Scotland

One king, two kingdoms

Until 1603 England and Scotland were entirely separate kingdoms. That year Elizabeth I of England died childless, and her crown passed to her cousin James VI, King of Scotland. The two countries now shared a monarch, an arrangement called the Union of the Crowns, but kept their own parliaments, laws and churches.^[8]

James wanted a “perfect union” of the two. A commission of English and Scottish members was set up in 1604, but Westminster had little enthusiasm for merging laws, parliaments and economies, and after debates from 1606 to 1607 there was no agreement. James settled for symbols: he styled himself King of Great Britain, and in 1606 ordered a British flag combining the crosses of St George and St Andrew.^[8]

A full union did happen once before 1707. Oliver Cromwell imposed one in 1652, held in place by an army of occupation and without popular consent.^[9] Charles II was restored to his kingdoms in 1660. When his brother James VII (James II in England) was deposed in 1688–89, the Scottish crown was formally offered to William of Orange and Mary, who accepted it on 11 May 1689.^[10]

A convention of Scotland’s estates discussed union with England in 1689, and the idea found favour among Scotland’s political elite in the 1690s because the economy was in a poor state. English politicians showed little interest: a proposal in the House of Lords in 1695 went nowhere, and in 1700 the Commons threw out a bill for union talks that the Lords had passed.^[11]

Why the parliaments reached union

The first push was money. England’s 1661 Navigation Act kept Scottish ships out of trade with English colonies, so in 1695 the Scottish Parliament set up the Company of Scotland to trade overseas.^[12] Its great venture was a colony called New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Darien, in today’s Panama. Five ships sailed from Leith on 14 July 1698. The settlers struggled to grow food, the Guna people had no use for the goods they had brought to trade, and King William ordered England’s colonies not to supply them. The colony was abandoned in July 1699, and a second expedition surrendered to Spain in 1700. The scheme cost about 2,000 lives and a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital.^[12]

The second was the crown. William and Mary had no children, and in 1700 the son of Anne, the next heir, died aged 11. England’s Act of Settlement of 1701 passed the crown after Anne to the Protestant Sophia of Hanover and her heirs, without consulting the Scots, and the Scottish Parliament made no matching choice.^[11] France recognised the exiled Stuart claimant, James Edward Stuart, as heir to both thrones.^[13] England, at war with France, feared a separate, Stuart-ruled and possibly French-leaning Scotland.^[14]

Talks in 1702–03 agreed in principle on a single parliament and the Hanoverian succession, but broke down over access to England’s colonial trade, taxes, the church, and whether England should compensate the Company of Scotland’s shareholders for Darien.^[15] The Scottish Parliament struck back. Its Act of Security, passed on 13 August 1703 after 19 stormy sittings, said Scotland would not share England’s next monarch unless its crown, parliament, religion and trade were guaranteed independence, and not without free access to English colonial trade.^[16]

Westminster answered with pressure. The Alien Act of early 1705 threatened to ban imports of Scotland’s main products into England, and to strip Scots of their rights under English law, including to property in England, unless Scotland agreed to negotiate a union and accepted the Hanoverian succession by 25 December 1705.^[14] On 1 September 1705 the Duke of Hamilton, an opposition leader, unexpectedly proposed that the Queen choose Scotland’s negotiators, and the motion passed by eight votes. Hamilton admitted privately that “our independency is now a jest”.^[17]

Commissioners met in separate rooms at the Cockpit in Whitehall from 22 April 1706, trading proposals in writing. Within three days each side had what it most wanted: England got the Hanoverian succession in Scotland, and Scotland got access to England’s colonial markets. Scotland also kept its own legal system, won exemptions from some English taxes, and was promised a payment called the Equivalent to offset the share of England’s national debt it would take on.^[18][19] The Articles of Union were presented to Queen Anne on 23 July 1706.^[3]

“the two kingdoms of England and Scotland be forever 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”^[18]

Ratified amid riots

The Scottish Parliament met to debate the Articles from 3 October 1706. Publishing them set off violent protests outside Parliament House in Edinburgh; troops were brought into the city with orders to shoot if necessary, and 96 petitions against the union came in from around Scotland.^[20] Honours, posts and pensions were handed out to win members over.^[21] The National Museum of Scotland notes that the Equivalent, £398,085 10s, partly compensated Darien investors, many of them politically influential, and that this helped secure the vote.^[12]

In January 1707 an act guaranteeing the Presbyterian Church of Scotland was made part of the ratifying act, and the Parliament ratified the Articles by 110 votes to 67.^[21] In voting for union, it had voted for its own end.^[19] Scotland would send 45 MPs and 16 peers to Westminster, and its crown jewels and records were to stay in Scotland.^[3]

The English Parliament ratified the Articles in March, and the united kingdom of Great Britain came into being on 1 May 1707. The new Parliament of Great Britain first met in October 1707.^[1][13] Scotland’s own parliament had adjourned on 25 March 1707.^[4]

North Britain and the Jacobites

Little thought had gone into how Scotland would be governed after the union. Westminster abolished the Scottish Privy Council in 1708, new taxes on everyday goods were enforced heavy-handedly, and customs officers were often attacked.^[22] The Jacobites, supporters of the exiled Stuarts, could present themselves as defenders of Scottish liberties pledged to repeal the union.^[23]

