• Three hundred years ago, on 16th January 1707, the Scottish Parliament voted in favour of ratification of the Treaty of Union with England.
• On 28th April the Scottish Parliament was dissolved by proclamation.
• Three days later, with the opening of the first session of the new British Parliament, the state of Great Britain formally came into existence.

Stan Crooke examines the background and the immediate results of the Act of Union.

Earlier proposals for some form of closer union between England and Scotland – in the immediate aftermath of the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and again in 1667,1670, 1690, and 1702/03 – had come to nothing.

A major obstacle to possible union of the two kingdoms had been the unwillingness of the English bourgeoisie to allow Scottish merchants access to England’s colonies in America. Although England and Scotland had been ruled by a common monarch since the Union of the Crowns in1603, only English merchants had the right to trade with the American colonies.

Hostility towards Scottish Presbyterianism by English High Church Tories had been another obstacle to union. English politicians also saw Scotland as a poor country with little or nothing to contribute in the event of union. This attitude was summed up by the Leader of the House of Commons in 1700: Scotland was a beggar, and “whoever married a beggar could only expect a louse for her portion.”

The last set of negotiations before those which resulted in the Union of 1707 lasted just ten weeks, from mid-November 1702 to the beginning of February 1703. Not infrequently, none of the English commissioners bothered to turn up for meetings. In January of 1703, after the English commissioners had failed to muster a quorum on five successive occasions, the quorum for each side was reduced from thirteen to seven.

The negotiations, such as they were, quickly descended into fruitless and unresolved arguments about trade, taxation, and compensation for shareholders in the ill-fated Company of Scotland, which had unsuccessfully attempted to establish a Scottish colony on the Isthmus of Panama.

The English commissioners were not willing to discuss Scottish access to trade with the colonies until all other matters had been resolved: “The plantations are the property of Englishmen and … this trade is of so great a consequence and so beneficial as not to be communicated as it is proposed till all other particulars which shall be thought necessary to this union be adjusted.”

Taxation resulted in another stalemate. Levels of taxation in England were higher than in Scotland, and the collection of taxes was also significantly more efficient. Unsurprisingly, the Scottish commissioners did not want to see the English tax regime extended to Scotland.

The issue of compensation for shareholders in the Company of Scotland led to immediate stalemate: the English commissioners simply declared compensation to be out of the question and demanded that the company be wound up.

Despite the lacklustre approach of the English government to the negotiations of 1702/03, there were good reasons for the English ruling classes to pursue the issue of union with Scotland with a greater degree of vigour. The two overlapping reasons were the Spanish succession, and, closer to home, the Hanoverian succession.

Since 1701 England had been fighting France in the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict over which dynasty would inherit the territorial possessions the last Spanish Hapsburg king. A victory for France threatened England with the loss of its American colonies, the main source of the English bourgeoisie’s mercantile wealth.

At the same time, the English government wanted to ensure that their own monarch – Queen Anne, who had no living heir to the throne – was succeeded by a member of the House of Hanover. This would prevent, or at least minimise, the danger of a Stuart restoration.

But in 1701 France recognised the son of James II/VII as the rightful monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland. (James II/VII, the last Stuart to rule over England and Scotland, had been deposed by Queen Anne’s predecessor in 1688 and had just died in exile in France.) The English government feared that French recognition of the “Old Pretender” could lead to a Jacobite uprising in Scotland, backed by French forces.

Such an uprising would not only imperil the Hanoverian succession but also undermine pursuit of the war against France on the continent. What was at stake, therefore, was the political and economic power of the English bourgeoisie. A Stuart restoration in conjunction with defeat by France could undo the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 and deprive England of her colonies.

The English government’s fears were well-founded. As Nathaniel Hooke, subsequently sent to Scotland by the French government in order to assess the prospects for a joint French-Jacobite uprising, explained in a report to the French High Council in 1703: “There is one sure way for France to force English ministers to the conference table before this costly European war goes any further, and that is to bring Scotland into play.”

Hooke’s arrival in Scotland later the same year coincided with a particularly low ebb in Anglo-Scottish relations.

Since the Union of the Crowns a century earlier England had undergone a bourgeois revolution. The English state was geared to the accumulation of capital. Agricultural output was increasing. So too was industrial output. And the foundations of a future empire had been established. Scotland’s history over the same period, however, had been a very different one.

Early eighteenth-century Scotland was still essentially a feudal society. Whereas in England the attempts of James II/VII to establish a form of absolutist rule had been opposed – and, in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, defeated – because they threatened the interests of a post-feudal bourgeoisie, in Scotland they had met the same fate because they threatened the rights and privileges of a feudal nobility.

The Scottish nobles exercised their own jurisdictions: “regalities” in the case of the most important nobles, and baronies in the case of the lesser nobles. These courts were empowered to try most criminal offences and to administer their own sentences, ranging from fines to imprisonment and execution (the power of “pit and gallow”). They also enforced the feudal duties of service which tenants owed to their lord.

