The uneasy relationship between England and Scotland stretched back for centuries. By the end of the eleventh century, after the Norman Conquest, Scotland’s territory looked very similar to how it does today, but the Scottish kings still hankered after expansion into Northumbria and Cumbria. The line of the border – from the Solway Firth in the west to the mouth of the Tweed in the east – was not actually finally settled until the Treaty of York in 1237 between the Scottish King, Alexander II, and Henry III. At the end of the thirteenth century civil war in Scotland played into the hands of the English monarchy. Edward I agreed to support John Balliol’s claim to the throne in return for being acknowledged as Scotland’s overlord, but Balliol lost control of the situation and his barons formed a council which signed an alliance with the French. Edward defeated the Scots at Dunbar in 1296 and suppressed the uprising of William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298 – although not before Wallace’s band of rebels had shocked the English by winning a surprising victory at Stirling the year before.
England’s control of Scotland was not tolerated for long. In 1314 Robert the Bruce won a devastating victory over Edward II at the Battle of Bannockburn: 6,000 Scotsmen massacred an English army of 15,000 men. Robert the Bruce was declared King of Scotland by the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320 – as proud and defiant a defence of liberty as any in British history: ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive, we shall never on any conditions be subjected to English rule. It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we fight, but for freedom alone, which no honest man gives up except with his life.’ England acknowledged Robert the Bruce’s sovereignty in the Treaty of Edinburgh of 1328, by which time the boy king, Edward III, had succeeded to the English throne.
The two countries were not destined to be friends. At the centre of their hostility was Scotland’s relationship with England’s historic rival, France. ‘The Auld Alliance’ led the Scots to invade England on more than one occasion – most disastrously in 1513. The Scottish king, James IV, believing the English army to be preoccupied with Henry VIII’s expedition against the French, marched across the border and was killed with many of his nobles at the Battle of Flodden Field. Scotland, constantly beset by internal warfare and always under threat from its more powerful southern neighbour, struggled after the reign of Robert the Bruce to build itself into a significant independent power.
Its moment came when the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I, died without leaving an heir. The main political aim of James VI of Scotland was to make sure he succeeded to the throne of England in 1603. In achieving this he gave Scotland position and prestige, as well as an opportunity for its nobility to get its hands on the more affluent lifestyle which London offered. It seemed as though the quarrelsome difficulties of the past might finally disappear as the new King attempted to create a new, integrated country – Great Britain. In this he and his successors throughout the seventeenth century were unsuccessful. Scottish hostility and rivalry continued and, inevitably, worsened during the period of the Civil War when the two countries divided not along national, but on religious lines. Scottish Calvinists were the natural allies of English Puritans, while the Catholic Royalists of the Scottish Highlands remained on the whole loyal to their Stuart king. In the end hard political reality drove the two countries together. England could not afford to let Scotland go its own way again, and used its greater muscle to coerce the Scots into full union.
Scotland had judged survival more important than sovereignty, and cut a deal.
When in 1702, James II’s younger daughter, Anne, became Queen of England, it was quite clear that she was not going to produce an heir. Four of her children had died in infancy – only a son had lived until he was eleven – and she had suffered several miscarriages. Securing her succession became the most important domestic political issue of her reign. The British government wanted the Protestant Hanoverians to take over the throne, but the country’s powerful enemy, Louis XIV of France, had sheltered the exiled Stuart king, James II, and was now harbouring his son. Scotland was the Stuarts’ power base: it could not be allowed to make its own arrangements for royal succession. The Scottish Parliament was pushed into acquiescence. Weakened by famine and the disastrous Darien expedition, the shame of the inevitable sweetened a little by the odd judicious bribe to members of the Scottish nobility, it agreed to abolish its institution of 157 seats in return for forty-five places in the Westminster House of Commons and sixteen elected peers. The act proclaimed that there would be ‘one United Kingdom by the name of Great Britain’. The nation’s one ruler would be Protestant: it had one legislature and one system of free trade. Scotland’s losses incurred in its colonial adventure were repaid; the Scottish Kirk kept its independence; and the two country’s systems of law and education remained separate. Scotland had judged survival more important than sovereignty, and cut a deal.
If Scotland had failed to build an empire of its own, it more than made up for this disappointment in the years following the Act of Union. The Scottish contribution to the growth of the British Empire was immense. The East India Company, the engine of Britain’s worldwide growth, was full of Scots. In 1731, John Drummond, a director of the company, reported that ‘all the East India Company ships have either Scots Surgeons or Surgeon’s mates’. A hundred and thirty years later the Liberal politician, Sir Charles Dilke, who travelled throughout the Empire, wrote that ‘for every Englishman that you meet who has worked himself up from small beginnings, without external aid, you find ten Scotchmen’. Half of the first six governors of New South Wales were Scottish. Scots dominated the China trade: they owned and ran many of the prosperous merchant houses of Canada, India and the Far East. Scotland may have assimilated its new opportunities with gusto, but for some this exciting commercial expansion came at a price. The nineteenth century adoption of all things Scottish, thanks in large part to the enormous success of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, brought about an image of Scotland which was criticised in some quarters for being unreal and romantic. In particular Scott helped introduce the wearing of the tartan to Lowland Scotland, of which it had never been part, and his stories, often adapted into melodramatic operas by Italian composers like Rossini and Donizetti, only served to reinforce an image of Scotland as a medieval tableau of long-dead heroics. While the Scottish people blazed a trail of enterprise abroad, or worked and suffered in the grinding difficulties of the Industrial Revolution, the world was fed a picture of Scottishness far removed from reality. Perhaps: but perhaps, too, Sir Walter Scott was just another example of Scottish skill and ingenuity, one of the world’s first examples of an international best-selling novelist, many of whose books remain classics of the English language.
The Act of Union combined Scotland’s future with England’s but it could not subdue its aspirations for a separate identity. In 1745 the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart, landed in the Hebrides, raised his standard in the Highlands, defeated a British army at Prestonpans east of Edinburgh and was halfway to London before England roused itself to confront him. ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ was confident that he could win back his family’s throne, but his military advisors, worried that his army would find itself isolated in the south of England, persuaded him to turn back to Scotland. The support in the countryside was far less than they hoped and the French fleet they expected had failed to materialise. The Scots rebels were pursued by the King’s son, the Duke of Cumberland. He caught up with them at Culloden in 1746 and cut them to pieces with frightening savagery. He returned to London to rapturous renditions of the popular song ‘God Save The Queen’. Bonnie Prince Charlie escaped to Europe disguised as an Irish maid, for a life of heavy drinking and ever-changing female companionship.
The post of Scottish Secretary was abolished after the rebellion of 1745 and responsibility for managing Scotland’s affairs was given to the Lord Advocate, the King’s advisor on Scottish matters. In the early nineteenth century it was passed to the Home Office, but in 1885 the post of Secretary of State for Scotland was created. Its powers were increased considerably in 1926, but pressure for greater devolution continued. In 1979 proposals to establish a Scottish Assembly were put to referendum in Scotland, but failed to win sufficient support. In 1995 the Scottish Constitutional Convention, which had been set up a few years before, finally brought forward proposals which, this time supported by a referendum, led to the creation of a separate Scottish parliament in 1999. Similar devolved powers were granted to assemblies in Wales and, ultimately, in Northern Ireland as well. The