Well – if you’re English then the answer has to be not bloody much. And surely if you are a Scot then I would have thought opinion would be divided – but I am on unsafe ground here. The Stuarts were the last Scottish royal dynasty and many Scots (and French come to that) spent an awful lot of time, effort and money trying to re-instate them to the British throne. But there again, it was a Stuart that forced the Scots into the Act of Union – much against the general opinion of the populace then, and I suspect, ever since.

My thanks must go to fellow Witanagemot Club member Waking Hereward for reminding us that in just over a year – the 26th of March 2007 – falls the 300th Anniversary of the Act of Union – the formal ending of the last Parliament of England in favour of the Parliament of Great Britain. And the formidable looking woman in the picture was Queen Anne, the last of the House of Stuart who, on coming to the throne in 1702, was Queen of England, Queen of Scotland and Queen of Ireland but after the Act of Union became simply, Queen of Great Britain.

Wikipedia offers a decent if brief overview of the Act of Union of which the following is a small extract:

While there had been three earlier attempts to unite the two countries by Acts of Parliament, these were the first Acts which had the will of both political establishments behind them, albeit for rather different reasons. In the English case, the purpose was to establish the Royal succession along Protestant lines in the same manner as provided for by the English Act of Settlement 1701 rather than that of the Scottish Act of Security. In the Scottish case, the purpose was partly to use English subsidies to recover from the financial problems caused by the failure of the Darién scheme and partly to remove English trade sanctions put in place through the Alien Act to force the Scottish Parliament into compliance with the Act of Settlement.

So, the English just wanted to keep Roman Catholicism out of our monarchy. And the Scots wanted English money. And 300 years later, not a lot has changed! Suffice it to say that it was unpopular then and is steadily growing more unpopular today since the creation of the Scottish Parliament and the abandonment of England by our leading political parties. Waking Hereward is calling for a demonstration and an awareness campaign to coincide with the anniversary – a call I echo here.