In England, the choice of the House of Hanover as successors to the throne had been widely welcomed, but in Scotland, which shared a monarch with England but not a Parliament, it precipitated an immediate rupture in relations.
In the past, the Scots Parliament had been managed for the absentee monarch by a committee called the Lords of the Articles. But the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary had liberated Parliament in Scotland as well as in England – freed from royal management, it could take an independent line against the crown. In 1703, it did just that with the Act of Security. This provided that, after Queen Anne's death, the next monarch of Scotland should be a Protestant and of the royal line, but should not be the same person as the successor to the English crown.
Anne refused to give her consent to the Act of Security for almost a year, until overwhelming pressure forced her to yield. But once news of Marlborough's great victory over the French at Blenheim reached London, the English Parliament – no longer afraid of a French-sponsored Jacobite invasion of Scotland – was now able to respond in kind to the Scots.
The result was the Aliens Act of 1705. All Scots, except those resident in England, were to be treated as aliens, and the major Scottish export trades to England were to be banned unless, by Christmas 1705, significant progress had been made towards agreeing a union of the two kingdoms.
The Aliens Act aroused predictable outrage in Scotland. But the deadline did concentrate minds. Two sets of commissioners were appointed to thrash out an agreement at Whitehall. They met in separate rooms, communicated by written minutes and strictly avoided socialising with each other. On 22 April 1703, the English room sent the following proposal to the Scottish:
That the two kingdoms of England and Scotland be for ever united into one kingdom by the name of Great Britain. That the united Kingdom of Great Britain be represented by one and the same parliament, and that the succession to the monarchy of Great Britain be vested in the House of Hanover.
On the 25th, the Scots commissioners came back with a counter-proposal. They would accept union and the Hanoverian succession but on condition of freedom of trade, not only within the United Kingdom but also within the 'plantations' – that is, the colonies in North America and the West Indies. The English replied promptly that they regarded such mutual freedom of trade as a 'necessary consequence of an entire Union'.
It had taken only three days to work out an agreement. Both sides got what they wanted: the English, a Scotland unshakably on-side during their struggle with France; the Scots (whose attempt to establish a colony in Central America had failed catastrophically), free access to the 'plantations' as a way out of their own desperate national poverty.
But the agreed articles of union had still to be ratified by the Parliament in London and the one in Edinburgh where they were also being asked to sign their own death warrant. On 16 January 1707, after three months of clause-by-clause debate, the Scots Parliament voted decisively by 110 to 67 for union and its own extinction. It was, said Anne, even among so many victories, the day that would prove the true happiness of her reign.
The union was a mixture of the conservative and the radical. Most that was distinctively Scottish (or indeed English) was preserved, and along with 'the most ancient and most noble order of the Thistle', Scotland kept its own law and law courts, its universities and educational system and, above all, the Presbyterian Kirk so dear to Lowland Scottish hearts. But equally the new union institutions of the United Kingdom were framed with the new, rational methods of Anglo-Dutch political economy.
Nevertheless, there were no celebrations for the union in Scotland, but as the intellectual and economic transformation of 18th-century Scotland would show, the Scots probably got the better deal.
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 Did You Know? Union of the Parliaments 1707
www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow_union.htm
The Scottish view of the Act of Union.
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Bought and Sold for English Gold: The Union of 1707 by Christopher A Whatley (Tuckwell Press, 2001)
Invaluable guide to the background to and causes of the Union of 1707, which, outside Parliament in Edinburgh, was deeply unpopular in Scotland. It takes the reader through the maze of competing arguments about why Scots gave up their Parliament in the first place.
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