The Politics of Great Britain

The union was finally achieved through the will in England of Lord Treasurer Godolphin and his allies the Whig Junto lords and, in Scotland, through the brief alliance of Queensberry, the Duke of Argyll and the squadrone. Such co-operation was all the more significant because in those times, politics were enlivened by faction, hatred, jealousy and self-interest. It was the same in both kingdoms without regard to party affiliations. George Lockhart, who had been a member of the Scottish Privy Council, referred to Scotland before the union as a country riven by ‘court divisions, pairties and animosities among nobles’. No doubt England’s grandeur and gravitas, in comparison with Scotland’s ramshackle instability on the margins of Europe, gave the antics of the Scottish pre-union elite a wild, unruly air; but the English were almost their match: ‘the English itch of contentione, the worst plague that poor Scotland was ever yet overspread with’ was an opinion from north of the border in 1708.1 So matters continued in disputatious vein in one form or another after the union. This was sometimes against the backdrop in England of divisions at court, a succession of long-term quarrels between the kings and their eldest sons, the Princes of Wales. For special reasons, however, the impact on Scottish affairs was disproportionately severe; whereas in England, the appearance was worse than the reality.