707, he ‘would have resigned my life to have prevented’ its enactment, but since it was ‘done before my day, I am sensible [it] was a wise scheme’.83 Divorcing studies of the Union’s eighteenth-century enactment from informing discussions about Scotland’s modern constitutional destiny should, however, denude the subject’s capacity to divide future generations of historians into mutually exclusive nationalist or unionist constituencies. As Bernard Crick has insisted, ‘There is no logical connection between the cause of union in 1707 and where one can stand today. Times change.’84
Brown, Stewart J., and Whatley, Christopher A., eds., The Union of 1707: New Dimensions, Supplement to Scottish Historical Review, 87 (2008).
Devine, T. M., ed., Scotland and the Union 1707–2007 (Edinburgh, 2008).
Kidd, Colin, Union and Unionisms: Political Thought in Scotland 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2008).
Macinnes, Allan I., Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge, 2007).
Robertson, John, ed., A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the British Union of 1707 (Cambridge, 1995).
Whatley, Christopher A., with Patrick, Derek J., The Scots and the Union (Edinburgh, 2006).