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The Union of Crowns refers to the accession to the thrones of England and Ireland of King James VI of Scotland following the death of his unmarried and childless cousin, Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudors, in March 1603.

The term itself, though now generally accepted, is misleading; for properly speaking this was little more than a dynastic union, the crowns remaining distinct and separate, despite James' best efforts to create a new 'imperial' throne. The Union of 1603 was, in some respects at least, a little like the marriage of oil and water; and so it remained for well over a century. Similarly, its origins can be traced back a century prior to James' entry to London in 1603.

The Thistle and the Rose

In August 1503 James IV, the Scottish King, was married to Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VII, King of England, and the spirit of the new age was celebrated by the poet William Dunbar in The Thistle and the Rose.

The union was the outcome of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace, concluded the previous year, which, in theory at least, ended centuries of Anglo-Scottish rivalry. In many ways the most important political marriage in the history of the two realms, it brought the Stewarts into the English line of succession, however remote the possibility of a Scottish prince ascending the English throne seemed at the time. There were, however, many on the English side concerned by the dynastic implications of the match, including some on the Privy Council. In countering these fears Henry is reputed to have said;

...our realme wald receive na damage thair thorow, for in that caise Ingland wald not accress unto Scotland, bot Scotland wald acress unto Ingland, as to the most noble heid of the hole yle...evin as quhan Normandy came in the power of Inglis men our forbearis.

The peace did not last in 'perpetuity': it lasted for a mere ten years, wrecked by by a young king and an old alliance. In 1513 Henry VIII, who had succeeded his father six years before, went to war with France. In response France invoked the terms of the Auld Alliance, her ancient bond with Scotland. James duly invaded northern England to meet defeat and death at the Battle of Flodden.

In the decades that followed England's relations with Scotland were sometimes bad and other times worse. By the middle of Henry's reign the problems of the royal succession, which seemed so unimportant in 1503, acquired ever bigger dimensions, when the question of Tudor fertility – or the lack of it – entered directly into the political arena. The line of Margaret Tudor was specifically excluded from the English succession, though this was a question that simply refused to go away, especially when Elizabeth I became queen. Although the question of her marriage was raised time and again, it was first evaded and then forgotten with the march of time. In the last decade of her reign it was clear to all that James of Scotland, the great-grandson of James IV and Margaret Tudor, was the only generally acceptable heir. For most of his adult life James, fretful and impecunious, had dreamed of a southern throne. In 1603 the dream came true with the assistance of the dying queen's principal secretary, Sir Robert Cecil.

I Am The Head

Whatever residual fears many in England may have felt at the prospect of being ruled by a Scot, James' arrival was greated with enthusiasm and a mood of high expectation. The twilight years of Elizabeth had been a disappointment; and for a nation troubled for so many years by the question of succession, the new king was a family man who already had male heirs in the wing. But James' honeymoon was of very short duration; and his initial political actions were to do much to create the rather negative tone which was to turn a successful Scottish king into a disappointing English one. The greatest and most obvious of these was the question of his exact status and title. James intended to be king of Britain. His first obstacle along this imperial road was the attitude of the English Parliament.

In his first speech to his southern assembly in March 1603 James gave a clear statement of the royal manifesto;

What God hath conjoined let no man separate. I am the husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head and it is my body; I am the shepherd and it is my flock. I hope therefore that no man will think that I, a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the head should have a divided or monstrous body or that being the shepherd to so fair a flock should have my flock parted in two.

Parliament may very well have rejected polygamy; but the marriage, if marriage it was, between the realms of England and Scotland was to be at best morganatic. James' ambitions were greeted with very little enthusiasm, as one by one MPs rushed to defend the ancient name and realm of England. All sorts of legal objections were raised: all laws would have to be renewed and all treaties renegotiated. For James, whose experience of parliaments was limited to the stage-managed and semi-feudal Scottish variety, the self-assurance – and obduracy – of the English version, which had long experience of upsetting monarchs, was an obvious shock. He decided to side-step the whole issue by unilaterally assuming the title of King of Great Britain by a Proclamation concerning the Kings Majesties Stile on 20 October 1604 announcing that he did "assume to Our selfe by the cleerenesse of our Right, The Name and Stile of KING OF GREAT BRITTAINE, FRANCE, AND IRELAND, DEFENDER OF THE FAITH, &c." . This only deepened the offence. Even in Scotland there was little real enthusiasm for the project, though the two parliaments were eventually prodded into taking the whole matter 'under consideration'. Consider it they did for several years, never drawing the desired conclusion.

