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The Treaty of Union of 1707 – Part 1

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Apr 032011

Voice’s Alex Mitchell recounts the key events which informed and influenced the Union Of Parliament between Scotland and England in 1707, and in doing so, impartially debunks some commonly held and perpetuated views on the issue.

Recently, in 2007, we saw the tercentenary of the Act of Union of the Parliaments of Scotland and England.

The Treaty of 1707 was not the first attempt to unite England and Scotland. King Edward I of England tried to colonise Scotland in the 1290s. King Henry VIII embarked on another such venture, with his “rough wooing” of 1544-50.

Since the Union of Crowns in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland had succeeded to the throne of England, a single monarch had ruled the two nations, but this was not a sustainable situation, comparable with trying to ride two unruly horses at once.

The Union of Crowns made the Union of Parliaments almost inevitable. In 1650-51, Oliver Cromwell invaded and conquered Scotland, imposing a short-lived unified Commonwealth, with a single British Parliament. Scotland had benefited from the trading privileges this entailed, but the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the person of King Charles II in 1660 had swept all these aside, specifically by the Navigation Act of 1670.

The geographical proximity of England and Scotland made some sort of accommodation essential.

But English ministers showed little interest in a closer constitutional relationship with Scotland during most of the seventeenth century. Their position changed for dynastic reasons. Under the 1689 Bill of Rights, the line of succession to the English throne was limited to the descendants of Queen Mary II and her younger sister Anne, the (Protestant) daughters of the deposed (Catholic) King James II/VII.

Mary died childless, aged 32, in 1694, and her husband (and first cousin) William III, William of Orange, did not remarry. On his death in 1702, the throne passed to his sister-in-law Anne, whose last surviving child out of some nineteen pregnancies, William, Duke of Gloucester, had died aged eleven in 1700, leaving no direct heir.

The English Parliament favoured the (Protestant) Princess Sophia, Electress of Hanover and granddaughter to King James I/VI, and an Act of Settlement was passed to that effect in 1701. It laid down that, in the likely event of Queen Anne dying without surviving issue, the English throne would pass to the Electress Sophia and her (Protestant) descendants.

The 1701 Act of Settlement was extended to Scotland as part of the 1707 Treaty of Union. To this day, only Protestant heirs of Princess Sophia can succeed to the British throne. Neither Catholics, nor those who marry a Catholic, nor those born out of wedlock, may remain in the line of succession.

In the event, Sophia died just before Queen Anne, in 1714, and thus Sophia’s eldest son George succeeded as Elector of Hanover and as King George I of Great Britain, commencing the long “Georgian” era, which extended until the death of King George IV in 1830.

But the English feared that the Scots would prefer Anne’s half-brother, James Edward Stuart (1688-1766), the Roman Catholic son of King James II, in exile since the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689.

A major factor pushing England in the direction of Union was her heavy military involvement in Europe, specifically in the War of the Spanish Succession, from 1702 until 1713. England and the Habsburg Empire were allied against Louis XIV’s France, which at this time had a population of about 19 million compared with less than 5 million in England & Wales, and the military struggle between England and France continued, on-and-off, until Waterloo in 1815.

The English feared that the French could open a second front by inciting Jacobite rebellion, threatening England’s security on her northern frontier. Thus in 1702, Queen Anne assented to an Act of the English Parliament empowering her to appoint Commissioners to “treat” or negotiate for Union.

Otherwise, Scotland had little to offer England. The Scottish state was effectively bankrupt.

English ministers suspected that Scotland would be a financial liability; that the country would cost more to administer, police and defend than could be raised from it in tax revenues. And although England and Scotland were both Protestant countries, opposed in terms of religion to Catholic France, it was feared by English Tories that the more radical elements within Scottish Presbyterianism would have a destabilising effect on the (Episcopalian) Church of England, with its hierarchical structure of bishops and archbishops, appointed by the Monarch.

From a Scottish perspective, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun favoured “nearer union with our neighbours of England”, but in terms of a federal union in which Scotland and England would retain their own Parliaments. He feared the loss of sovereignty an incorporating union would involve.

The Scottish Parliament passed a succession of Acts deemed contrary to English interests, notably the Act anent (concerning) Peace and War

Scottish opinion turned against union in the period after 1689, mainly because of the Glencoe massacre in 1692 and the failure of the Darien scheme, for both of which King William III was held partly responsible. The abolition of the Lords of Articles in 1690 – formerly a means of royal influence in Scotland – transferred substantial powers to the Scottish Parliament, newly elected in 1703, which began to act with new-found vigour and confidence, adopting a position of aggressive constitutional nationalism.

The Scottish Parliament passed a succession of Acts deemed contrary to English interests, notably the Act anent (concerning) Peace and War, which laid down that no successor to Queen Anne should declare a war involving Scotland without first consulting the Scottish Parliament; also the Act of Security, which asserted that the Scottish Parliament, twenty days after Anne’s death, should name as her successor a Protestant member of the House of Stuart.

To England, it seemed that the prospects of Union were slipping away.

With her forces now locked into the War of the Spanish Succession, and unable to risk the withdrawal of Scottish regiments from the north European theatre of war, plus rumours that arms from France were on their way to Scotland, London took the view that the unruly Scots had to be brought to heel and made to discuss the twin issues of the Hanoverian succession and the Union of Parliaments.

