This book brings together in a fruitful way two historiographical strands long associated with the seventeenth century: the relationship between the Stuart dynasty's British kingdoms, and the role of the armed forces in the formation of a British state. It presents a convincing account of the Royal Navy's importance for setting the two British kingdoms on a path toward political union. Under the Stuarts, the navy was, Helling argues, both an institution through which it became possible for Scottish elites to think about national security as a multi-national project, and a force that propelled the two kingdoms toward forming one sovereign state.
Helling points out that, between 1603 and 1707, the navy was the only institution, save for the monarchy, with an accepted role in both British kingdoms. Yet the navy was not a shared institution in the sense that its soul (leadership) and body (dockyard infrastructure) remained based in England. Nor was the navy an integrative institution during the period. Instead, its importance for the union lay in its effect on the thinking of key political players in England and Scotland, albeit in different ways and with contrasting intensity depending on the security situation. Naval security, Helling contends, was pulled into the “British sphere” (PAGE) as an instrument of a monarchy shared by the two kingdoms. Over the course of seventeenth century, but especially after the Revolution of 1688, the navy gained broad support as an instrument by which security objectives shared by English and Scottish political elites could be attained.
Helling concludes that the navy was a strong and critical unionist force but did not itself make the union. Naval affairs made the perpetuation of some kind of political unification inevitable, and the navy became what he calls an indispensable part of the architecture of the union that did emerge in 1707. Drawing on the same metaphor, Helling suggests that a naval union of the kingdoms was practically unavoidable given the common security architecture of the shared island. Thus, unlike some recent social constructivist approaches to the maritime history of early modern Britain, Helling's is not averse to a more realist linking of maritime geography with historical developments.
The Navy and Anglo-Scottish Union develops these arguments with a chronologically organized analytical narrative divided into three parts. The first, entitled “Aspiration,” deals with the period from James VI's accession to the English (and Irish) throne to the coerced incorporation of Scotland into the first unitary British polity. Here he shows that both King James and King Charles saw the Royal Navy as a tool for promoting a British interest in the near seas. The pursuit of control over these British seas had, Helling suggests, obvious unionizing aspects, but bringing the ambition to fruition highlighted the absence of what he calls British thinking in both realms. For example, Charles I wanted a single unified navy to defend his sovereignty around the British Isles but directed his efforts exclusively toward the Channel. This section of the book also has a helpful discussion of the influence of naval thinking on the calculations of the Scottish Covenanters. Naval defense rose to a central place in the Covenanters’ political consciousness during their negotiations with Parliamentarians, but the Scots’ preference for talking about naval security in lieu of investing in ships and dockyards helped institutionalize their maritime vulnerability.
The second section, called “Integration,” concerns the Restoration period, which Helling characterizes as the high point of the regally unified Royal Navy. As a result of the Second Dutch war, Scottish policy makers came to expect that their country's naval affairs would be handled by an English armed service acting as a British naval force. This expectation was disappointed with the severing of the personal union of the English and Scottish Admiralties once James II and VII lost his thrones. The book's third section, appropriately labelled “Disruption,” traces the consequences of the strained interactions between Scottish policy makers and William III's war aims. The king's decision to enforce an embargo on French trade in Scottish waters, which was not welcomed by all, did not represent a clash of national interests so much as the reality that the northern kingdom's politicians were not in a position to shape their senior coalition-partner's war policy. This context helps explain the emergence during the 1690s of a small Scottish naval squadron, understood as an expression of national sovereignty. This would be the last such outburst at the maritime level. For, as Helling concludes, any provision for Scotland's maritime security during the Stuart era relied on either English self-interest happening to be in alignment with the Scots’, or, more often, the interest of the monarch overriding the default English indifference.
The Navy and Anglo-Scottish Union offers a refreshingly broad and clear naval history of the Stuart century, mostly from the perspective of Holyrood. This is understandable since it was Scottish elites who over the years came to love the Royal Navy more and more, despite their irritation with some aspects of William III's naval policy. Helling cleverly describes the relationship between the two realms over naval affairs as a marriage of convenience, one in which the dominant spouse often failed to acknowledge the fact of the bond. But at least a marriage implies a degree of consent between two parties. Germany, famously shattered by foreign and native armies during the Thirty Years war, was eventually unified by nineteenth-century Prussia's preeminent military forces. Helling's book, like the best comparative histories, should prompt scholars to re-visit with new insights an earlier attempt at historical comparison, in this case Otto Hintze's path-breaking discussion of the relationship between the nature of national armed forces and the constitutional histories of Western European nations over the early modern and modern eras (Otto Hintze, “Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung,” in Staat und Verfassung [1906/1970]). It also serves as another helpful reminder of importance of the Royal Navy to Britain's early modern Sonderweg.
