7 - Securing the Union and the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland, 1707–37

Summary

The Hanoverian Succession did not have a uniform British impact. From an Anglocentric perspective, it consolidated the bipartisan Revolution of 1688–89 that was reaffirmed by the extension of the English state to include Scotland in 1707. The immediate impact of the Hanoverian Succession was to promote the Whig supremacy in Britain and Empire, albeit this was not fully secured until the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1715–16. From a Scottish perspective, the Revolution of 1689–91 was an exclusive Whig achievement, uncompromised by any accommodation with the Tories. James VII was deposed in Scotland, whereas he was deemed, as James II, to have abdicated in England. Certainly, Whig interests at the Revolution in Scotland spilled over into the Union of 1707. However, there was no predetermined path from Revolution to Union. The English parliament rejected union with Scotland in 1689 and again in 1703, as also with Ireland in 1703, 1707 and 1709. The Irish parliament was subordinated to the British by the Declaratory Act of 1720.

Union with Scotland was driven on from 1705 by the English ministry. In part, this was because of the perceived threat of invasion from France through Scotland in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession. More pertinent were issues of political economy. The English state, during first the Nine Years War of 1688–97 and, subsequently, during the War of the Spanish Succession, had become increasingly disconcerted by the rogue behaviour of Scottish commercial networks as major interlopers in the colonial trade to the Americas. These networks circumvented the English Navigation Acts through tramptrading, a practice the Scots had exported from the Baltic to the Caribbean, through counterfeiting of shipping documentation and through the judicial packing of colonial courts, particularly in the Delaware. Networks operated not only from Scottish and colonial ports but through commercial hubs based in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Hamburg as well as London. The Union was specifically designed to bring these networks under control.

The Union did not close the door to foreign backing for Scottish Jacobitism which was offered variously from France, Spain, Sweden, Russia and the papacy before and after the Hanoverian Succession.