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Like any other great event in history, the union between Scotland and England is a complicated one. The result was the same for both countries, but the motivations for union were different. Indeed, the events leading up to union have all the hallmarks of the best political drama: backstabbing, threats, posturing, greed, bribery, corruption and occasional acts of principle.
Before I deal with some of these sordid issues, let me make two key points:
There was nothing inevitable about parliamentary union, despite the Union of the Crowns in 1603 (see Chapter 10).
The idea of parliamentary union was not a popular one in Scotland, and much of the pressure for it came from the English.
The Scots weren’t too pleased with the English over the Darien Scheme (see the preceding section), but the English made matters worse by passing the Act of Settlement in 1701, which excluded the Stewarts and all Catholics from the English throne. Queen Mary wasn’t producing any more heirs, and her younger sister A
The Scots may have agreed to this plan, but they were never consulted, so they were understandably angry. In retaliation for the Act of Settlement, the Scottish Parliament passed three pieces of legislation designed to assert Scottish independence:
The Act of Security (1704)
restated Scottish prerogatives in regard to the Scottish crown. After A
The Act anent Peace and War (1704)
asserted the right of Scotland to pursue an independent foreign policy after A
The Wine Act (1704)
allowed the import of wine from France into Scotland at a time when England was operating a blockade against French trade.
The English saw these acts as deliberate provocation. And to make matters even worse, the Scots had hinted that they could conceive of a future monarch who might be Catholic. After all, the Old Pretender, James Francis Edward Stewart, the son of the deposed James II and VII, was living it up in France at Louis XIV’s expense and was ready, on the death of A
The succession crisis, as it was known, had to be solved. The English knew that, and they scored a wi
As a contemporary put it, ‘our country’s fortunes depend on England: the only wealth we have comes from the cattle and horses we sell there’. He might have added linen as well. But the threat was real and that concentrated the minds of the Parliament in Scotland. It allowed Queen A
Given the fractious relations between the two countries, it seems surprising that the deal was struck so quickly. In a poorly attended session, on 16 January 1707, the Scottish Parliament voted 110 to 67 for an incorporating union. The big question is why?
Bought and sold for English gold?
The question of why the Scottish Parliament voted for an incorporating union is something that divides historians as much as it does the Scottish public. Here are some possibilities:
Bribery and corruption:
People in this camp echo Robert Burns, who said that the Scots were ‘bought and sold for English gold’.
Statesmanship:
According to the people who believe statesmanship was the reason, in difficult circumstances, the Scottish negotiators got the best possible deal for Scotland.
No alternative:
Another view can be best described as TINA (there is no alternative). People who see this as the reason for the union believe that Scotland was so impoverished that the country had no alternative but to negotiate for union, especially given the Alien Act, which had been passed by the English Parliament.
There is no doubt that some of the opposition in the Scottish Parliament were bought off.
The most celebrated case was the leader of the opposition Country Party, the duke of Hamilton. In return for getting the Scottish Parliament to agree to allow the queen to appoint the negotiation commissioners (ensuring minimal opposition), he was given an English dukedom in 1711.
On top of the promise of land and offices of state, there was the brown envelope! Earl of Glasgow David Boyle was given £20,000 to incentivise waverers to vote for union. The main Scottish negotiator, the 2nd duke of Queensberry, received more than £12,000 in ‘back pay’. The leader of the
Squadrone Volante
(Flying Squadron), the 2nd marquis of Tweedale, who delivered the 25 or so votes of this independent grouping in the Scottish Parliament for union, received £1,750 in ‘back pay’. The other leading Squad noble, Roxburgh, received a dukedom.
But the biggest sweetener of all was the ‘Equivalent’. Article 15 of the Treaty of Union guaranteed to compensate those Scots who had lost money in the Darien Scheme. Just over £398,000 was set aside for compensation, which meant that the investors would not only get back what they put into the scheme but also receive 5 per cent interest. Because every well-to-do person had lost money in Darien, the Equivalent was a huge incentive to deliver the right result.
However, some of the sums used to bribe Scottish nobles were so small that it’s difficult to make a case that it was simply votes for cash. Plus, many members of the opposition continued to speak out against union, particularly Lord Belhaven and Lockhart of Carnwath, who was one of the few commissioners opposed to union.