This resulted in the formidable economic bludgeon of the Alien Act of March 1705, which proposed that, unless progress had been made on the twin issues by Christmas – specifically that unless Scotland had accepted the Hanoverian succession by Christmas Day 1705 – all of Scotland’s exports to England, being linen, wool, coal, cattle & sheep, would be embargoed or banned, and all Scots would be declared and treated as aliens.

– Next week, Alex Mitchell presents Part 2 of this 3 part account.

Round And About, February 2011

Aberdeen City, Articles, Community, Environment, Featured, Information No Responses »

Feb 182011

By Alex Mitchell.

A bright, sunny Thursday afternoon. Left the car at Union Square and walked through the main aisle. A fair number of mostly young people are walking briskly and purposefully to and fro rather than window-shopping or going into any of the shops, other than Apple. Out on to Guild Street. The Edwardian frontage of the Station Hotel (1901) looks well in the bright sun.

Across Guild Street and into the recently-designated ‘Merchant Quarter’ around the Green. This whole area, as around the triangular site of the Carmelite Hotel – Trinity Street, Carmelite Street & Lane, Stirling Street and Exchange Street – is characterised by narrow streets, alleys and wynds, small medieval plots and very tall buildings which shut out the sunlight. The overall effect is dark, congested and Gothic, a bit like the medieval Paris depicted in Dieterle’s film of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939).

There is also a marked absence of green space or trees. As part of The Green Townscape Heritage Initiative, ACC has laid down concrete rectangular enclosures for shrubs and trees, as in Carmelite Street and Rennie’s Wynd, but these will take time to establish themselves. The Green itself is in deep shade at 1.30 pm, with nobody much going about.

Out by Hadden Street, on to Market Street and along Trinity Lane to Shiprow. The huge City Wharf development, originally scheduled for completion in December 2009, was left unfinished when the Edinburgh-based developer, Kenmore, folded. The development is now owned by SI City Wharf Ltd, and what is striking is the lack of any apparent urgency to finish the job. Even the Ibis Hotel, which was relatively well advanced, remains as yet unfinished. The Harbour is full of oil vessels. Oil-related activity has surged now that the world price has reached $100 per barrel, comparing favourably with long-run extraction costs estimated at $30-50 per barrel.

Across Union Street and into Broad Street. Marischal College, newly restored, shines brightly in the sunshine, the single most iconic building in Aberdeen.

It is a pity the same treatment cannot be applied to the adjacent and contiguous Greyfriars Kirk.

The Church of Scotland wants £1.25 million for Greyfriars Kirk; but Aberdeen City Council estimate its value as being in the vicinity of zero, given that nobody else wants it and the building is full of dry rot.

Down Queen Street, once an elegant Georgian residential thoroughfare inhabited from 1791 by the young George Gordon Byron, later Lord Byron, and his temperamental mother, Catherine Gordon, heiress to Gight Castle. They later moved to Broad Street and young George attended the Grammar School, then at its original site on Schoolhill. Now Queen Street and Broad Street have no resident population at all.

Round by Aberdeen Arts Centre, in John Smith’s South Church of 1829 at the crossroads of King Street and North Street. Along East North Street towards the Castlehill roundabout. The new low-rent flats built around the old Timmer Market car park have been finished for some reason in a drab brown/black slate-like material. By contrast, the 1960s tower-block flats on Castlehill, viewed at a distance and in the full glare of the afternoon sun, achieve something like elegance and symmetry.

In by Justice Street to the Castlegate which is barely ticking over. Fifty-odd years ago, this was the city’s main bus/tram interchange. Alex ‘Cocky’ Hunter’s emporium and the Castlegate market were in full swing and the Sick Kids’ Hospital was round in Castle Terrace.

Up on to Castlehill itself by the one-time Futty Wynd. There remain long stretches of substantial granite wall from the C.18th Barracks and the earlier Cromwellian fortifications of the 1650s, and a circular indentation, as of a gun emplacement, overlooking the harbour. The Gordon Highlanders left the Barracks in the 1930s and these impressive Georgian buildings became a form of emergency housing until their demolition in the 1960s. There must still be people around now, between fifty and eighty years of age, who were brought up in that distinctly bleak and austere environment.

The odd thing now is that there must be hundreds of people living in the present blocks of flats, Marischal Court and Virginia Court – the equivalent of a large village – but at 2.30 on a sunny weekday afternoon there is nobody going about on Castlehill apart from a couple of Council workmen. Kids would still be at school at this time of day, but even so the entire vicinity is unnervingly silent and still and full of ghosts.

Down Marischal Street and along Regent Quay. The waters of the old natural harbour reached the foot of the Castle Hill at high tide, a line roughly corresponding to Virginia Street. The area between Virginia Street and the present harbour-front is the old Shorelands, a muddy inter-tidal zone once inhabited mainly by crabs, but reclaimed from the mid-C.18th and since occupied by Commerce Street, Mearns Street, James Street, Water Lane and the lower end of Marischal Street.

The view up Mearns Street is dominated by the shining tower of the Castlehill flats. Virginia Street used to be a narrow and meandering cobbled thoroughfare, but is nowadays yet another urban motorway, wider than it really needs to be and at the expense of much of the old toun. It is an unpleasant experience to walk the narrow footpath as between the Shore Porters’ building and the monster trucks charging straight into the permanent traffic gridlock of Guild Street and Market Street. Back along Shore Lane, across the foot of Marischal Street and past Theatre Lane – an almost subterranean link to Virginia Street and well worth exploring. But not today.

Contributed by Alex Mitchell.

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