The Union of the Crowns refers to the accession of Jacques VI, King d' Écosse, with the throne of England, thus joining together these two countries under only one monarch, following the death of his/her cousin, single person and without child, Elisabeth Ire, last monarch of the dynasty Tudor.
This expression itself, although generally accepted, is ambiguity, because it was not, strictly speaking, a personal union, nor a dynastic union, since the Crowns remained distinct and separate, in spite of the efforts of Jacques Ier to create a new imperial throne of Great Britain. The England and the Scotland, although dividing the same monarch, remained independent states, until the Acte of Union of 1707, concluded during the reign from the last monarch of the Dynastie Stuart, Anne Ire of Great Britain.
The Thistle and the Rose
In August 1503, Jacques IV of Scotland married Marguerite Tudor, oldest daughter of Henri VII of England, and the spirit of a new time was celebrated by the poet William Dunbar in the Thistle and the pink .This marriage was the consequence of the perpetual Peace treaty, concluded the previous year, which, in theory at least, put an end to centuries of anglo-Scottish competition. With many regards, it was the most important political marriage of the history of the two kingdoms, because it linked the Stuarts and the English dynasty of the Tudors. Although at the time, the accession of a Scottish prince to the English throne seemed far from probable, there was however English side much of people worry about the dynastic implications of the marriage, some pertaining to the private Conseil. To push back their fears, Henry VII is famous to have said:
… our kingdom would not suffer any damage there, because in this case England would not melt itself in Scotland, but it would be Scotland which would melt itself in England, because of the noblest lords of all the island… just like when Normandy came to the capacity from the English, our ancêtres.
Peace was not perpetual: it did not last more than one ten years, broken by a young king and an old alliance. In 1513, Henry VIII, king d' Angleterre and of Ireland, which had succeeded his/her father six years earlier, left in war against the France, which retorted by calling upon the terms of the Auld Alliance, an old military alliance signed between Scotland, the Norway and France. Jacques IV of Scotland invades the north of England consequently, to be made beat and kill with the Bataille of Flodden Field.
During the decades which followed, the anglo-Scottish relations were sometimes bad, and sometimes worse. In the middle of the reign of Henry VIII, the problems of the royal succession, which seemed so unimportant in 1503, took great proportions, when the question of the fertility of Tudors - or rather of their lack of fertility - entered the political arena. The line of Marguerite Tudor was explicitly isolated English succession. But this question, which appeared definitively distinct, refused to be dissipated, especially when Elisabeth Ire became queen. Although the question of its marriage was raised many and many times, it first of all was eluded, then forgotten with time. During the last decade of the reign of the “virgin queen”, it became clear with all that Jacques, king of Scots, grandson of Jacques IV and Marguerite Tudor, was the only acceptable heir. During most of his life of adult, Jacques, gloomy and impecunious, dreamed of a southernmost throne.
I am the head
As from 1601, during the last years of the life of Elisabeth Anger, certain English politicians, in particular his principal minister, Robert Cecil, 1st count de Salisbury, maintained a secret correspondence with Jacques VI in order to prepares the succession carefully. Cecil advised in Jacques VI not to insist on the question of the succession with the queen, but contrary to treating it simply, with kindness and respect. This approach was effective. Elisabeth wrote in Jacques: “I hope that you will not doubt that your last letters are received in so pleasant way which my thanks can be to you given only in grateful manner. ”. In March 1603, as the queen was obviously dying, Cecil sent to Jacques VI an outline of proclamation of her accession to the throne of England. The strategic fortresses were put in alarm, and London placed under monitoring. Elisabeth died in the first hours of March 24th, and, in the eight hours, Jacques VI was proclaimed king in London. This news was accommodated without protest, and disorders.April 5th, 1603, Jacques left Edinburgh for London, promising to return every three years there, a promise which was never held, and it advanced slowly, of city downtown, in order to arrive in the capital after the funeral of Elisabeth. Along the course, the local lords accepted Jacques with ostentation, and its new subjects bound to see it, relieved over very that the succession had not started disorders nor of invasion. When it entered London, it was attacked. An observer reported that crowd was so tall “that it covered the beauty of the fields, and that people were so avid to see the king whom they were wounded the ones the others. The English crowning of Jacques VI of Scotland, becoming Jacques Ier of England, took place on July 11th, and was decorated sophisticated allegories worked out by authors of theater, like Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson, although the festivities dussent being limited because of the appearance of the Peste. Nevertheless, any London was present for the occasion: “The streets appeared paved with men” writes Dekker. “The stalls, instead of exposing rich person goods, were charged children, and the women tightened themselves by the open windows.
