The Union of the Crowns

1. Bridging context: James VI's Scottish kingship before 1603

James Charles Stuart was born on 19 June 1566 at Edinburgh Castle, the only son of Mary, Queen of Scots and Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. After Mary was forced to abdicate, the thirteen-month-old was crowned King of Scots at the Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling, on 29 July 1567. His minority was governed by four successive regents, two of whom died violently: James Stewart, Earl of Moray (assassinated 1570); Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, James's own paternal grandfather (fatally wounded in a raid on Stirling, 1571); John Erskine, Earl of Mar (died 1572); and James Douglas, Earl of Morton, the most effective and longest-serving, who fell from power in 1578 and was executed in 1581. James was given a rigorous humanist and Calvinist education under George Buchanan.

James's grip on his own government came in stages. His minority ended formally in 1578, but after the trauma of the Ruthven Raid of August 1582 — when he was seized and held for nearly a year by Protestant nobles — his escape in June 1583 is generally taken as the beginning of his effective personal rule. (Some accounts cite 1585 for the consolidation of his authority; 1583 is the more commonly cited date for the start.) In 1589 he married Anne of Denmark, travelling personally to Scandinavia to collect his bride when storms delayed her crossing; they were married in person at Oslo on 23 November 1589.

Modern scholarship, above all the work of Jenny Wormald, has substantially rehabilitated James's Scottish kingship. Against the older, Anglo-centric caricature of a "slobbering buffoon," Wormald and others (Roger Mason, Julian Goodare, Michael Lynch) present James as a shrewd, pragmatic and intellectually formidable ruler who — in sharp contrast to his mother's turbulent, catastrophic reign — reconciled warring noble factions, asserted royal authority over the Kirk, and made Scotland governable. He was also an author, producing Daemonologie (1597), The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598) and Basilikon Doron (1599). One popular but slippery epithet, "the wisest fool in Christendom," is traditionally attributed to Henri IV of France; its sourcing is weak and it is very likely apocryphal (see Caveats).

2. The death of Elizabeth I and the succession

Elizabeth I died in the early hours of 24 March 1603 at Richmond Palace, the last of the Tudor line, unmarried and childless. James's claim to the English throne rested on his descent from Margaret Tudor, elder sister of Henry VIII, who had married James IV of Scotland in 1503 (the subject of Card #11): James was Margaret's great-grandson, and the senior surviving descendant of Henry VII in the Protestant line. Crucially, the succession was smoothed in advance by a secret correspondence conducted from 1601 between James and Elizabeth's chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, who advised the king on how to handle Elizabeth and prepared the machinery for a peaceful accession. When Elizabeth died, the council proclaimed James king in London within hours. Sir Robert Carey rode north with a sapphire ring as pre-arranged proof, reaching Holyrood late on 26 March. The accession was, by the standards of the age, remarkably smooth and effectively uncontested (a minor plot involving Arabella Stuart and Sir Walter Raleigh came to nothing).

3. James's journey south and the new royal style — examined precisely

James left Edinburgh on 5 April 1603, promising to return every three years, and made a leisurely, triumphal progress down the Great North Road, reaching London in early May; he and Anne were crowned at Westminster Abbey on 25 July 1603 (public festivities were curtailed by plague). Historian Pauline Croft cautions that the "outpouring of affection" James believed he was witnessing was in large part relief at a peaceful succession mixed with curiosity.

What actually happened constitutionally must be stated with precision. James inherited a second, separate crown. He did not merge his kingdoms. In October 1604 he proclaimed himself "King of Great Britain, France and Ireland" — but this was a personal style adopted by royal prerogative, not by statute. Sir Francis Bacon warned him that he could not lawfully use the style in "any legal proceeding, instrument or assurance," and the English Commons had already refused in April 1604 to grant the title by law. Scotland and England therefore remained two distinct kingdoms — each with its own parliament, its own body of law and courts, its own established church, and its own theory of sovereignty — throughout James's reign, throughout Charles I's, and until the Acts of Union of 1707. This is the single most important and most commonly misunderstood fact about 1603.