The First and Oldest Empire

In Scotland the incorporating union desired by James met with the same lack of zeal that it did in England, but for different reasons. Whatever pleasure there was in seeing a Scottish king succeeding to the crown of England, rather than the danger for centuries past of an English king seizing the crown of Scotland, there were early signs that many saw the risk of the 'lesser being drawn by the greater', as Henry VII once predicted. The obvious example before Scottish eyes was the case of Ireland, a kingdom in name, but – since 1601 – a subject nation in practice. John Russell, lawyer and writer, an initial enthusiast for 'the happie and blissed Unioun betuixt the tua ancienne realmes of Scotland and Ingland' was later to warn James:

Lett it not begyne vith ane comedie, and end in ane tragedie; to be ane verball unioun in disparitie nor reall in conformity...thairby, to advance the ane kingdome, to great honor and beccome forzetfull of the uther, sua to mak the samyn altogidder solitat and desoltat qhilk cannot stand vith your Majestie's honor. As god hes heichlie advanceit your Majestie lett Scotland qhilk is zour auldest impyir be partakeris of zour blissings.

These fears were echoed by the Scottish Parliament, learning from its English cousin that the King's word was not law after all. MPs, in much the same way as those in England, were telling the king that they were 'confident' that his plans for an incorporating union would not prejudice the ancient laws and liberties of Scotland; for any such hurt would mean that 'it culd no more be a frie monarchie.'

Scottish fears can scarcely have been allayed when the king, now aware of the depths of English hostility, attempted to reassure his new subjects that the new union would be much like that between England and Wales, and that if Scotland should refuse 'he would compell their assents, having a stronger party there than the opposite party of the mutineers'. In June 1604 the two national parliaments, with obvious lack of enthusiasm, passed acts appointing commissioners to explore the possibility of a 'a more perfect union'. One cannot but sympathise with these men whose remit was to achieve the impossible – a new state that would still preserve the laws, honours, dignities, offices and liberties of each of the component kingdoms. James, in a more sober and wiser mood, closed the final session of his first parliament with a rebuke to his opponents in the House of Commons – 'Here all things suspected...He merits to be buried in the bottom of the sea that shall but think of separation, where God had made such a Union.'

Beggarly Scots and English Monkeys

James, of course, was moving too quickly for both nations, attempting to conjure away centuries of mutual hostility virtually overnight. He scarcely improved his position as large numbers of impoverished Scottish aristocrats and other place seekers made their way to London, ready to compete for the very highest positions at the heart of government. Several years later Sir Anthony Weldon was to write that 'Scotland was too guid for those that inhabit it, and too bad for others to be at the charge of conquering it. The ayre might be wholesome, but for the stinking people that inhabit it...Thair beastis be generallie small (women excepted) of which sort there are no greater in the world.' But the most immediately wounding observation came in the comedy Eastward Ho, a collaboration between Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston. In enthusing over the good life to be had in the colony of Virginia it is observed;

And then you shal live freely there, without Sergeants, or Courtiers, or Lawyers, or Intelligencers – onely a few industrious Scots perhaps, who indeed are disperst over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends of Englishmen and England, when they are out an't, in the world, then they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of them were there, for wee are all one Countrymen now, yee know; and wee shoulde finde ten times more comfort of them there, then wee do here.

But the Scots were too happy to pay out these libels, with interest. The age-old French slander that the English had tails like monkeys was once again in circulation, joining many more original anti-English satires, so much so that in 1609 the king had an act passed, promising the direst penalties against the writers of 'pasquillis, libellis, rymis, cockalanis, comedies and sicklyk occasiones whereby they slander and maligne and revile the estait and countrey of England...'

Against this cultural and political background the gentlemen of the parliamentary commission had little real prospect of making any progress along the road to a close and intimate union. As early as October 1605, well before the commissioners reported, the Venetian ambassador noted 'the question of the Union will, I am assured, be dropped; for His Majesty is now well aware that nothing can be effected, both sides displaying such obstinacy that an accommodation is impossible; and so his Majesty is resolved to abandon the question for the present, in hope that time may consume the ill-humours.' It did, but over a far longer period than James can ever have imagined.