As Daniel Defoe, the English writer and spy, wrote of such feudal powers, “they bound down Scotland to the private tyranny and oppression of the heritors and lairds.” Another contemporary observer commented: “The barons have power not only in life and limb but in an absolute sense too. … In fact, these lords of regality are sovereigns, not subjects.”

The vassals of the feudal lords were required to carry out military service for their masters. The Duke of Argyll, for example, could raise more troops from his estates than there were regular soldiers in Scotland. Vassals were also obliged to carry out non-military services. Even craftsmen, such as weavers, shoemakers and millers, were subject to the feudal privileges of the nobles on whose estates they laboured.

By the early eighteenth century many nobles had fallen into economic difficulties. But some combined political and social power with economic wealth, thereby strengthening even further their domination of Scottish society. The estates of these nobles were the main source of the major Scottish exports: textiles, cattle, and, to a lesser extent, coal.

Linen was woven by tenants and paid to their feudal lords as a form of rent in kind. Black cattle were exported to England from estates in the Highlands and, much more so, from estates in the Lowlands. (In 1703 black cattle exports from the estates of just one Lowlands lord accounted for 40% of the value of all Scottish exports to England.) In Fife and the Lothians the estates of lesser nobles were the main sources of Scotland’s exports of coal.

The feudal nature of Scottish society was reflected in the composition of the Scottish Parliament. This consisted of three Estates. The ‘electorate’ of the two Estates whose members were elected amounted to around just 4,000: one man in every thousand (compared with four men in every hundred in England).

150 members of the Parliament were feudal nobles. They were members by birthright. 90 members represented the counties. They, and their ‘electorate’, consisted in the main of lesser nobles who also exercised feudal rights. The other 67 members represented the royal burghs which, until the 1670s, enjoyed a total monopoly over Scottish foreign trade. Their ‘electorates’ varied from 33 (in Edinburgh) to nine (in the smaller burghs).

There were ‘parties’ in the Scottish Parliament. But they bore no resemblance to parties today, or even to the Tory and Whig parties which had emerged in the English Parliament by this time.

The main parties - the Court party and the Country party - were unstable alliances between different nobles. Their members regularly switched their allegiances in pursuit of personal gain and advancement - “disobliged courtiers and self-conceited men who could relish nothing but what was of their own contrivance”, as one contemporary writer described them.

In the latter part of the seventeenth century the Scottish Parliament had taken steps designed to promote Scottish trade, banking, manufacturing, and imperial expansion. A small minority of nobles had begun to promote mining and industrial production on their estates. There had also been some improvements in Scottish agriculture, and market relations had begun to penetrate agriculture in the south east in particular.

But despite such – modest – developments, late-feudal Scotland remained a poor country. Scotland consisted of a series of small local economies, rather than anything even beginning to approach an integrated national economy. Tax yields in Scotland were less than one thirty-sixth of what they were in England. Some English counties paid more in taxes than did all of Scotland.

For every ton of Scottish shipping, England had a hundred tons. Annual consumption of iron in Scotland was, per capita, only a quarter of that in England. Scotland’s small manufacturing sector suffered from the absence of a skilled workforce and from low-quality production. Of 47 joint-stock companies formed in the early 1690s, only twelve still existed in 1700.

Exports of coal and salt - previously two of Scotland’s most important exports - had collapsed by the end of the century. The per capita value of Scottish exports was around 4 shillings – a third lower than even that of Ireland. Between 1698 and 1706 the value of Scottish exports fell by 50%. By 1704 Scotland’s trade deficit was estimated at £2 millions (Scots), with the value of imports running at double the value of exports.

Most money in circulation in Scotland was foreign. According to one contemporary political economist, only a sixth of the £2 millions (Scots) issued after a recoinage in 1686 was still in Scotland by the time of the Union. “The want of money has been gradually growing for some years past,” commented one pamphleteer in 1704. The same year the Bank of Scotland had to stop paying out coin in exchange for banknotes: it had run out of coinage.

Agriculture in Scotland was largely subsistence-based. Harvest failures could, and did, result in mass starvation. In the last decade of the seventeenth century between 5% and 15% of the Scottish population perished after a succession of harvest failures. “Everyone may see death in the face of the poor that abound everywhere. Some die in the wayside, some drop down in the street, the poor sucking babs are starving from want of milk,” wrote one contemporary.

At the close of the seventeenth century something over 5% of the Scottish population lived in towns, compared with over 18% in England. Only two towns in Scotland had populations exceeding 10,000. In the first half of the century, when Scotland’s population numbered less than a million, around 100,000 Scots migrated abroad. Around 40,000 migrated to Poland alone.

Scotland’s economic weaknesses were mirrored in - and reinforced by - its failures to emulate England in the sphere of imperial enterprise.

Settlers who claimed Cape Breton Island for Scotland in 1629 quickly surrendered to the French. An attempt to create a ‘new Scotland’ in Nova Scotia collapsed in 1632, when the territory was ceded to the French. The South Carolina settlement established in 1682 was overrun by the Spanish in 1686. The East New Jersey settlement founded three years later was more successful, but was absorbed into New Jersey in 1702.

