Chapter 3 - Scotland in Britain

Summary

After sketching the gradual unification of Scotland as a kingdom in the mediaeval period, this chapter looks at Scotland’s entry into Great Britain with the Union of Crowns in 1603. The Scottish king, James I & VI, was an important engineer of the British union, although throughout the succeeding Stuart era during the rest of the seventeenth century confessional tensions, especially surrounding prelacy and Presbyterianism, remain rife. Such tensions are reflected in Scottish literature and continue with added conflictual pinch-points following the Union of Parliaments (1707) and the Jacobite rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century. Debates about improvement, primitivism and the nature of Britishness endure in Scottish literature from that time until the present. From the Victorian era, Scottish culture can be read as subsumed within Britishness, and yet from the twentieth century new patriotic Scottish agendas, including political nationalism, sought a renewed distinctiveness for Scotland, reflected often in literary debates.