Scotland’s miraculous century (it started with the Union)

In 1707 Scotland surrendered what it had of its independence by the Treaty of Union with England. That independence had been limited since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, and arguably for at least half a century before that. But the treaty was, as Lord Seafield, Chancellor of Scotland, said ‘the end of an auld song’. It was unpopular in Scotland, popular in England because, in the middle of a war with France, it secured the Protestant succession to the throne and meant that the new kingdom of Great Britain no longer had an internal frontier to defend.

Nevertheless, it would be 40 years before domestic peace and security were assured. In that time there were three Jacobite risings — attempts to restore the exiled Stuart kings. The continuing unpopularity of the Union meant that all these insurrections had some support in Scotland, and the last and most improbable of them, in 1745, seriously shook the stability of the Hanoverian throne.