In 1693 the Scottish Parliament created the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. It was authorised to establish colonies, to be held by the crown of Scotland, where there was no prior European settlement. Having raised £400,000 from Scottish investors, the Company of Scotland attempted to found a Scottish colony and free port at Darien on the Isthmus of Panama.

But the weakness of manufacturing in Scotland meant that the would-be colonists had nothing to trade. “We cannot conceive for what end so much thin grey paper and so many little blue bonnets were sent here, being entirely useless and not worth their room on the ship,” wrote one of the venture’s participants. No more tradable were the 4,000 periwigs and 1,500 Bibles which the vessels had carried across the ocean.
The venture ended in disaster. Only three of the thirteen ships which had sailed from the Clyde returned. Most of the first expedition, in 1698, died of fever, while the second expedition a year later was overrun by the Spanish. Up to a quarter of Scotland’s liquid assets – nearly two and a half times the value of Scotland’s annual exports – had been lost in this attempt to lay the foundations of a Scottish Empire.

Subsequent ventures by the Company of Scotland, involving the eastern trading route around the Cape of Good Hope, were equally unsuccessful. Its first vessel was shipwrecked in 1700 in the Straits of Malacca. The crews of the second and third vessels defected to piracy in 1701, taking their vessels with them.

A fourth vessel was seized by English revenue officers in the English Channel in 1704: its intention of retrieving the cargo of goods saved from the vessel shipwrecked in 1700 constituted a breach of the monopoly of the East India Company.

When a new session of the Scottish Parliament assembled in May of 1703, it did so at a time of a virtual crisis in Anglo-Scottish relations: policies pursued by the English Parliament and successive monarchs were condemned for having benefited the English ruling classes at the expense of their Scottish counterparts.

England imposed high customs duties on its principal imports from Scotland. The English Navigation Laws, which denied Scottish merchants access to England’s American colonies, were being enforced with increasing vigour. England’s wars with the Netherlands and France had damaged Scottish trade with continental Europe. And the then ruling monarch, William III, had ordered all English colonies in the Americas to refuse assistance to the Darien colony.

The response of the Scottish Parliament was to pass the Act of Security. Under the terms of the Act the Parliament would meet within twenty days of the death of Queen Anne and, in the absence of an heir apparent, choose a successor. That successor would also be the English monarch only if certain – unspecified – conditions were met. (In moving the relevant amendment to the Act, the Earl of Roxburghe had refrained for tactical reasons from stipulating the conditions.)

The same Act declared that the Union of the Crowns would be maintained only if “the freedom, frequency, and the power of parliament, and the religion, liberty and trade of the nation (free) from English or any foreign influence” were guaranteed in the course of the current monarch’s rule.

A second Act, Anent (concerning) Peace and War, gave the Scottish Parliament the right to declare war and make peace even if Scotland and England continued to have a single monarch after the death of Queen Anne.

The Court party had unsuccessfully opposed the Acts. But support for the two Acts was not the result of a unified opposition. Rather, it was the product of different, and often contradictory, political interests. As George Ridpath, who recorded the parliamentary proceedings, commented on the vote on the Act of Security: “The majority of the House was for it, though upon different considerations.”

The Jacobites, who numbered about 70 in the Parliament, supported the Acts as a step towards blocking the Hanoverian succession and restoring the Stuarts. The first Act left open the question of who would succeed Queen Anne, while the second Act might eventually allow Scotland to conclude a separate peace with pro-Jacobite France.

A group around the baronial laird Fletcher of Saltoun saw the Acts as an assertion of parliamentary rights against royal control. In fact, Fletcher had proposed his own, and far more radical, Act of Security. Under his version, the monarchy would have been virtually stripped of its powers. But this was too radical a proposal for the Estates of the Scottish Parliament, for so many members of which defence of hereditary privilege was understandably a matter of principle.

For the majority of the Country party the Acts were an attempt to secure more favourable terms for Scottish trade and commerce in exchange for support for the Hanoverian succession: if the Scottish Parliament was to agree to the Hanoverian succession, then it should be able to exact a high price for giving its agreement. And that price, although not spelt out in detail, should certainly include economic concessions by England.

The leader of the Country party, the Duke Hamilton, also had reasons of his own for leaving open the question of who would succeed Queen Anne. He entertained ambitions of securing a crown for himself, even if he did not have the strongest of claims: two and a half centuries earlier one of his ancestors had married into the Stuart dynasty.

When the Scottish Parliament met again the following year, it re-affirmed the position taken in 1703. A composite motion declared that the Parliament would not “proceed to the nomination of a successor (to Queen Anne) until we have had a previous treaty with England in relation to our commerce and other concerns with that nation,” and that the Parliament should also “rectify our constitution and vindicate and secure the sovereignty and independence of the kingdom.”

