What was the condition of England before unification?
Answers
In 1284 the crown of England annexed Wales under the Statute of Wales. But annexation and incorporation are two different matters, and the Act of Union of 1536 declared English King Henry VIII’s wish to incorporate Wales within his realm. The Welsh were to be accorded the same political status as the English and to send representatives to Parliament. In with English common law, out with Welsh law. None of this came into effect until 1543, however, when all the details were laid out in a second act. Still, Wales and England had been unified.
Sixty years later, England and Scotland were still entirely independent kingdoms when Queen Elizabeth I of England died unmarried and childless in 1603. Her cousin James VI, who happened to be the king of Scotland, also became the king of England as James I under what became known as the union of the crowns. He was determined to bring the two kingdoms together into a single British state. Failing to achieve that goal, he contented himself with their symbolic unification in the creation of a flag in 1606 that bore both the English cross of St. George and the Scottish cross of St. Andrew. That banner, the forerunner of the United Kingdom’s familiar flag, took its name, the Union Jack, from the shortened form of the name Jacobus, the Latin version of James.
For most of the 17th century, against the backdrop of the English Civil Wars, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution, England and Scotland remained under the rule of the same monarch, but repeated efforts to unite the two kingdoms were unsuccessful (save for Oliver Cromwell’s brief unification, maintained by an English army of occupation in Scotland during the Protectorate). Finally, at the beginning of the 18th century, Scotland needed economic help, and England needed a safeguard against the possibility of Scotland serving as a launching ground for French attacks. The English also feared a Jacobite attempt to restore the crown to Queen Anne’s exiled Roman Catholic half-brother, James Edward, the Old Pretender. Unification posed an answer for both kingdoms’ problems. Free and equal trade throughout the new unified kingdom would be Scotland’s payoff. In return, England would get Scotland’s acquiescence in the Hanoverian succession, through which Protestant rule would be maintained by the accession to the throne of George I. Scotland had to relinquish its parliament under the agreement, but it kept Scottish law. Thus, the 1707 Act of Union, which went into effect on May 1, 1707, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain, was a winning deal on both sides of the border.