The peculiar history of Scotland and England’s union

On Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron issued a plaintive appeal to voters in Scotland ahead of next week's referendum on Scottish independence. "We desperately want you to stay; we do not want this family of nations to be ripped apart," Cameron wrote in a column published in the Daily Mail.

A Scottish Saltire flag is raised over 10 Downing Street in London, September 9, 2014. (REUTERS/Luke MacGregor)

The "Yes" and "No" camps appear to be neck-and-neck ahead of the vote. If the former prevails, it raises profound, existential questions for the nation that Cameron now governs. Could it even be called Britain?

To that end, it's worth remembering why Scotland and England first united their parliaments more than three centuries ago.

Before then, the two nations hardly had a cuddly relationship. The Romans took one look at the wild tribes stalking Britain's north and chose to build a wall and sit behind it. For centuries thereafter, the borderland between England and Scotland was a ravaged, desolate place. Acts of aggression and war are far more remembered than moments of bonhomie. There was that English king who was subtly known as the "hammer of the Scots." Then there was this fellow whose uprising and pillaging of England's north getsmisrepresented in Mel Gibson's Braveheart.

For years, Scotland was eyed by England's European rivals as an ally and potential staging ground for an assault on the English. Scottish nobles curried favor and hatched plots in the courts of Spain and France. Queen Elizabeth I's execution of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 is seen as a precursor to the launching of the Spanish Armada -- an epic, botched invasion of England.

After Elizabeth died, though, her crown was given in 1603 to Mary's son, James VI of Scotland, who sat as monarch for both nations. There was nothing necessarily strange about this: modern nationalism makes us believe that our rulers ought to share our ethnic identity. But for most of human history, royals and their political elites existed on a different plane from their subjects, swanned around in foreign lands as youths, married nobility from other kingdoms, and spoke languages vastly different from the vernaculars of the peasants and soldiers who toiled in their name.

Despite sharing a monarch, England and Scotland maintained separate parliaments, courts and almost everything else. The brutal English Civil War led to the beheading of James's son Charles I. The English resisted various bids to unite commercially and politically with Scotland. What eventually compelled the Treaty of Union in 1707 -- the moment that made the two countries part of Cameron's "family of nations" -- was Scotland's need for economic aid and England's suspicion and fatigue with the "rogue" state to its north.

England allowed free trade; Scotland agreed to a line of foreign Protestant kings taking the throne of their United Kingdom. It was a pact born less out of a sense of fraternity than pragmatic necessity. Of course, not all were happy. The Jacobites, supporters of the Stuart dynasty of James I's descendants, backed at times by the French, waged a long-running rebellion that was only decisively put down in 1745.

It was only after the 18th century, as a disproportionate number of Scots got involved in Britain's imperial adventures overseas, that a true sense of shared identity emerged. Those in the "Yes" camp likely appreciate its tenuousness more than those seeking to keep this union intact.

By Ishaan Tharoor

sourche: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/09/11/the-peculiar-history-of-scotland-and-englands-union/?tid=pm_world_pop