The English Parliament saw the Acts in the same terms as the Jacobite members of the Scottish Parliament: a threat to the Hanoverian succession, and a threat to successful prosecution of the war against France. As Godolphin, the English Lord Treasurer, put it: “We are now in so critical a juncture with respect to other nations that all Europe must in some measure be affected by the good or ill-ending [i.e. outcome] of the Parliament of Scotland.”

In 1704, in response to the Scottish Parliament’s Acts, the English Parliament passed the Act for the Effectual Security of the Kingdom of England from the Apparent Dangers that May Arise from the Several Acts Lately Passed in the Parliament of Scotland, more commonly known as the Alien Act. The Act was given royal assent by Queen Anne in February of 1705

The Act stated that unless the Scottish Parliament accepted the Hanoverian succession, then all Scots, apart from those already living in England, would be treated as aliens, all Scottish imports into England would be forbidden, and all estates held by Scots in England would be confiscated.

The Act also proposed the appointment of commissioners to conduct negotiations about “a nearer and more complete union” between the two kingdoms. A deadline of Christmas of 1705 was set for a response from the Scottish Parliament.

Having reconvened later the same year, the Scottish Parliament voted in favour of appointing commissioners to discuss a closer union with England. It then went on to support a motion from the Duke of Hamilton that the Scottish commissioners should be appointed by Queen Anne, not by the Parliament itself. (By this time Hamilton was leader of the opposition to the Court party in name only.)

Apart from a common desire to prevent implementation of the sanctions threatened by the Aliens Act, the rationale behind the Parliament’s decision to open negotiations differed from one party and faction to another. As had been the case in 1703, different factions had reached a common position for conflicting reasons.

For the Jacobites the appointment of commissioners continued to leave open the question of the succession to Queen Anne. For the Country party appointing commissioners allowed more time for the Scottish Parliament to bargain about the price for supporting a Hanoverian succession. For Fletcher’s group, given that there had so far been no mention of a union of the Parliaments, the appointment of commissioners was not incompatible with their proposals for reform of the Scottish Parliament.

In November the English Parliament voted to repeal the sanctions threatened by the Alien Act. In February of the following year Queen Anne appointed the Scottish commissioners. In April the English commissioners were appointed.

With negotiations about a union back on the agenda, the Whigs, who now controlled the English Parliament, changed their position. Previously, their priority had been to secure the Hanoverian succession, while leaving the question of union to a later date. Now, however, they decided that union itself could resolve the question of the succession. But for that to be the case, the union would have to be a union of the two Parliaments.

Negotiations opened in April. Given that the Scottish commissioners had been appointed by Queen Anne, there was not a lot to negotiate about. The Scottish commissioners initially argued for a federal-type arrangement between Scotland and England, either because they supported this as an end in itself, or because they saw a federal relationship as a tactical step towards a later union of the Parliaments.

The English commissioners, however, were intent on a union of the Parliaments. As one of the Scottish commissioners later wrote: “After all the trouble we have given ourselves, we knew at the time that it was but losing our labour, for the English commissioners were positively resolved to treat of no kind of Union with us but what was to be incorporating and perpetual.”

Three months later, in July of 1706, the English and Scottish commissioners reached agreement on the draft Articles of Union. In October of the same year the Scottish Parliament reconvened to discuss and vote on the Articles. Apart from securing the Hanoverian succession, by validating the English Act of Settlement, the 25 Articles covered Scottish representation in a single British Parliament, the preservation of the powers of the Scottish nobility and of other Scottish institutions, and, at greatest length, economic issues.

Scotland was to have 45 Members of Parliament, and 16 peers in the House of Lords. This was unrepresentative in terms of the size of Scotland’s population (one fifth of England’s) but ‘over-representative’ in terms of the assumed taxable capacity of Scotland (less than a fortieth of England’s). It was also unfair, in that no such calculations applied to English representation in Parliament: Cornwall alone sent 44 MPs to the House of Commons.

The Scottish legal system, including the authority and privileges of all Scottish courts and all Scottish laws which were not inconsistent with the terms of the treaty, was to be preserved. The rights and privileges of the royal burghs were also to be preserved, as too were the “heritable offices, heritable jurisdictions, offices for life and jurisdictions for life” of the nobility, whose other privileges would also include exemption from civil actions for debt. (For the sake of clarity, “superiorities” were subsequently added to the list of feudal rights to be preserved.)

Scottish merchants and traders were to enjoy freedom of trade with England and equal access to the English colonies (“…freedom and intercourse of trade and navigation … for all the subjects of the United Kingdom of Great Britain”).

Scotland’s payment of a Land Tax was fixed at £48,000 per year, a figure which remained unchanged for the rest of the eighteenth century. Under the same tax, England was required to raise nearly £2 millions per year. For every £50 raised in Scotland, almost £2,000 was to be raised in England.

Although payment of a share of the national debt was to be raised in Scotland – £398,085 and 10 shillings – exactly the same sum, the so-called “Equivalent”, was to be paid out as compensation for this. This figure included nearly £250,000 to cover the costs of adopting English coinage, to provide a ‘subsidy’ to promote industry in Scotland, and as compensation for those who had lost money in the Darien venture.