4. The failed attempt at full political union — "dynastic, not political"

James genuinely wanted more. He pressed for a full, "perfect" incorporating union: one king, one parliament, one law. "Hath He not made us all in one island," he told the English parliament, "compassed with one sea and of itself by nature indivisible?" He compared ruling two separate kingdoms to polygamy: "I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife."

A joint Union Commission was set up in October 1604 (the Scottish Parliament having appointed its own commissioners in July 1604 under Alexander Seton, Lord Fyvie). The English side, a large group, put forward a draft treaty for incorporating union — the "Instrument of the Union" — on 6 December 1604, recommending the abolition of hostile Border laws, mutual freedom of commerce, and that Scots be treated as citizens of both kingdoms. The Instrument was formally read in the Commons on 21 November 1606, and the recommendations were debated at Westminster between November 1606 and July 1607.

The project failed in both parliaments. In England, resistance was fierce and partly xenophobic — Sir Christopher Pigott, MP for Buckinghamshire, on 19 February 1607 delivered what the History of Parliament Trust records as "by-matter of invective against the Scots and the Scottish Nation, using many words of scandal and obloquy," and at the king's insistence was imprisoned in the Tower and stripped of his seat — but the decisive objections were legal and economic. English lawyers (about a fifth of the Commons) argued that a union of kingdoms without a union of laws was a contradiction, and that merging the two would extinguish English common law and "Magna Carta." Sir Edwin Sandys objected that "we cannot make laws to bind Britannia" and that the Scots were "better than aliens but not equal with natural subjects"; he then wrecked the plan with a masterstroke, insisting that only a full statutory union be accepted — knowing the Scots would never abolish their own law. Free trade was seen as benefiting the poorer Scots at English expense. In Scotland, the political nation was equally protective of its distinctiveness: the Scottish commissioners insisted on the inviolability of the "fundamentall lawes, ancient privileges, offices, richtis, digniteis and liberteis of this kingdome," removed religion from the table at the outset, and refused to countenance a union of laws or the loss of a separate Scottish parliament. Historian Alan MacDonald's verdict: the outcome "was a union but it did not run deep" — a failure for James, a success for the Scottish parliament.

All that passed (1607) was a limited statute abolishing the "hostile laws" between the realms. James accepted defeat but never forgave the English parliament. The naturalisation question was ultimately resolved not by statute but by the courts: in Calvin's Case (1608), decided by Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and fourteen judges (of whom two, Sir Thomas Foster and Sir Thomas Walmsley, dissented), the court held that allegiance was tied to the person of the king rather than to the kingdom or its laws, and thus that Scots born after 1603 (the post-nati) were natural-born English subjects at common law — though Scots born before 1603 (the ante-nati) remained aliens in England, Parliament having refused to naturalise them for fear of "an influx of hungry Scots."

5. The Union Flag (1606)

Denied his political union, James found a symbolic one at sea. By a proclamation of 12 April 1606, ships of "Great Britain" were ordered to fly a combined flag joining the red cross of St George (England) and the white saltire of St Andrew (Scotland). The design — St George's cross superimposed on St Andrew's saltire on a blue field — was intended to end quarrels over precedence between English and Scottish vessels at sea, where the two nations otherwise still treated each other as foreign. Neither nation was fully satisfied: the English disliked the blue field, the Scots resented St George's cross being laid on top of St Andrew's. The name "Union Jack" (possibly from Jacobus, Latin for James, or from the nautical "jack" flag) came into common use later; the flag became a true national flag only after 1707, and gained St Patrick's saltire for Ireland in 1801.

6. James's absentee kingship of Scotland

Having promised to return every three years, James in fact returned to Scotland only once, in 1617 — a visit timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his accession rather than any political emergency. From London he governed Scotland through the Privy Council in Edinburgh, boasting to the English parliament in 1607: "Here I sit and govern it with my pen; I write and it is done; and by a Clerk of the Council I govern Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword." No new governing institutions were created; a postal service between Edinburgh and London (an ancestor of the Royal Mail) kept king and council in touch. Historians debate how tightly James actually controlled Scottish affairs — some see an efficient system of remote control, others a council largely left to itself — but the traditional view is that James, who knew Scotland intimately, governed it capably at a distance until his death. His son would inherit a very different situation.

