This Woman Joined Scotland and England. Should Her Work Be Undone?

August is the tercentenary of Queen Anne’s death, so it is a good time to remember her most significant political accomplishment: the Act of Union of 1707. The pending September referendum on Scottish independence may well overturn this Union. As the religious, tribal, and economic passions awakened by the impending vote are not unlike those surrounding the original Union, it may be useful now to remember Anne’s motives and strategies in seeking to unite her kingdoms.

During the fierce debates over the Union, Anne’s Scottish physician, Dr. John Arbuthnot, described her as “a gracious Queen of the Ancient Line of our own Monarchs,” who “desires nothing more than that the People from whom she derives her Blood, should enjoy the same Liberty and Plenty with others whom Providence has called Her to Govern.” As Arbuthnot was reminding his fellow Scots, Anne was a Stuart, and thus a descendant of the Scottish royal family. Her great-grandfather, James VI of Scotland, had begun the process of union by outflanking his rivals and claiming the English throne left empty by the death of the “virgin Queen” Elizabeth in 1603. The male Stuart monarchs—James I, Charles I, Charles II, and James II—were all determined to impose the hierarchical organization of the Church of England, with its powerful archbishops and bishops, upon the established Church of Scotland, which was Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in government, with elders elected by each congregation and General Assembly voting policies for the whole church.

Anne, by contrast, though a committed and pious Anglican, consistently showed respect for the Scottish Church and its democratic traditions, and thus succeeded where the others had failed. Although the English monarchy no longer wields real power, and issues of Church government no longer loom large in public debate, some of the resentment of England that fuels the current passion for independence reflects the long, stubborn tradition of Scottish democracy, bred in the congregations of the Kirk.

From 1681–82, at the age of sixteen, Princess Anne spent ten months in Edinburgh, where her father was serving as Lord Lieutenant; she enjoyed horseback riding, country dances, and acting in an all-female production of a tragic drama. Her success in persuading the political leadership of both nations to agree to the Union probably owed something to this personal experience in her northern kingdom. In her first speech to the English Parliament in 1702, the new queen said that her heart was “entirely English,” a phrase widely understood as an implicit criticism of her Dutch-born predecessor William III, but in the very same speech, she reminded Parliament that William had recommended union with Scotland on his deathbed. The issue was urgent because of the troubled succession. Anne’s only child to survive infancy, the little Duke of Gloucester, had died at eleven in 1700, and there was a real danger that the Scottish Parliament, which had the right to name the next ruler of Scotland, might choose James Frances Edward, her Catholic half-brother, whose birth had precipitated the Revolution of 1688. Many in England, including Anne’s friend Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, thought that the immediate problem could be solved by forcing the Scots to accept the Hanoverian succession that had been law in England since 1701, but Anne recognized the importance of seeking a long-term Union rather than a short-term concession: begging her friend’s “pardon for differing with her in that matter as to the succession,” she pointed out that “if the union can ever be compassed, there would be no occasion of naming a successor, for then we should be one people.”

In seeking to make the English and the Scots “one people,” Anne was giving a political imprimatur to an ethnic and social reality. Scots were already prominent in all aspects of English life. Citizens of the two nations had fought side by side in William’s continental campaigns, and were doing so again in Anne’s more successful war against France. Intermarriage was common, and neither nation could claim tribal purity. In 1700, attacking a racial definition of nationality, Daniel Defoe had pointed out that the population of Britain was a mixture of tribal strains from various parts of the world: “That Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman,” he wrote, was

In eager Rapes, and furious Lust begot,

Betwixt a Painted Britton and a Scot:

Whose gend’ring Offspring quickly learnt to bow,

And yoke their Heifers to the Roman Plough.

Anne would not have approved of Defoe’s vulgar imagery, but she recognized the fundamental truth of his argument. The current attempt to stir up Scottish nationalism on racial grounds ignores how much the two nations have become one people; as Simon Schama recently noted, “five of the UK’s 13 postwar prime ministers are Scots or from Scottish families, including Mr Cameron.”

Economics, which appears to be central to the current debate, was also an important consideration in the original Union. Despite their antagonism toward England, eighteenth-century Scots recognized that an Act of Union might finally give their impoverished country a larger share of the lucrative foreign trade enjoyed by their southern neighbors. When commissioners appointed to discuss a scheme for uniting England and Scotland met during the winter of 1702–1703, the Scots agreed to merge the two parliaments, a concession that seemed likely to guarantee a Protestant succession and a single monarch, while the English—even more remarkably—agreed to grant their northern neighbors full access to their own markets. The problems came when the Scots asked for access to colonial trade, at which point the English commissioners began staying away from the meetings, which could not proceed without a quorum. Still hoping to move the negotiations forward, Anne redrafted the rules, reducing the number of men required on each side from thirteen to seven, but a solution remained elusive. On 3 February 1703, the queen adjourned the commission. The huge elephant folio that was to record the minutes of the meetings seeking Union has just fifty-two of its pages filled in; hundreds more are blank.

A lesser monarch might have been discouraged by this failure, and by an act passed by the Scottish Parliament in 1704 that stipulated that any future monarch would not have the power to make war without the consent of a future Scottish Parliament. Yet Anne persisted, aided by some tough trade sanctions designed to bring the Scots to the negotiating table—and by the Duke of Marlborough’s impressive victories in Europe, which offered the promise of an expanding Empire. When new commissioners met in 1706, the Queen again took a personal role, visiting with them several times to urge them onward, and when the Scots gained economic access to what would become the British Empire, an agreement was in sight. Despite determined opposition, the Union passed both Parliaments.

There have, of course, been threats to its continuance: there was a dust-up over the malt tax in 1713 that led to a motion in the Lords to dissolve the Union, which failed by only four votes. More famously, there was the rebellion of 1745, led by Scots supporting Anne’s nephew “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” which terrified the English before being brutally snuffed out at Culloden. But Anne’s vision of a united nation has been a reality for over three hundred years: the democratic habits of mind spawned by the Scottish Kirk remain intact and have had a salutary influence on English politics; the hybrid vigor of British society, strengthened by the original Union, now extends to include thousands of citizens from the nations once part of the Empire; and the economic engine of Great Britain, driven not only by a single currency but by the easy movement of talent and ideas across the Tweed, continues to function.

As the celebrations of the Union began in the spring of 1707, one thoughtful poet described the joining of Anne’s kingdoms as a substitute for the child she could not have:

May You to many happy Years arrive,

To see your Britain by this Union thrive.

And if an Off-spring Heav’n should You deny,

Be this your Child, and Royal Progeny.

As an American of Scottish ancestry, I am hopeful that Scottish voters will see the wisdom of preserving her offspring.