The contents of the proposed treaty, published in October, triggered popular unrest in Scotland. Demonstrations were staged outside of Parliament House. Presbyterian ministers denounced the proposals as a threat to the Kirk. Riots broke out in Edinburgh and became a daily event. In early November rioting also spread to Glasgow.

In Kirkudbright, Dumfries, and Stirling – all of which, like Glasgow, were strongly Presbyterian in outlook – the text of the treaty was burnt at the town crosses. In Lanarkshire handbills were circulated calling on Presbyterians to prepare arms and provisions for a march on the Parliament in Edinburgh. Rumours circulated of an armed insurrection, involving a possible alliance of Lowland Covenanters and Highland Jacobites.

96 anti-union petitions, predominantly from the West of Scotland, were submitted to the Scottish Parliament. In Scotland as a whole, 14 out of 34 counties, 19 out of 66 burghs, 60 out of 938 parishes, and from 3 out of 68 presbyteries submitted such petitions.

Within the Scottish Parliament itself there was, according to one of its members, “a great backwardness for a union with England of any kind whatsoever.” And yet, in January of 1707, the Parliament voted by 110 to 67 to ratify the Treaty of Union.

Three centuries later it is impossible to state with absolute certainty which factors led a majority of the Parliament’s members to vote in favour of the Union. Even allowing for such qualifications, however, it is possible to determine the combination of factors which, more likely than not, resulted in acceptance of the Treaty of Union.

Bribery was not a determining factor. Burns’ portrayal of the Union as something “wrought by a coward few, for hireling traitors’ wages … we’re bought and sold for English gold - such a parcel of rogues in a nation” might make for good poetry. But it makes bad history.

The “English gold” referred to by Burns was the £20,000 sent to Scotland from the English Treasury in the autumn of 1706. The money was used to pay off debts to nobles on the Scottish civil list. But paying off those debts was also clearly intended to influence the outcome of the eventual vote on the Union.

In the event, the payments changed the voting intentions of, at most, only a handful of members of the Parliament. The bulk of the money, £12,325, for example, was paid to the Duke of Queensberry, the leader of the Court party. But he had always been a supporter of a union anyway. Other payments also went to long-standing supporters of a union. And, by the standards of time, what today would count as bribery was then simply a commonplace practice.

If the Union could be explained in terms of bribery, why did it not occur on earlier occasions? Bribes were surely no less available, and Scottish nobles no less corrupt, in earlier years than in 1707. Nor does bribing a Scottish noble appear to have necessarily been a particularly expensive affair: five of the bribes paid out were less than the sum paid to the messenger who carried the treaty from Scotland to England.

If, for example, Lord Banff could have been influenced in his voting intentions by the princely sum of £11 and 2 shillings which he received, then it says much about the desperate economic straits of many members of the Scottish nobility. The fact that it was from England that the £20,000 had to be despatched is equally significant: there was simply no money in the Scottish Treasury.

In any case, “English gold” was not the only currency of bribery in early eighteenth-century Scotland. When the Duke of Hamilton, who had looked to the French court to support his claim to the Scottish crown, met with the French spy Hooke in 1705, he asked for – and, according to contemporaries, obtained and used – money from France in an attempt to bribe members of the Parliament.

The risk of an English invasion was no more significant than bribery in determining the outcome of the Scottish Parliament’s vote on the Treaty of Union. It is certainly the case that while the Scottish Parliament was discussing the draft Treaty of Union, England moved troops to the Border region and to the north of Ireland. How serious the intentions were behind these troop movements is a separate question.

War in Scotland would have undermined the all-important war on the continent. The Duke of Marlborough, the commander of the English forces, had consistently advocated a union rather than a war with Scotland – not least because of the potential impact of such a war on the 10,000 Scottish troops under his command. Nor was Marlborough’s a lone voice in wanting to avoid the use of force. Queen Anne was of the same opinion.

Moreover, the whole point of the Union was to ensure that Scotland did not become a ‘second front’ in the war against France, with troops having to be diverted from Europe to Scotland in order to deal with a French-Jacobite uprising. An English invasion of Scotland to enforce the Treaty of Union would therefore have resulted in precisely that which the Treaty of Union was meant to avoid.

If bribery and troop movements were not significant factors in deciding the outcome of the Scottish Parliament’s vote on the Treaty of Union, the prospect of access to English colonies and the abolition of duties on Scottish exports to England certainly was a major influence, albeit not the sole influence.

Scotland’s late attempt to establish its own colonies had not been tolerated by other European states – Spain and France as much as England. The Scottish navy – consisting of three vessels, with hulls borrowed from England – was no match for the navies of those states. And high tariff barriers – erected not just by England, but by all European states – stifled the market for the little which Scotland had to offer by way of exports.

Union with England offered a chance to escape from this dilemma. “The only popular topic produced for rendering it (the Union) palatable was the great advantage that must accrue to Scotland from the communication of trade,” as one writer put it.