Also, you shouldn’t view supporters of union as simply men on the make. There were many principled pro-Unionists, such as Sir William Seton of Pitmedden, who argued
by this Union, we’ll have Access to all the Advantages in Commerce, the English enjoy; we’ll be capable, by a good Government, to improve our National Product, for the benefit of the whole Island; and we’ll have our Liberty, Property and Religion, secured under the Protection of one Sovereign, and one Parliament of Great Britain.
Given the division of the world into major power blocs, for these men it was better to be a small fish in a large pond than a large fish in a small one. The Court Party and its ally, the
Squadrone Volante,
mustered enough votes to ratify the Treaty. Failure to ratify the treaty may have led to invasion from England because troops were massing on the border. So, union may have been a forced marriage of convenience, but what was in it for the Scots?
The Treaty of Union
The Treaty of Union passed by the Scottish Parliament on 1 May 1707 contained 25 articles or clauses that dealt with a variety of issues:
Economics:
Fifteen of the articles dealt with economic issues, like a single currency, taxation, weights and measures. The most outstanding was the right of Scots to have access to the largest free trade empire in the world, something for which the Scots had been clamouring for many decades. There was also guaranteed financial support to help develop Scottish industry, particularly linen and woollens, and of course there was the Equivalent (see the preceding section).
The Equivalent and support for Scottish industry was good, but the weak Scottish economy was opened to competition from more advanced and efficient producers south of the border. Plus, Scotland may have been allowed to freely trade with the English colonies, but could its merchants take advantage of the new situation? Finally, Scotland would have to take on a proportion of English national debt and accept higher taxes. So, what you give with one hand you take away with the other.
There may have been opportunities, but there were also threats.
Politics:
Scottish representation in the new Parliament was to be 45 members of Parliament and 16 peers of the realm sitting in the House of Lords.
Scotland had the same level of representation as Cornwall did in the new Parliament of Great Britain. Scotland went from 227 members of Parliament in the Scottish Parliament to just 45 in the Westminster Parliament of 513 members, and only 16 seats in the House of Lords. How in a parliament that was overwhelmingly English were Scottish interests to be represented?
Religion:
By Article 2 of the treaty, this was to be a Protestant state as ‘papists and persons marrying papists’ were excluded from succession to the throne. The Protestant settlement of 1689 was ratified, and a further act guaranteeing the independence of the Presbyterian Church was added.
Law:
The independence of the Scottish legal system was also guaranteed.
Popular reactions to union
The majority of Scots had no say in the Union debates. As late as 1788, there were only 2,668 registered voters in Scotland. To say the Treaty of Union was unpopular in Scotland would be an understatement. One of the commissioners claimed that: ‘The whole nation appears against the Union.’ Even the very pro-Unionist Sir John Clerk of Penicuik stated that the Treaty of Union was ‘contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom’.
Public opinion was voiced against the Treaty as it passed through Parliament, with petitions from half of the shires and one-third of the burghs, as well as from presbyteries and parishes, totalling 80 in all. In November 1706, the presbytery of Lanark protested that union would render Scotland subject to ‘strangers to our constitution … who may judge it for the interest of Britain to keep us low and entirely subject to them’.
The Convention of Royal Burghs also petitioned against the union; not one petition sent to the Scottish Parliament favoured an incorporating union. On the day the treaty was signed, the bellringer of St Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh, rang the bells to the tune of ‘Why Should I Be So Sad on My Wedding Day?’.
There were also riots. The anti-union mob in Edinburgh had kept up an almost daily harassment of known pro-Unionist members of Parliament during the parliamentary debates. In November and December 1706, there were riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow; in towns like Dumfries and Stirling, angry mobs burned the Treaty.
The English author and spy Daniel Defoe spoke of the Scottish protestors as a ‘rabble’ and the worst of its kind. To him the Scots were a ‘hardened, refractory and terrible people’.
When the day of union arrived, the mob broke loose in Edinburgh and a riot ensued, spreading to Glasgow and several other Scottish burghs. Threats of widespread civil unrest resulted in Parliament imposing martial law.