Citizens and Subjects

By 1606 James' dream of a British Crown was looking sickly. The Union Commission made some limited progress, but only by setting the big picture to one side, concentrating instead on the seemingly more manageable issues like hostile border laws, trade and citizenship. The borders were to become the 'middle shires', as if history could be side-stepped by semantics. But the issues of free trade proved highly contentious, threatening powerful economic interest groups, as did the issue of equal rights before the law. It was to be, in essence, the immigration debate of the day. Fears were openly expressed in Parliament that English jobs would be threatened by all the poor people of the realm of Scotland, who will 'draw near to the Sonn, and flocking hither in such Multitudes, that death and dearth is very probable to ensue.' The exact status of the Post-Nati, those born after the Union of March 1603, was never to be decided by Parliament. In the end the deadlock had to be broken by the courts in the case of Robert Calvin, a Post-Nati, which extended property rights to the Scots in English common law.

Symbols and Substance

In the end James never got his 'imperial crown', and of political necessity was obliged to accept the reality of polygamy. Denied the substance he played with the symbols, devising new coats of arms, a uniform coinage and the like. But the creation of a national flag proved just as contentious as a national crown. Various design were tried, that which proved acceptable to one side almost inevitably offended the other. James finally proclaimed the new Union Flag on 12 April 1606, but it was greeted without a great deal of enthusiasm, especially by the Scots, who saw a St. George's Cross superimposed on a St. Andrew's Saltire. For years afterwards vessels of both nations continued to fly their respective 'jacks', the royal proclamation notwithstanding. Ironically, the Union Jack only entered into common use under Cromwell's Protectorate.

British

James did not create a British Crown but he did, in one sense at least, create the British as a distinct group of people. In 1607 large tracts of land in Ulster fell to the crown. A new Plantation was started, made up of Protestant settlers from Scotland and England, mostly from the Border country (the "middle shires" between the Firth of Clyde and the Mersey Estuary), with a minority from Bristol and London. Over the years the settlers, surrounded by the hostile Catholic Irish, gradually cast off their separate English and Scottish roots, becoming British in the process, as a means of emphasising their 'otherness' from their Gaelic neighbours (Marshall, T., p. 31). It was the one corner of the United Kingdom where Britishness became truly meaningful as a political and cultural identity in its own right, as opposed to a gloss on older and deeper national associations.

Though, over time, Britishness also took some root in England and Scotland – especially in the days of Empire – by and large people were English or Scottish first, and British second. In Northern Ireland the Protestant communities were to be British first, second and last. It was James' most enduring – and troublesome – legacy.

A Perfect Union?

In many ways the problems of the dynastic union in the United Kingdom were little different from those engendered by similar experiments elsewhere in Europe: the case of Aragon and Castile springs to mind, as does the temporary union of Sweden and Poland. Unions of this kind can be made to work, but they take time to bed down. In the end the union of Scotland and England was to be successful but it was never a marriage of equals. James promised that he would return to his ancient kingdom every three years. In the end he came back only one time – in 1617 – and even then his English councillors pleaded with him to remain in London. Scotland, up to the full parliamentary Union of 1707, may have retained its institutional independence, but it lost control of vital areas of policy, most notably foreign relations, which remained the prerogative of the crown. This meant, in practice, that policy matters were inevitably tied to an English rather than a British interest. A case in point was the Dutch Wars of Charles II, which took Scotland to war with its strongest trading partner, though no Scottish interest was served and none threatened. James' imperial crown over time diminished in size and scope, so much so that in 1616 he was to admit openly in the Star Chamber that his intention 'was always to effect union by uniting Scotland to England, and not England to Scotland.' Years later Queen Anne, the first true British monarch, was to describe the Scots as 'a strange people' and told her first parliament that she knew her heart 'to be entirely English.' It was to be George III – a scion of the German House of Hanover – who recaptured something of the old spirit of King James of 1603 when he declared his pride 'in the name of Briton.'

References

• Brown, K., The Vanishing Emperor: British Kingship and its Decline, 1603-1707, in Scots and Britons, ed R. A. Mason, 1994.
• Ferguson, W., Scotland's Relations with England: a Survey to 1707, 1977.
• Galloway, Bruce, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603-1608, 1986.
• Lee, M.,ed. The 'Inevitable' Union and Other Essays on Early Modern Scotland, 2003.
• Marshall, T., United We Stand?, in BBC History magazine, July 2005
• Mason, R. A., Scotland and England, 1286-1815, 1987.
• Stewart, A., The Cradle King. A Life of King James VI and I, 2003.
• Wormald, J., The Union of 1603, in Scots and Britons, op cit.

1. Proclamation styling James I King of Great Britain on 20 October 1604

External links

• Union of the Crowns 300th anniversary educational website
• Ulster-Scots Agency: 1603 – The Union of the Crowns (.doc format)

• British monarchy
• History of Great Britain