The author of the pamphlet “Honey Lies in the Trade” likewise explained that the Union “may bring us into the way and knowledge of these places and things which they (the English) have laboured to conceal from us. And having once got a foot, we may possibly screw into the bowels of the hive.”

The attraction of screwing into the bowels of the hive was also highlighted by supporters of the Union during debates in the Scottish Parliament: “This nation being poor and without force to protect it, its commerce cannot reap great advantages by it, till it partake of the trade and protection of some powerful neighbour nation, that can communicate both these. By this union we will have access to all the advantages in commerce the English enjoy.”

It was Article IV of the Treaty of Union which provided for freedom of trade. When the Scottish Parliament voted on the Article – in its debates on the Treaty of Union the Parliament discussed and voted on each Article separately – it passed by an overwhelming 156 votes to 19. The size of the majority underlined the extent to which “communication of trade” acted as an incentive to support the Treaty of Union.

No less important in securing assent to the Union were guarantees, or apparent guarantees, contained in other Articles that the class structure and institutions of Scottish society – with the obvious exception of the Scottish Parliament itself – would be preserved by the Union: the superiorities and privileges of the nobility, the rights and privileges of the royal burghs, and the existence of a separate Scottish legal system.

Given the domination of the Scottish Parliament by greater and lesser feudal nobles, the preservation of feudal superiorities was a matter of no small significance. The stated guarantees undermined attempts by the Union’s opponents to persuade members of the Parliament that the Union would result in the demise of Scotland’s feudal nobility.

It was to no avail, for example, that Lord Belhaven warned his peers in the Scottish Parliament of his vision of the fate awaiting them in the event of Union: “I see the noble and honourable peerage of Scotland divested of their followers and vassalages, and put upon such an equal foot with their vassals that I think I see a petty English exciseman receive more homage and respect than what was paid formerly to their quondam Macccallanmores.”

Amendments to the draft Treaty of Union in the course of its passage through the Scottish Parliament – subsequently accepted by the English Parliament – undermined, albeit not entirely, opposition to the Union on fears of higher taxation.

Such fears had been one of the driving forces behind the popular unrest triggered by publication of the draft Treaty of Union in October of 1706: taxes in Scotland were lower, and less efficiently collected, than was the case in England. But subsequent amendments to Articles concerning taxation in the draft treaty protected basic commodities from English levels of taxation.

English taxes on salt – an essential part of the Scottish diet – would not apply in Scotland for the first seven years of the Union. A lower rate of tax would apply to beer in Scotland than in England, and the English tax on malt would not apply in Scotland for the duration of the war against France. English duties on “coals, culm and cinders”, on “windows and lights”, and on “stamped paper, vellum and parchment” would likewise not be applied in Scotland, at least for varying periods of time.

Of arguably greater importance than the amendments made to the draft treaty in response to concerns about higher levels of taxation were the steps taken to defuse the far more militant and widespread opposition to the Union on religious grounds.

Church of Scotland ministers played a central role in the wave of unrest which had followed publication of the draft treaty. The proposed Union guaranteed the Scottish legal system but made no mention of the position of the Church of Scotland. The Kirk feared that the Union would lead to the re-introduction of bishops into church government, and to the imposition of ministers on local congregations.

In the Scottish Parliament’s opening debate on the draft treaty Belhaven had been quick to pounce on the alleged threat to the Church of Scotland: “I see a national Church, founded upon a rock, secured by a Claim of Right, hedged and fenced about by the strictest and pointedest legal sanctions that sovereignty could contrive, voluntarily descending into a plain, upon an equal level with Jews, Papists, Socinians, Armenians, Anabaptists and other sectaries.”

In negotiating the draft treaty the Scottish commissioners, as one of them later wrote, had wanted to “make the Presbyterian government and its security the basis of any Union between the two nations.” But the final draft omitted any guarantee of the Presbyterian settlement at the insistence of the English commissioners: they feared a Tory backlash in the English Parliament in the event of such a guarantee.

Religious-based opposition to the draft treaty was serious enough to threaten its chances of acceptance by the Scottish Parliament. “One thing I must say for the Kirk, that if the Union fail it is owing to them,” wrote one of the Union’s supporters in the Scottish Parliament. It was hardly a coincidence that, with the exception of Edinburgh, the centres of protest against the proposed Union were largely to be found in the most strongly Presbyterian districts in Scotland.

The response of the Scottish Parliament, in November of 1706, was to rush through the Act for Securing the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government in November. The Act confirmed “the said true Protestant religion, and the worship, discipline and government of this Church (i.e. the Church of Scotland) to continue without any alteration to the people of this land in all succeeding generations.”

(The Act received support from anti-Union Episcopalian peers in the Parliament. They believed that its confirmation of Presbyterian government would alienate Tories in the English Parliament and thereby lead to a collapse of the proposed union.)

Thereafter, as one contemporary wrote, “in the churches, by and large, the trumpets of sedition began to fall silent.” Lockhart of Carnwath, an anti-Union member of the Scottish Parliament, wrote in later years: “No sooner did the Parliament pass an Act for the security of their kirk … than most of the brethren’s zeal cooled – thereby discovering that provided they could retain the possession of their benefices they cared not a farthing what became of the other concerns of the nation.”

