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WHEN
Queen Anne came to the throne the Crowns of England and Scotland had been united
for just a century, but in other respects the two kingdoms remained independent.
This was an unprofitable situation for both: the two countries could not pursue
one common policy either in commerce or diplomacy. Scottish enterprise suffered
from having no free market across the Border; English political security was
endangered by a grave uncertainty. “Should the Scots, on the death of Queen
Anne, decide to recall the House of Stuart, the restoration of King James the
Eighth in Scotland might easily lead to the restoration ‘of King James the
Third in England. It was therefore essential to obtain, during the lifetime
of the Queen, an incorporating Union which would merge the kingdom of Scotland
and the kingdom of England in one United Kingdom of Great Britain. There must be
no separate Parliament of any description in Scotland which could repudiate an
Act of Union, and a federal solution of the problem was therefore debarred”
(Professor R. S. Rait). In order then to hold the Empire together, the Whig
statesmen, with the support of some moderate Tories, offered Scotland complete
union and free trade on condition that the Crowns and Parliaments became one and
the same. They were justified by the event; yet it was with great difficulty and
amid general disapproval that the Treaty was carried in Scotland.” But, as Dr.
Mathieson has said, “Happy it - was for the future of Great Britain that Scottish
nationality went down, suppressed indeed in outward form, but defiant and
unbroken to the last, for this spirit, persisting as it did, not only ensured to
Scotland its just recognition in the terms of Union, but in after years
asserting its vitality in literature and arms and promoting a solid partnership
founded on mutual esteem, was to mingle with English traditions and to become
the common heritage of the British race.” It is astonishing that a bargain so full of plain good
sense should have inspired a picture so full of beauty as this. Mr. Monnington
has brought back from Rome a sense of the life as well as the stateliness of
the Augustan age. There is a classical serenity in the lines of the Mall, seen
through the palace window; in the graceful figures of the Queen and her ladies;
and no less in the bearing of the Commissioners in their superhuman costume.
We see but a few of them— there were some sixty in all—but among them we may
remember the names of Cowper, Godolphin, Newcastle, Devonshire, Hartington,
Grey, Granby, Halifax, and Harley, for England; and for Scotland, Queensberry,
Mar, Sutherland, Wemyss, Rosebery, Campbell, Clerk of Pennycuick; and Chancellor
Seafield, who, as he signed the Act, uttered the bitterly heroic farewell to the
Scotland of the past:
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