Whatever were residual fears that some, in England, could test with the idea to be governed by a Scot, the arrival of Jacques woke up great hopes. The last years of Elisabeth had been disappointing, and, it was a relief, for a nation disturbed since as well years by the question of the succession, as the new king was an household head who had already several male heirs under his wing. But its state of grace was of short duration, and its first political initiatives were for much in the creation of a negative tonality which transformed a happy Scottish king into a disappointing English king. Undoubtedly the most important thing and most foreseeable was the question of its statute and its exact title. Jacques intended to be the king of Great Britain and Ireland. The first obstacle on this road was the English Parlement.
In March 1603, at the time of its first speech before the English assembly, Jacques gave a clear declaration of royal proclamation:
What God linked, no man can separate it. I am the husband and the whole island is my legitimate wife. I am the head, and it is the body. I am the shepherd, and it is my herd. Consequently, I hope that nobody will think that me, Christian king in front of the Gospel, I could be polygamous, a husband with two women; that, me the head, I should have a divided or monstrous body, or that being the shepherd, I should have my herd divided in deux.
The Parliament could have rejected polygamy very well; but the marriage, if marriage there were, between the kingdoms of England and Scotland was to be as well as possible morganatic. The ambitions of Jacques were accommodated with very little enthusiasm, since one by members of the Parliament precipitated to defend old the name and kingdom of England. All kinds of legal objections were advanced: all the laws should be re-examined and all the renegotiated treaties. For Jacques, whose experiment were limited to the Scottish of the Parliament, framed and semi-feudal variety, the balance - and even obstinacy - english language version, which had a long practice to oppose the monarchs, was a manifest shock. It decided as a whole to dodge the problem by allotting in a unilateral way the title of king of Great Britain by a Proclamation relating to the name of Its Majesty the King on October 20th, 1604, announcing that it assumed “thanks to the clearness of my right the name and name of King de Grande-Bretagne, France and Ireland, defender of the faith etc”. That did nothing but worsen dissatisfaction. Even in Scotland, there was hardly real enthusiasm for this project, although the two Parliaments were finally thorough to take into account this subject. Admittedly, they consider it during several years, but never they did not arrive at the desired conclusion.
The first and oldest Empire
In Scotland, the fusion wished by Jacques Ier met the same lack of zeal as in England, but for other reasons. Whatever was the pleasure of seeing a Scottish king succeeding the Crown of England, after the secular danger to see an English king seizing that of Scotland, there were very early signs showing that several people apprehended the risk that “smallest was with the trailer of largest”, like had predicted Henri VII. A obvious example with the eyes of the Scot was the fate of the Royaume of Ireland, a kingdom of name, but in practice, since 1601, a prone nation. John Russell, man of law and writer, enthusiastic of the first hours of “a Union happy and crowned between the two old kingdoms of England and Scotland”, warned Jacques then:Let us not start with a comedy, to finish by a tragedy; to be in a disparate union, without real equality, and thus to make progress a kingdom to gain honors, and to neglect the other, creating there at the same time the vacuum and desolation, that would not be appropriate for the honor of Your Majesty. Since God made largely advance Your Majesty, that Scotland, which is your first and older Empire, remains a share of your grâce.