Whatever the precise calculations in the minds of those members of the Scottish Parliament who voted to ratify the Treaty of Union, it is credible to assume that the combination of free trade, guarantees of feudal privileges, recognition of Presbyterian church government, concessions on tax issues, and the allocation of the “Equivalent” sufficed to bring about a majority.

In addition, there was the question of what, if any, was the alternative to acceptance of the Union.

Economically, the likely alternative was further economic stagnation. Scotland lacked the military power and economic development needed to break into European markets fenced off by the principles of mercantalism. Its recent attempt to become a colonial power had proved a disaster. And refusal of the Treaty of Union could trigger implementation of the sanctions previously threatened in the Aliens Act.

Politically, given that the Treaty of Union incorporated confirmation of the Hanoverian succession, the likely alternative was a French-backed attempt by Jacobites to restore the Stuarts to the Scottish throne. This would mean civil war in Scotland. Inevitably, England would also be drawn into such a conflict.

A restored Stuart monarchy would take revenge on those sections of the Scottish nobility who had supported the ousting of James II/VII, and also attack Presbyterian church government in Scotland. Alternatively, a victory for England would result in a union anyway – but only after war in Scotland, and on far less favourable terms.

(Pro-Union pamphleteers made great play of the risk – and it was a real risk – of a Stuart restoration if Union with England were rejected: “Men are known by their friends. All the Jacobites are in league with you (opponents of the Union), the Papists are on your right hand, the Prelatists on your left, and the French at your back. … On what account do these people join with you?”)

Although a majority of the Scottish Parliament concluded that their class interests were best served by ratification of the Treaty of Union, some sections of the Scottish ruling classes, as well as other social forces in Scotland, drew a very different conclusion. But they did so on the basis of contradictory considerations.

Jacobites opposed the Union for obvious reasons. As one of the Scottish commissioners wrote of them: “They could not think of embracing a system for the Union of the two kingdoms wherein succession to the Crown was to be settled on the House of Hanover.”

Fletcher of Saltoun and his supporters opposed the Union because, by preserving the powers of the feudal nobility, it ran counter to the constitutional reforms which Fletcher had argued for in his proposed Act of Security in 1703.

Covenanters opposed the Union because they regarded it as a betrayal of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. This had called for the extension of Presbyterianism throughout England, Ireland and Scotland. But by guaranteeing the continuation of separate churches in England and Scotland, the Union would, as one Covenanter wrote, place “an eternal embargo upon all such endeavours.”

Even the “communication of trade” provided for by the Treaty of Union was a reason for some to oppose the Union. Free trade cut both ways: free trade for Scotland with England and its colonies also meant free trade for England with Scotland. Scotland was therefore at risk of being overrun by cheaper English commodities and raw materials.

Anti-Union pamphleteers pointed to the threat which free trade might pose to Scottish manufacturing: “Scotland may then bid farewell to the woollen, stuff, stocken, and many other manufactures, especially now in so hopeful a way of thriving among them. … All hope of erecting new manufacturies must be lost.”

Some royal burghs opposed the Union because they saw free trade as a threat to their feudal monopoly over foreign trade (although, by the time of the Union, that monopoly had already begun to be substantially undermined).

The Glasgow merchant elite was hostile to the Union for a different reason: free trade would lead to the stationing of customs officers in Glasgow, putting at risk the profits accumulated from illegally smuggling tobacco from the American colonies.

Individually, none of these strands of opposition carried enough social weight to frustrate the Union. Nor could they act together in an attempt to secure their common goal: their motivations for opposition to the Union, and their alternatives to the Union, were not only inconsistent but also often mutually exclusive.

The Treaty of Union formally came into effect on 1st May 1707. According to Adam Smith, writing in later years, “the immediate effect (of the Union) was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country.” This was not entirely accurate. Even in the short term, some nobles and merchants profited handsomely from the Union.

Grain and oatmeal exports doubled in the decade and a half following the Union. Commercially oriented cattle-rearing increased, in order to take advantage of easier access to an expanding English market. And, by 1730, Glasgow merchants, having overcome the problem of having to pay duty on their imports, had trebled the volume of their tobacco imports from the Americas.

But while some “orders of men in the country” quickly profited from the Union, other, lesser, orders paid the price for those profits, as well as suffering under the imposition of higher taxes.

The doubling of grain exports to the new markets opened by the Union resulted in severe food shortages in the Lowlands: grain crops were being exported instead of being supplied to local markets. A wave of food riots broke out in 1720. The level of unrest in the Lowlands was greater than in the whole of Scotland during any of the post-Union Jacobite uprisings.

In Galloway the spread of cattle-rearing had similar consequences: tenants were dispossessed in order to make way for enclosures. In 1724/25 the region was swept by the most serious rural unrest – the Levellers’ Revolt – anywhere in Scotland in the entire century. Hundreds of armed men tore down the walls of cattle enclosures, mutilated cattle, and fought pitched battles with troops. The revolt lasted for some six months.

