Act of Union 1707

The Act of Union 1707 joined England and Scotland in a state whose policy was firmly controlled by Parliament. The book presents the union as part of the constitutional settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution: the transfer of authority from monarch to Parliament ended absolutism in England and subsequently Great Britain, and helped create conditions in which political power and the rule of law could constrain the elite as well as the crown.

The Constitutional Settlement

After the Glorious Revolution, Parliament and William negotiated a new constitution. The Declaration of Rights, presented to William in February 1689 when Parliament offered him the crown, established principles that limited royal power. It determined the succession in a way that departed from hereditary convention, barred the monarch from suspending or dispensing with laws, reaffirmed that taxation required parliamentary consent, and prohibited a standing army in England without that consent.

The settlement’s language was not always precise. It said parliamentary elections ought to be free without defining freedom, and called for frequent Parliaments without specifying when they had to meet. A Triennial Act under Charles II had required Parliament to be called at least once every three years, but Charles ignored it without consequence because no mechanism enforced the requirement. After 1688, Parliament did not create a comparable enforcement mechanism for the new provisions. The decisive change was practical: authority and decision-making had shifted to Parliament.

Parliament Supplants Royal Prerogative

William gave up practices associated with earlier kings, including interference in legal decisions and the claim to receive customs revenues for life. Together with Parliament’s new authority, these changes represented the triumph of Parliament over the king and the end of absolutism in England. The book traces that constitutional change into the subsequent creation of Great Britain through the Act of Union 1707. From then on, Parliament firmly controlled state policy.

This shift altered the interests shaping government. Many parliamentarians had investments in trade and industry and therefore had a stake in protecting property rights, which the Stuart kings had often infringed. They had also resisted higher taxes and a stronger state when the monarch controlled public spending. Once Parliament controlled expenditure, it was willing to raise taxes for purposes it considered valuable, especially a stronger navy to protect overseas commercial interests.

Pluralism and Its Limits

Parliamentary control widened access to political decision-making compared with government driven by the king, partly because Members of Parliament were elected. But this was not democracy in the modern sense. In the eighteenth century, fewer than 2 percent of the population could vote, and only men were eligible. Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Sheffield—the cities where the Industrial Revolution took place—had no independent representation in Parliament, while rural areas were overrepresented.

The settlement’s significance therefore lies not in universal participation but in the redistribution and constraint of power. The constitutional changes made it harder for the monarch to govern alone and gave Parliament a central role in shaping economic and political institutions. They established a more pluralistic order, though one still marked by severe inequalities in representation.

Rule of Law and Institutional Consequences

The book connects the post-1688 order to the rule of law: laws should not be applied selectively or arbitrarily, and no one should stand above them. The distinction matters because a harsh law can still be imposed as an instrument of power; rule of law requires that its application be constrained and that legal protections extend beyond the ruling group. The later prosecution of John Huntridge under the Black Act illustrates the limits imposed on powerful Whig figures: despite pressure from the political leadership, a jury acquitted him, in part because of irregularities in the collection of evidence.

For the book, such constraints help explain how pluralistic institutions persist. If a narrow group could set aside legal protections whenever they obstructed its interests, it could undermine the balance of power that the constitutional settlement had established. The Act of Union 1707 thus belongs to a broader transformation: Parliament’s ascendancy ended absolutism, while the institutions built around that ascendancy created grounds for the rule of law and for demands for still wider political participation.