These fears were taken again by the Parlement of Scotland, learning from his/her English cousin that the word of the king did not constitute a law after all. Members of the Parliament, in the same way that those of England, said to the king who they were “trustful” that its plans of fusion of the kingdoms would not carry damage to the old laws and freedoms of Scotland, because such wrongs would mean that “it would not be any more one free monarchy”.
The Scottish fears could hardly calm down when the king, conscious maintaining intensity of the English hostility, tried to reassure his new subjects in their saying that the new union would resemble much more that which existed between England and the Wales, and which, if Scotland refused, “it would force them to accept, having here a party stronger than the opposite party of the mutineers”. In June 1604, the two Parliaments, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm, laws naming of the police chiefs charged voted to explore the possibility of a “more perfect union”. One can only have compassion for these men, whose attributions were to achieve the impossible one - a new state which would preserve despite everything the laws, the honors, dignities, the loads and freedoms of each of the two kingdoms. Jacques Ier, of a more moderate and wiser mood, enclosed the final session of its first Parliament by a reproach with his opponents of the House of Commons: “That it is buried with deepest seas, that which would think only of separation, where God carried out such a Union”.
English poor wretches Scot and monkeys
Of course, Jacques Ier wanted to make move the things too quickly, trying to make disappear almost from the day at the following day an old mutual hostility several centuries. He hardly improved his position when a great Scottish number of impoverished aristocrats and others with the looking for a job went to London, ready to compete to obtain the very high places within the government. Several years later, Sir Anthony Weldon wrote that “Scotland was too good for those which lived it, and too bad for those which had the responsibility to conquer it of. The air was to be healthy there, but only for the stinking beings which lived there. Their animals, of which there was not in the world of more many species, were generally small (their excluded wives)”. But the observation most directly wounding came from the comedy Eastward Ho , written in collaboration by Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston. By being filled with enthusiasm beautiful life which one had in the colony of Virginia, it was observed there:And then we will live happy here, without sergeants, courtiers, men of law, advisers; only perhaps some Scot lazy, which is really widespread on all the surface of the Earth. But there is not in the world of better friends of the English and England that them, when they are not there. Only they are there. But, for my part, I would wish that they be a hundred and thousand, because we all belong now to the same nation, you know; and we could obtain thanks to them ten times more wellbeing than we do not find ourselves of them ici.
But the Scot were too happy to return the currency of the coin, with the interests. Old calumny French, which affirmed that the English had tails like the monkeys, was again put in circulation, while adding to it of many other new anti-English satires, so much so that in 1609 the king made vote a law, promising the most terrible sorrows with the authors “of pasquinades, make out, ends rhymes, abrupt change of subject, comedies and any unhealthy demonstration, where and the state and the country of England insulted would be calumniated”.
With this cultural and political background, these Sirs of the parliamentary commission had little chance to make some progress on the way of a narrow union and close friend. Not later that in October 1605, well before the report/ratio of the police chiefs, the Ambassador of the Republic of Venice foot-note which “the question of the Union will be, I am sure, abandoned; because Its Majesty is now fully conscious that nothing could be made, each camp showing such an obstinacy that very compromised is impossible; and as Its Majesty is determined to give up this question for the moment, hoping as time will consume bad moods”. They ended up being consumed indeed, but that took much more time than had imagined it Jacques Ist.
Citizens and subjects
In 1606, the dream of Jacques Ier of a British imperial crown was almost extinct. The commission of the Union had done little progress, and only by approaching this great task only one side, concentrating only on the problems apparently easier, like the laws relating to the hostile borders, the trade and the citizenship. The borders were going to become the “counties of the medium”, as if the history could be eluded by semantics. But the questions of free trade appeared prone to polemics, because they threatened of powerful groups of economic interest, just like the question of the equal rights in front of the law, which was going to become a debate on immigration. Members of Parliament openly expressed their fears which employment of the English would be threatened by all poor of the kingdom of Scotland, which “were going to flow here in such masses that death and the shortage will be the most probable consequences”. The exact situation of the “post natii”, those which had been born after the Union from March 1603, was never clarified by the Parliament. Finally in fact the courts, in 1608, had to bring a solution to this dead end at the time of the case of the baby Robert Calvin, extending the property rights of the English law common to the subjects of the king, i.e. with the Scot.
