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Imagined Polities, Failed Dreams, and the Beginnings of an Unacknowledged Britain: English Responses to James VI and I's Vision of Perfect Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2013

Abstract

The regal union (and James VI and I's desire that it be perfected) produced varied responses to Scotland, not just hostile reactions. Plays, pamphlets, treatises, and manuscripts accompanied parliamentary debate in England and queried the precedents for, as well as the future potential of, something called Britain. They also engaged with the nature of sovereignty. Authors thus deployed both negative and positive descriptions of the Scots, and they were unified less by Scotophobia and more by a tendency to privilege a distinctly English narrative despite a specifically British problem. Such Anglocentric narratives circumvented the issue of the Anglo-Scottish relationship, postponing English engagement with the realities of their new context. This was possible only because the Scots occupied a position somewhere between sameness and difference in the English imagination.

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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

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References

1 This is not to say that Scotland was not experiencing economic growth, particularly in the carrying trade, in which Scotland's small light boats sometimes gave it an advantage. But England was generally richer and growing faster.

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48 Ibid.

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70 Ibid., 209–39.

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82 Ibid., 8–19.

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88 This complements Steve Murdoch's argument that one of the places where an identification with Britain did occur was in the Stuart diplomatic corps and continental forces. Murdoch, Steve, “Diplomacy in Transition: Stuart-British Diplomacy in Northern Europe, 1603–1618,” in Ships, Guns and Bibles in the North Sea and Baltic States, c. 1350–1700, ed. Macnnes, A. I. and Pedersen, F. G. (East Linton, 2000): 93107Google Scholar; Murdoch, Steve, “James VI and the Formation of a Scottish-British Military Identity,” in Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c. 1550–1900, ed. Murdoch, Steve and Mackillop, A. (Leiden, 2002), 332Google Scholar.

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97 White, “Militant Protestants,” 163.

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99 Ibid., 39v.

100 Spedding, The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, 315.

101 Ibid., 323.

102 Ibid., 218–34; Galloway and Levack, The Jacobean Union, 143–51.

103 Ibid., 232.

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