Scotland After the Union

Scotland's union with its southern neighbour did not erase its own institutions. It kept its own courts and schools, and its own Presbyterian Church, so the change reshaped government without absorbing the country outright.

Not everyone accepted the new settlement peacefully. The Jacobites tried to put James II's son on the throne in George I's place, an attempt that was quickly put down. Government carried on regardless, and Robert Walpole, who had led the king's ministers for two decades, finally left office in 1742, ending the long spell in which one man had effectively run the country for a monarch who barely spoke English.

Scotland's culture found its own voice in the same period. Robert Burns became known in Scotland as The Bard, a poet whose work gave Scotland a literary identity that owed nothing to Westminster.