Andrew Wilson

In 1707, Scotland was not united in a "voluntary union". It was annexed, and the whole of Europe documented it at the time. Four sovereign states went on recognising a King of Scots straight through the date the Scottish Crown was supposedly extinguished. Within two years, London had to buy its own legitimacy abroad, mortgaging fortresses in the Spanish Netherlands to the Dutch for a guarantee of a succession it could not secure at home; Swift's word for it was that "every petty prince in Germany must be entreated to preserve the queen of Great Britain upon her throne." Six years in, recognition had to be extorted from France and Spain at Utrecht as the price of ending a war, in a settlement Scotland was never party to. France put 5,000 troops and a fleet to sea in 1708 to reverse it. Spanish regular infantry fought at Glen Shiel in 1719, and the 274 who surrendered were taken as prisoners of war of a foreign crown; not as rebels, because Madrid had never accepted that the kingdom they came to restore had ceased to exist. France treated with Scotland as a sovereign party again in 1745. Rome/the Holy See recognised a King of Scots until 1766. Europe's standard history of the new state, printed at The Hague in 1724, was titled Histoire d'Angleterre: the History of England. A union nobody on the continent could see. An annexation everybody recorded. In international law, recognition is the test of annexation. 1707 failed that test in its own century. Which is why Scotland's claim is not secession. It is state resumption.