7. The Plantation of Ulster

Among the most consequential developments of James's reign for later Scottish, Irish and British history was the Plantation of Ulster. After the Flight of the Earls in September 1607 — when the Gaelic lords Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell, fled to the Continent — their vast Ulster lands were declared forfeit to the Crown. From 1609 a systematic plantation settled English and (especially lowland Scottish, largely Presbyterian) Protestant colonists on confiscated land across counties including Armagh, Tyrone, Fermanagh, Cavan, Donegal and Coleraine. (Private Scottish settlement in Antrim and Down had begun even earlier, from 1603.) Though this is primarily an Irish story, the large-scale Scottish emigration it set in motion created the Ulster-Scots (Scots-Irish) community and laid down demographic and religious fault lines whose consequences run through subsequent Irish and British history to the present day.

8. James's religious policy and the Five Articles of Perth (1618)

James's long-term aim was to bring the Scottish Kirk "so near as can be" to the English episcopal model — gradually reintroducing bishops and asserting royal authority over the church, while (wisely) largely leaving the forms of worship alone. His most controversial step came in 1618, when — following his 1617 visit, during which his use of Anglican rites at Holyrood had already caused resentment — he pushed the Five Articles of Perth through a carefully managed General Assembly at Perth on 25 August 1618 (contemporary accounts describe the meeting as surrounded by guards, with members' votes recorded and reported to the king). The Articles required kneeling to receive communion (the most objectionable to Presbyterians, who feared it implied adoration of the elements), private baptism where necessary, private communion for the sick, episcopal confirmation of children, and the observance of the great holy days (Christmas, Easter, etc.). They were ratified by the Scottish parliament on 4 August 1621 — a day remembered in Scotland as "Black Saturday" for the violent storm that broke over Edinburgh, which opponents read as a judgment of Heaven against the Articles. They met bitter resistance from strict Presbyterians and were unevenly enforced. James, recognising he had overreached, did not press further ecclesiastical innovation — a restraint his son would not show. The Articles were a clear precursor to the far graver crisis under Charles I.

9. Bridging to 1638: Charles I, the 1633 coronation and the 1637 Prayer Book crisis

James died on 27 March 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles I. Where James had been Scots-born, pragmatic and intimately familiar with his northern kingdom, Charles had been raised in England, held a more rigid and exalted view of divine-right kingship, and had little feel for or interest in Scottish sensibilities. After moving south with the royal household in childhood, he became a far more distant ruler of Scotland and was less willing to compromise.

Charles delayed his Scottish coronation for eight years, finally travelling north to be crowned King of Scots at Holyrood Abbey, Edinburgh, on 18 June 1633. The ceremony, conducted with full High Anglican / Laudian ritual and attended by William Laud (soon Archbishop of Canterbury), caused deep alarm among Presbyterian Scots, arousing "gryt feir of inbringing of popery." (The visit was also marked by tragedy: on 10 July 1633 the ferry Blessing of Burntisland capsized in a storm in the Firth of Forth; only two of its thirty-five passengers and crew survived, and a costly royal silver service was lost.) Charles then pressed further than his father ever had. Working with Laud, he sought to impose a new Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Kirk — drawn up without proper consultation with the Scottish church or parliament and widely denounced as "Laud's Liturgy" and a Trojan horse for Catholicism.

The new Prayer Book was first used at St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh, on Sunday 23 July 1637. As Dean James Hannay began to read the service, a riot broke out; it spread through the city and beyond, and the resulting groundswell of resistance led directly to the signing of the National Covenant in February 1638 — where Card #15 takes up the story. The best-known version of the flashpoint is the tale of Jenny Geddes, a market-woman who is said to have hurled her folding stool at the Dean's head, crying words to the effect of "Deil colic the wame o' ye, fause thief; daur ye say Mass in my lug?" ("Devil give you colic, false thief: dare you say the Mass in my ear?"). This story should be treated with real source-critical caution (see Caveats): the riot itself is beyond doubt and was indeed begun by women, but the named heroine and her defiant one-liner are very probably later embellishments.