The multiple perspective

Britain was not a homogeneous entity, with a single unified society, but embraced peoples of widely different traditions. To understand the course of English public policy towards its three neighbours, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the feedback of these upon itself, a complex and painful perspective is necessary.

Wales, though never to lose her national consciousness, had by the later eighteenth century come close to England, with no distinction of institutions, with common access to markets and personal status, and with representation in the English parliament.

To the north, Scotland had maintained her autonomy through bitter wars until, in 1707, under the Act of Union, it was agreed by the two parliaments to merge as one economy, one polity and in some senses one society. Scotsmen and Englishmen gained equal rights in each others' countries, and both were to be ruled by a common parliament at Westminster. The Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 had been put down, and a policy of pacification of the Highlands was actively pursued, involving the ending of the clan system. But Scotland continued to have her own distinctive institutions and practices: these included her established church (in the Presbyterian form), her judiciary and legal system (though with final appeal to the House of Lords), her educational structure, the Gaelic language over at least half of the country, her poor law system, and, deriving from these and other elements in her past, her own ethos and sense of nationhood.