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This book presents an overview of the first six decades of the Union of the Crowns. It also provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660 and a summary of the straits in which Scotland found itself in the opening years of the eighteenth century. It then explores the problems which union posed to maritime lawyers of both nations, the dark reception that the Scots received in eighteenth-century England, and the way Enlightenment Scotland viewed the British unions. It examines the ambitions of Scottish élites in India, the frame for radical cooperation in the age of the Friends of the People and later, and the background for the sojourn of Thomas and Jane Carlyle in London. It finally outlined the Anglo-Scottish relations on the political scene in the nineteenth century. The parliamentary union did little in the short run for Anglo-Scottish relations. It is shown that Scots are indeed worried and worry a lot about Anglo-Scottish relations, but the English worried and worry about them hardly at all, except in times of exceptional crisis, as in 1638–54, 1703–7, 1745–7 and perhaps much later in the 1970s after oil had been discovered.

This chapter examines the Scottish Petrarchans before and after 1603 or the Union of the Crowns. It explains that Petrarch was initially resisted as a model for the connection between poetry and nationhood and that the Scottish sonnet became more anglicised when James VI became King of England and Scotland and Petrarchism became the more dominant lyrical influence. It considers three Scottish poets who exemplify this development of the Petrarchan sonnet, culminating in William Drummond of Hawthornden.

This chapter demonstrates that Queen Victoria had a talent for interpreting and manipulating history, adopting national identities and evoking a significant response. It also discusses the English reaction when the ‘Stone of Destiny’ was (briefly) taken from Westminster Abbey in 1950 by nationalist students from Glasgow University. It specifically explores Scottish perceptions of the monarchy as part of a wider British identity in Scotland. It begins by briefly outlining the ways in which Victoria re-established the notion of monarchy in Scottish society. The contrast between the popular perception of Victoria and her heir, Edward, is examined to illustrate how notions of Scottishness were significant in identifying the attitudes towards the monarchy. It then addresses the period surrounding the coronation of Queen Elizabeth as it took place in 1953, the 350th anniversary of the Union of the Crowns. It further evaluates some of the reasons why the effect of monarchy as a unifying factor in British identity has decreased in Scotland over the last twenty years. There has been a steady decline in the number of Scots who served in the armed forces in the period after 1945.

This chapter recommends a reversion from the 1707 Union of Parliaments to the 1603 Union of Crowns (though not of governments). Its argument is originally submitted to the joint attention of the Royal Society and the British Academy on a date very close to 5 November 2003. James succeeded in preserving peace in the islands during his long reign — long in England itself, longer yet in Scotland. In Westminster as well as Edinburgh and elsewhere, real power has come to be invested in parliaments, and thus in the governments that command parliamentary majorities through the dominance of political parties. The UK system works so long as party ties make more or less unquestioned the loyalty of the head of a devolved Scottish government to the head of the United Kingdom government. Generally, the present contribution is offered primarily as a scholarly, not a political one. It is enough if it has sketched grounds for taking seriously the question what ‘new unions for old’ might mean.

Through dynastic accident, England and Scotland were united under King James VI and I in 1603. To smooth the transition, officials attempted to create a single state: Great Britain. Yet the project had a narrow appeal; the majority of the English populace rejected a closer relationship with Scotland. Such a strong reaction against Scotland resulted in a revived sense of Englishness. This essay analyzes English tactics to distance themselves from the Scots through historical treatises. For centuries, the English had created vivid histories to illuminate their ancient past. It is evident from the historical works written between 1586 and 1625 that authors sought to maintain a position of dominance over Scotland through veiled political commentaries. As such, their accounts propagated an English national identity based on a sense of historical supremacy over the Scottish. This was further supported through the use of language studies and archaeological evidence. After the 1603 Union of the Crowns, these stories did not change. Yet, questions arose regarding the king's genealogy, as he claimed descent from the great kings of both kingdoms. Consequently, historians re-invented the past to merge their historical accounts with the king's ancestral claims while continuing to validate English assertions of suzerainty.