The imposition of new taxes and of higher levels of taxation – despite, or even in breach of, amendments to the Treaty of Union during debates in the Scottish Parliament – also provoked widespread unrest in the immediate post-Union years.

In 1711 and 1715 the British Parliament imposed duties on exported and printed Scottish linens. Paper-making and candle-making were hit by new excise duties, with paper production falling from 100,000 pounds to 40,000 pounds between 1712 and 1720. The cost of salt doubled when a salt tax was introduced in 1713, six years after the Act of Union.

The same year Parliament voted to apply the malt tax to Scotland, again in breach of the Treaty of Union. Although the malt tax was withdrawn, a further attempt to introduce the tax in 1724 provoked a particularly serious wave of rioting. The introduction of more effective methods of collection added to popular grievances over increased taxation. Assaults on customs officers and attacks on customs warehouses were frequent and widespread.

In the aftermath of the malt tax riots of 1725, however, increased state assistance for Scottish manufacturing, reduced bounties on the export of grain (which reduced the profitability of such exports), and the first signs of growth in some sectors of the economy as a result of trade with England and the colonies resulted in a decline in the unrest provoked by the short-term economic impact of the Union.

From the point of view of the English ruling classes, the Treaty of Union was only partially successful. France failed to secure its aim of territorial expansion in the War of the Spanish Succession. And after Queen Anne’s death in 1714 the crown was transferred to the House of Hanover. But the Union failed to eliminate the threat of Jacobitism.

On the contrary, there were attempted Jacobite uprisings of varying degrees of seriousness in 1708, 1715, 1719 and 1745. And it was the Treaty of Union itself which had helped make possible those uprisings.

The social basis of Jacobitism in Scotland was a section of the feudal nobility based predominantly, but not exclusively, in the Highlands. The source of their power lay not in their wealth but in the feudal superiorities and privileges which had been preserved by the Treaty of Union.

In contrast to those landed nobles who had established themselves as capitalist proprietors or, in fewer instances, who had invested part of their wealth in trade and industrial production, most of the Highland clan chiefs and Lowlands nobles who provided the main source of support for Jacobitism had been unable to make that transition.

As such, they represented both an anomaly and a threat. The former because they constituted a survival of feudalism in a state increasingly based on capitalist relations of production. And the latter because their exercise of feudal powers, together with the support which they continued to receive from France, allowed them to remain a significant social force.

Eradication of the continuing Jacobite threat was therefore inseparable from abolition of the Scottish feudal superiorities which the Treaty of Union itself had allowed to be carried over into the new British state.

But it was only in 1747 that these superiorities were abolished: following the defeat of the Jacobite forces at Culloden Moor Parliament passed the Act for Taking Away and Abolishing the Heritable Jurisdictions in That Part of Great Britain Called Scotland …and for Rendering the Union of the Two Kingdoms More Complete.

From the point of view of the Scottish ruling classes, the results of the Union were more complex.

On the one hand, at least in the short term, the Treaty of Union preserved their feudal powers. On the other hand the existence of those powers was incompatible with the expansion of capitalist methods of production triggered, albeit only from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, by the Scottish economy’s integration into that of the newly created British state.

The wealthiest faction of the feudal nobility was able to benefit from the emergence of a Scottish capitalist economy. The remainder looked – unsuccessfully – to Jacobitism and France to preserve their feudal privileges. Culloden and the legislation of 1747 sealed their fate. In that sense, Belhaven’s warnings in the Scottish Parliament that Union would lead to the nobility being “divested of their followers and vassalages” had been proved correct.

Paradoxically, the main beneficiary of the Union in Scotland was a social force which had played little role in bringing it about: the Scottish bourgeoisie.

Unlike in England, there had been no victorious bourgeois revolution in Scotland in the seventeenth century. In the opening years of the following century the embryonic Scottish bourgeoisie was economically and politically weak, and sceptical about a union with England.

Its economic weakness was reflected in the overall weakness of the Scottish economy. Its political weakness was reflected in the domination of Scotland and its Parliament by a feudal nobility. And its scepticism about a union flowed out of fears that Scottish manufacturing would not survive a post-union flood of cheaper and better-quality English imports.

In the event, however, from the 1750s onwards the Union resulted in a rapid capitalist transformation of the Scottish economy: a process which, in England, had required nearly two centuries was concentrated into a period of decades in Scotland. Inevitably, the class which emerged as the dominant class from that capitalist transformation was the Scottish bourgeoisie.

The Scottish bourgeoisie did not rise to the level of a ruling class in an independent Scotland. Just as the Scottish economy had been gradually integrated into a single British economy in the aftermath of 1707, so too the Scottish bourgeoisie had become part of a single British ruling class. In later years the same forces which had created a single British ruling class would also lead to the emergence of a British-wide workers’ movement

See also
Scotland's snipes
300 years
Scottish News - Barriers to independence - 15.12.06