The end of an ancient kingdom
On 1 May 1707, the Acts of Union came into force, merging the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England into the new Kingdom of Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament, which had sat in Edinburgh since the late thirteenth century, was dissolved. The members rode home, many of them deeply uneasy about what they had done. The Earl of Seafield, the Lord Chancellor, reportedly remarked as he signed the treaty: "Now there's an end of an auld sang."
The road to union had been tortuous. Scotland was financially broken after the catastrophic Darien Scheme — an attempt to establish a trading colony on the mosquito-ridden isthmus of Panama that consumed perhaps a quarter of the nation's liquid wealth. Thousands of investors, from lairds to widows, were ruined. England, which had actively sabotaged the venture, now offered compensation and access to its vast colonial trading networks. The price was Scotland's independence.
The Scottish people were overwhelmingly opposed. Anti-union riots erupted in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dumfries. Petitions poured into Parliament. The Duke of Hamilton, who might have led the opposition, repeatedly failed to act at critical moments — some suspected he had been bought. Daniel Defoe, working as an English agent in Edinburgh, reported that for every Scot who supported the union, ninety-nine were against it. Robert Burns would later distil the popular fury: "We're bought and sold for English gold — such a parcel of rogues in a nation."
Yet the union endured. Scotland kept its own legal system, its own church, and its own education system — three pillars of national identity that survived nearly three centuries of shared governance. The economic benefits that the union's supporters had promised were painfully slow to arrive, but by the late eighteenth century, Scotland was thriving within the British framework. The Scottish Enlightenment, the industrial revolution on the Clyde, and the global reach of the British Empire all unfolded within the union. Whether Scotland gained more than it lost remains the most debated question in Scottish history — a question that brought the nation to the brink of independence again in 2014.