In 1715 the Earl of Mar raised 16,000 men, two-thirds of them from Highland clans and the Episcopalian north-east. The Duke of Argyll’s government army, outnumbered three to one, fought them to an inconclusive draw at Sheriffmuir on 13 November. Mar pulled back instead of pressing on, and early in February 1716 he fled to France.^[23] Mar had served as Secretary of State for Scotland after the union.^[24]

Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonnie Prince Charlie”, landed on Eriskay on 2 August 1745 and, against his officers’ advice, set out to march on London. His army of 5,000 Highlanders was defeated by 9,000 government troops at Culloden, near Inverness, on 16 April 1746: some 2,000 were killed and 1,000 taken prisoner. Laws passed from 1746 banned Highland dress and the carrying of arms and abolished the heritable jurisdictions that gave clan chiefs power over their clansmen.^[25]

Support for the Stuarts in Scotland was limited, and some Highland clans, such as the Campbells and the Munros, backed the government. After Culloden, clan chiefs increasingly ran their land as commercial estates.^[9] Some landowners cleared tenants off the land for sheep, sometimes violently, in the Highland Clearances, as the Sutherland family’s agents did in Strathnaver around 1810–20.^[26]

Industry, empire and the Scottish Office

From the 1820s the Industrial Revolution was in full swing in Scotland. Coal and iron output rose, and shipbuilding made the Clyde’s reputation. Scotland’s population, perhaps a million around 1700, passed 4.5 million by 1900.^[27]

Under the union Scotland kept its own church and legal system.^[9] Its government was thinner. A Secretary of State for Scotland served until the post lapsed after the 1745 rising; then the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s senior law officer, managed its affairs until they passed to the Home Office in 1827. The Secretary for Scotland Act 1885 created a Scottish Office, based at Dover House in London, and a minister for Scottish affairs. In 1926 the post was raised to a full Secretary of State.^[24] In 1939 the Scottish administration moved to St Andrew’s House in Edinburgh.^[26]

In the Highlands, crofters (small tenant farmers) campaigned in Parliament and, from 1882, sometimes turned to violence in the “Crofters’ War”, winning security of tenure and fair rents in an act of 1886. Britannica calls that campaign, which united Highlanders and Lowlanders, a key stage in forging a modern Scottish consciousness.^[26]

Home rule stirs

The Scottish National Party was formed in 1934 by merging two smaller parties, and it made little electoral impact before World War II.^[26] In 1949 more than two million Scots reportedly signed a Scottish Covenant calling for home rule, and on Christmas Day 1950 the Stone of Scone, on which Scottish kings had been crowned, was stolen from Westminster Abbey and taken to Scotland; it was returned in April 1951.^[28]

Winnie Ewing won the Hamilton by-election for the SNP in 1967.^[4] Oil was discovered in the North Sea in the early 1970s, and campaigning on the slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil!” the SNP won more than 30% of the Scottish vote and 11 of Scotland’s 71 seats in October 1974.^[28]

1979, and the long road back

Callaghan’s Labour government, which relied on SNP and Plaid Cymru votes, passed the Scotland Act 1978 to create a Scottish Assembly. A backbench amendment by George Cunningham, passed 166 votes to 151, required 40% of the whole electorate to vote yes.^[5] In the referendum on 1 March 1979, 51.6% voted yes, but that was only 32.9% of the electorate. The SNP withdrew its support, the government lost a vote of confidence by one vote, and the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher won the election that followed.^[5] The SNP lost 9 of its 11 seats,^[28] and the Scotland Act was repealed in June 1979.^[29]

Through the 1980s the Conservative government in London had little support in Scotland. The community charge, or poll tax, was brought in in Scotland in 1989, a year before England and Wales, and set off widespread protests.^[28] After the 1987 election, parties, councils, churches and voluntary groups formed the Scottish Constitutional Convention.^[29] At its first meeting, on 30 March 1989, members signed a Claim of Right declaring the Scottish people’s sovereign right to choose their form of government. All of Scotland’s Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs signed except Tam Dalyell.^[30] The Convention’s final report, published in November 1995, set out a plan for devolution.^[29]

At the May 1997 general election the Conservatives lost every seat they held in Scotland, and Tony Blair’s new Labour government called a referendum.^[28]

A parliament again

In a referendum on 11 September 1997, 74.3% of voters agreed that there should be a Scottish Parliament, and 63.5% that it should be able to vary taxes. Turnout was 60.4%.^[6] The Scotland Act 1998, passed at Westminster, begins: “There shall be a Scottish Parliament.”^[31]

Its 129 members were elected in May 1999, and it first sat on 12 May 1999 in the Church of Scotland’s Assembly Hall in Edinburgh.^[4] It has wide powers over health, education, housing, regional transport, the environment and agriculture, and some power over income tax.^[32] Matters such as the union itself and the UK Parliament stay reserved to Westminster.^[33]

“The Scottish Parliament, which adjourned on March 25, 1707, is hereby reconvened.”^[4]

Independence votes

For the 2014 referendum, a 2013 Order in Council under the Scotland Act gave the Scottish Parliament the power it needed to hold the vote.^[33] On 18 September 2014 Scotland voted against becoming an independent country by 2,001,926 votes (55.3%) to 1,617,989 (44.7%), on a turnout of 84.6%.^[7]

The Scottish Government later drafted a bill for a second referendum, and the UK Government was unwilling to agree another Order. On 23 November 2022 the UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the bill related to matters reserved to Westminster, so without such a change the Scottish Parliament cannot legislate for an independence referendum. The court said it was answering a legal question, not the political one of whether Scotland should be independent.^[33]