Fund and symbols
Finally Jacques Ier could not obtain his imperial crown, and by need, it was obliged to accept the political polygamy, which it rejected in 1603. Being unaware of the bottom of the unsolved problem, he played with the symbols, creating a new blazon, a common currency, and other similar things. But the creation of a national flag appeared as problematic as that of the national crown. Several models were tested, but when one of them appeared acceptable with a camp, it inevitably offended the other camp Jacques Ier finally proclaimed the new flag of the Union on April 12th, 1606, but it was accommodated without much enthusiasm, especially by the Scot, which saw a cross of St George superimposing a cross of St Andre. They sought to create their own reason, in which the overtaxation was reversed. This model was used in Scotland until 1707. During years still, the vessels of the two nations continued to raise their respective flags, in spite of the royal proclamation. Ironically, the Union Flag entered of everyday usage only under Protectorate of Cromwell.
British
Jacques Ier did not create the British crown, but, in a direction at least, it created the British as a distinct group individuals. In 1607, great ground extents returned to the crown. A news Plantation was launched, animated by colonists Protestant English and Scottish, resulting for the majority from the border regions, the “counties of the medium” between the Firth off Clyde and the estuary of the river the Mersey, and a minority coming from Bristol and London. With the passing of years, the colonists, surrounded by hostile catholic Irishmen, gave up their Scottish or English roots gradually, becoming thus British, like a means of affirming their difference with respect to their neighbors gaelic. It was in this part of the United Kingdom that the British identity took truly its political and cultural direction, in opposition to varnish of other older national associations.However, with time, the British character developed also its roots in England and Scotland, particularly at the time of the British Empire. In a general way, the individuals felt English or Scottish initially, and British as a second. In Northern Ireland, the Protestant communities were considered only British. It was the legacy of most difficult Jacques Ier most durable and.
A perfect Union?
With many regards, the problems of the dynastic union of England and Scotland were not very different from those which were generated by similar experiments elsewhere in Europe: the case of the Aragon and the Castille was comparable, as well as the temporary union of the Sweden and the Poland. The unions of this type can function, but they take time to be set up. The union of England and Scotland ends up succeeding, but it was never a marriage the equal ones. Jacques had promised that it would turn over in his kingdom every three years. In fact it returned there only once, in 1617, and, even then, its English advisers begged it to remain in London. Scotland could keep its institutional independence until the complete parliamentary union of 1707, but it lost the control of certain vital domains of its policy, in particular the foreign affairs, which remained the prerogative of the crown. That wants to say that in practice, the political questions were inevitably treated according to the interests of England and not of those of Scotland. For example, at the time the Dutch wars of Charles II, Scotland made the war with its principal business partner, whereas none of his interests did not gain there, nor was not threatened. The attempts of Scotland to establish a trade with the overseas colonies, first of all in Nova Scotia, then later in the Isthmus of Panamá with the disastrous Darien plan, failed partly because of the priority given by the sovereign to the English interests on the interests Scot. With time, the imperial crown of Jacques decreased in the face and importance, so much so that in 1616, it had to openly admit in front of the spangled Chambre that its intention “was always to carry out the union by linking Scotland in England, and not England in Scotland”. Years later, Anne Ire, the first true British monarch, described the Scot like people strange, and known as at the time of its first Parliament which it knew that its heart “was entirely English”. It was George III, a descendant of Germanic the Maison of Hanover, which found a little the spirit of Jacques Ier, when he declared his pride in the name of British.
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