The historiography of the Treaty of Union reflects the changing and interchanging domestic and imperial perspectives. In the process, it tells us much about the reception and perception of Union, without necessarily coming to grips with its conception and delivery. Indeed, the historiography has three pronounced features – its longevity, its partisanship and its ideological fragmentation. It is long on emphatic pronouncements but short on scientific rigour and academic detachment as the Union has been challenged but never broken over the last 300 years, neither by Jacobitism in the eighteenth century nor by Home Rule movements from the nineteenth century. Commentators on the Union have ranged from players and spectators at the outset, through the intellectuals and improvers of the Enlightenment, to professional academics in history and cognate disciplines. Along the way, novelists, clergymen, lawyers, journalists and diplomats have made contributions that were no less significant or informed. Their diverse offerings set the scenes for a wider contextualising that will extend far beyond the confines of Anglo-Scottish relations.

Jacobites and Whigs

Partisans and activists who were far from averse to self-serving observations provided the initial commentaries on Union. First up was Daniel Defoe, novelist, polemicist and spy, who was sent to Scotland by the English ministry in 1706 to facilitate the passage of Union. His unattributed The History of England from the beginning of the reign of Queen Anne, to the conclusion of the Glorious Treaty of Union between England and Scotland, which was rushed out in 1707, placed the Union as the culmination of a series of battles, sieges, victories and turns of fortune by land and sea that characterised the allied endeavours under John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, against the forces of Louis XIV of France during the War of the Spanish Succession.