act of union 1707

Act of Union 1707

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The Acts of Union was a pair of Parliamentary acts passed in 1706 and 1707 that took effect on 1 May 1707 by the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland, respectively. These Acts were the implementation of the Treaty of Union negotiated between the two countries.

The Kingdom of Great Britain was created by merging the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland. Since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the two countries shared a monarch but retained separate and sovereign parliaments.

The Acts of Union dissolved both the parliaments of England and Scotland and replaced them with a new Parliament, called the Parliament of Great Britain. This new parliament is based in Westminster, the former home of the English Parliament. These Acts are referred to as the Union of the Parliaments.

Background

While there had been three attempts in 1606, 1667, and 1689 to unite the two countries by Acts of Parliament, these were the first Acts that had the will of both political establishments behind them, albeit for rather different reasons. In the English case, the purpose was to establish the Royal succession along Protestant lines in the same manner as provided for by the English Act of Settlement 1701, rather than that of the Scottish Act of Security 1704. The two countries had shared a king for much of the previous century. The English were concerned that an independent Scotland with a different king, even if he were a Protestant, might make alliances against England.

In the Scottish case, it was claimed that union would enable Scotland to recover from the financial disaster wrought by the Darien scheme through English assistance and the lifting of measures put in place through the Alien Act to force the Scottish Parliament into compliance with the Act of Settlement.

The treaty consisted of 25 articles, 15 of which were economic in nature. In Scotland, each article was voted on separately and several clauses in articles were delegated to specialised subcommittees. Article 1 of the treaty was based on the political principle of an incorporating union and this was secured by a majority of 116 votes to 83 on 4 November 1706. In order to minimise the opposition of the Church of Scotland, an Act was also passed to secure the Presbyterian establishment of the Church, after which the Church stopped its open opposition, although hostility remained at lower levels of the clergy. The treaty as a whole was finally ratified on 16 January 1707 by a majority of 110 votes to 69.

The ultimate securing of the treaty in the unicameral Scottish Parliament can be attributed more to the weakness and lack of cohesion between the various opposition groups in the House as opposed to the strength of pro-incorporationists[citation needed]. The combined votes of the Court party with a majority of the Squadrone Volante were sufficient to ensure the final passage of the treaty through the House. Many Commissioners had invested heavily in the Darien Scheme and they believed that they would receive compensation for their losses; Article 14, the Equivalent granted GBP398,085 10s to Scotland to offset future liability towards the English national debt. In essence, it was also used as a means of compensation for investors in the Darien Scheme.

Bribery was also prevalent. £20,000 (£240,000 Scots) was dispatched to Scotland for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow. James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, the Queen's Commissioner in Parliament, received £12,325, the majority of the funding. To many Scots, this amounted to little more than a bribe. Robert Burns describing it as

Criticisms

For the very simple reason that the two parliaments had evolved along different lines, contradictions and teething troubles were frequent. For example, the English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty in all aspects of national life did not exist in Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament was unicameral, not bicameral. Most of the pre-Union traditions of Westminster continued, while those of Scotland were forgotten or ignored.

Defoe drew upon his Scottish experience to write his Tour thro' the whole Island of Great Britain, published in 1726, where he actually admitted that the increase of trade and population in Scotland, which he had predicted as a consequence of the Union, was "not the case, but rather the contrary", and that the hostility towards his party was, "because they were English and because of the Union, which they were almost universally exclaimed against".

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a vehement critic of the Union, said in An Account of a Conversation, that Scotland suffered “the miserable and languishing condition of all places that depend upon a remote seat of government."

However by the time Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their tour in 1773, recorded in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland Johnson noted that Scotland was: “a nation of which the commerce is hourly extending, and the wealth encreasing”, and Glasgow in particular had become one of the greatest cities of Britain.