Scotland in the Age of Union and Civil Wars (1603–1707): Political Upheaval, Religious Strife, and the Birth of Great Britain
In the early spring of 1603, the cold North Sea wind blew through the cobbled streets of Edinburgh as word arrived that Queen Elizabeth I of England was dead. At Holyroodhouse, James VI of Scotland—thirty-six years old, balding, bookish, self-assured in the divine right of kings—prepared to cross the border and ascend the English throne as James I. The Stuart dynasty had done the impossible: united two ancient enemies under one crown. But in reality, this was a marriage in name only, a personal union without a shared body politic, and the complications that followed would convulse both nations in blood and betrayal. For Scotland, it was the beginning of a century of civil war, religious martyrdom, lost independence, and finally, reluctant union.
James Stuart, the “wisest fool in Christendom,” as the French king Henry IV allegedly called him, believed himself the great unifier. He imagined that his accession to the English throne would bring harmony, a single Church, and the seamless governance of two kingdoms. But Manchester would have said that James, like many men with grand ideas, misunderstood his people. “The past is a foreign country,” Manchester once wrote, “and they do things differently there.” Scots had no intention of doing things the English way. Scotland had evolved a distinct form of government and a fiercely Presbyterian Church that stood in militant opposition to the hierarchical Anglicanism of Canterbury. “No bishop, no king,” James once insisted, but in Scotland, bishops were seen not as sacred overseers but as papal stooges and agents of foreign tyranny.
James’s attempts to unify ecclesiastical practices met with mounting resistance, which his son, Charles I, would disastrously inflame. In 1637, Charles and his archbishop, William Laud, introduced the English Book of Common Prayer into Scottish worship. The reaction was immediate and ferocious. In St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes allegedly hurled a stool at the minister’s head. That defiant gesture echoed across the country. Soon, Scottish nobles, clergy, and commoners were signing the National Covenant, a declaration of resistance to Anglicanism and to the very idea that kings could dictate the terms of God’s service. Historian Rosalind Mitchison notes, “The Covenanting movement was, at its heart, a rejection of foreign imposition. It was religious but also intensely nationalistic” (Mitchison, 1982, p. 211).
The Covenanters—grim, righteous, and unbending—became the soul of Scottish resistance. When Charles attempted to enforce his will by force of arms, he encountered a people who had honed not only their theology but their military tactics. The Bishops’ Wars of 1639–1640 saw the Scottish army invade England and humiliate Charles into calling a new Parliament—thus inadvertently setting in motion the English Civil War. As historian Allan Macinnes observes, “Scotland was not a passive partner in the British crisis of the mid-seventeenth century. It was a major player—first destabilizing the Stuart regime and later attempting to rebuild it on new terms” (Macinnes, 2007, p. 91).
Yet politics makes strange bedfellows. In 1643, the Scots signed the Solemn League and Covenant with the English Parliamentarians. They agreed to support the English Civil War against Charles in exchange for a promise to reform England’s Church “according to the word of God and the example of the best Reformed Churches.” At first, it worked. The king was defeated and handed over to the English by the Scots in 1647. But when it became clear that Oliver Cromwell’s Independents would never accept Presbyterianism in England, the Scots turned back toward the monarchy. In 1650, they crowned Charles II King of Scots at Scone.
That act drew the wrath of Cromwell. In August 1650, his disciplined New Model Army crushed a larger Scottish force at Dunbar. A year later, at Worcester, Charles’s dream of reclaiming the English throne lay in ruin. He fled into exile; Scotland became a conquered province of Cromwell’s Commonwealth. The Scottish Parliament was dissolved. English soldiers garrisoned the land. Presbyterian ministers were harassed, churches watched, pulpits silenced. It was, as Michael Lynch puts it, “the deepest political eclipse Scotland had suffered since the twelfth century” (Lynch, 1992, p. 237).
But it would not last. After Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the collapse of his regime, Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660. The euphoria of Restoration, however, soon curdled. Episcopacy was reimposed in Scotland, and the Covenanters, once allies of the crown, were now treated as dangerous rebels. They retreated to the moors and fields, holding open-air “conventicles” in defiance of the king’s decrees. The government’s response was savage. From 1661 to 1688—what the Scottish Presbyterians would later call the “Killing Times”—hundreds were executed for their faith. Many more were tortured, fined, or banished. In the words of historian David Stevenson, “The Restoration regime in Scotland was not simply authoritarian. It was an instrument of persecution. Its brutality left scars that shaped the Scottish psyche for generations” (Stevenson, 1973, p. 174).
The pendulum swung again in 1688, when the Glorious Revolution deposed James VII (II of England), the Catholic king, and brought in his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. In England, this was almost bloodless. In Scotland, it brought war once more. John Graham of Claverhouse—Viscount Dundee—raised the royalist banner in the Highlands, rallying the clans in the name of the exiled king. At Killiecrankie in 1689, Dundee won a stunning victory but was mortally wounded. Without his leadership, the Jacobite cause faltered. The revolution solidified Presbyterianism as Scotland’s national religion, and the balance of power shifted once more toward constitutionalism.
Yet despite this settlement, Scotland’s future remained uncertain. Its parliament was independent, but its economy was fragile. The disastrous Darien Scheme (1698–1700), an ill-fated attempt to establish a Scottish colony in Panama, bankrupted the country’s elite and destroyed public confidence. “The Darien disaster,” writes historian Christopher Whatley, “did more than ruin investors. It exposed the limitations of Scotland’s independence and intensified the search for political alternatives” (Whatley, 2001, p. 193). England, for its part, sought security. The War of the Spanish Succession was raging, and English ministers feared that an independent Scottish parliament might ally with France. The solution, for both economic and strategic reasons, was union.
Thus, in 1707, the Acts of Union were passed. Scotland and England became one kingdom: Great Britain. The Scottish Parliament was dissolved, its peers absorbed into Westminster. The Union was greeted with riots in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Church bells tolled in mourning. The poet Robert Burns, writing a generation later, captured the public mood: “We’re bought and sold for English gold—such a parcel of rogues in a nation!” Yet the Union was not the death of Scotland. It was, in time, the beginning of its industrial, imperial, and intellectual ascendancy.
Looking back, historian Michael Lynch summarized it best: “The period 1603 to 1707 was a century of deep instability in Scottish political and religious life—a time when Scotland’s identity as a nation was challenged, reshaped, and ultimately redefined within the context of British statehood” (Lynch, 1992, p. 289). In those tumultuous hundred years, Scotland fought civil wars, lost its sovereignty, buried martyrs, and endured humiliation. But it also laid the foundation for its modern identity—part Presbyterian, part British, and fiercely proud of both.
References
- Lynch, Michael. Scotland: A New History. London: Pimlico, 1992.
- Mitchison, Rosalind. A History of Scotland. London: Methuen, 1982.
- Macinnes, Allan I. Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Stevenson, David. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland, 1644–1651. London: Royal Historical Society, 1973.
- Whatley, Christopher A. Bought and Sold for English Gold? Explaining the Union of 1707. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2001.