This book outlines the association between Scotland and England since the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Individual chapters range in focus from the late nineteenth century to the foreseeable future. They cover topics from the monarchy, constitution, parliamentary procedure, public policy and finance to the attitudes, experiences and identities of the ordinary Scots and English — both as majorities and as minorities in each other's country. They also include the natural inequality of the union in consequence of population sizes; trends in culture and identity; the changing role of the state; cross-border sympathy; and the pressure of adversarial politics. Gini's ‘Coefficient of Inequality’ is used to calculate the concentration of income or wealth within countries. Culture and identity are not merely conceptually and empirically distinct, they seem to be trending in opposite directions: cultures are merging, identities diverging. An overview of the chapters included in this book is shown.

This chapter explores the pre-history of the Union of 1707. It looks at the Scots’ attitudes to England over the course of the seventeenth century and why there was so much dissatisfaction with the Union of the Crowns of 1603, when James VI of Scotland became monarch of the three kingdoms, governing from London.

This chapter reports the Scottish National Party (SNP)'s understanding of ‘Britain’. Scotland's incorporation within the UK starts from the 1707 Treaty of Union and the Union of Crowns in 1603. It was noted even before the SNP's electoral victory that inter-governmental communication between London and the Scotland could have been better. Relations between the Scottish government and the UK experienced some stress during 2009. In the aftermath of secession, Scotland would also retain other connections to the UK. Until Scotland reaches independence, the issue of inter-governmental relations remains contentious. The SNP government has respected the ground rules in its conduct of relations with London. SNP would be unlikely to tolerate the apparent flaws in inter-governmental communication and co-operation. Scotland would remain part of a monarchical and social union within Britain.

The clash of legal and political cultures that unfolded as the idea of conquest began to materialize is the subject of Chapter 7. The main question addressed is whether the new policy of conquest supported by the Habsburg administration can be explained in terms of ‘Spanish influence’ on the Portuguese imperial apparatus. It is argued that the Iberian Union of crowns served as an opportunity for Portuguese reformists to change their own empire. Although orders for the conquest of Ceylon were issued in Madrid, an intricate web of communications spanning half the globe was ultimately a more powerful source of political change than any of the central authorities of the Catholic Monarchy. Emphasis is still placed on the commonalities of Iberian and Lankan political culture, on the possibilities of joint empire-building as well as the impossibilities.

This chapter reflects theologically on the historical development of theological constructions of Scottish identity, considering disputed assessments of ‘nationalism’ in the light of insights from both political theology and theological ethics. It explores how early modern developments, from the Reformation through to the Unions of 1603 and 1707, continued to be reflected and refracted in nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructions. It traces the influence of two world wars, decolonization, and the end of the British Empire on the development of contested public theology accounts of Scotland’s twenty-first century history, in which arguments for devolution and independence continue to play a leading role.

The present chapter traces the emergence of Scottish Atlantic writing in the seventeenth century by focusing on works from the 1620s that promote the colonization of Nova Scotia. It studies works written by James VI and I, William Alexander, Robert Gordon, Thomas Hariott, and Richard Guthry while also discussing the role the Virginia Company and the indigenous Mi'kmaq and Maliseet populations played in Scotland's attempts to colonize Nova Scotia. It situates these agents and works in the larger contexts of European empire-building. It also considers forms of internal colonialism in the British Isles, including writings about the Highlands and Islands and inner-British power dynamics after the Union of Crowns. The utopian tradition offers ways to understanding the spaces, temporalities, and cultural agents in the emerging Scottish Atlantic, including the tropes of newness and reform as well as the intertextual relationships with earlier travelogues and the longevity of the Scottish colonial imagination.

Chapter 6 analyses the transformations that paved the way, in the 1580s and 1590s, for a policy turn towards an officially sanctioned Iberian conquest of Ceylon. The 1580 donation of Kōṭṭe to the Portuguese crown, which would itself fall into Habsburg hands soon after, emerges as a key moment along with the dramatic military and political developments in other parts of the island. The growth and collapse of the rival empire of Sītāvaka in the interior is shown to have triggered perceptions of opportunity among Portuguese leaders, but wider connections were also essential for change to occur. Crucial new links emerged between Colombo, Malacca, Manila, and Madrid, the imperial capital where, ultimately, conquest orders were issued. Even so, the local initiatives of Luso-Lankan and Sinhalese war-makers remained a driving force.