The peaceful accession of the electoral house of Brunswick-Lüneburg to the throne of Great Britain was roundly greeted with astonishment. The widespread reports of ‘such general joy’, as one observer put it, ‘nothing but Bonefires, letting out of Guns, and huzzaing, and drinking of King George’s health all night’, seemed to dispel at once the morbid apprehensions of insurrection and invasion, civil war and sectarian bloodshed that had long pervaded British politics. The American-born Henry Newman, secretary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, likened it to waking from a dream. Many naturally attributed such a turn of events to divine intervention. And as another public manifestation of the heavenly superintendence of the Protestant monarchy of Great Britain, Newman proclaimed the events of 1 August 1714, ‘not less miraculous, nor less seasonable than our late Happy Revolution was’. The comparison is, at once, both obvious and curious. Britons seldom felt the regard of providence as publicly and as tangibly as when it was confounding popery. And for a second time in living memory, the nation imagined itself preserved from the ruin of the Catholic Stuarts and their Bourbon sponsors. And yet, whether divinely engineered or not, the events of 1688–89 and those of 1714 represented rather different species of deliverance. The Glorious Revolution required an upending of law and dynastic right, the virtual annulment of a public theology that had for more than a generation immunised hereditary monarchy from resistance or critique. The Revolution might have been experienced immediately as an ‘appeal to heaven’ (in John Locke's famous phrase) simply because it seemed to occur so far out beyond the edges of legality and orthodoxy. The Hanoverian Succession, by contrast, embodied the fulfilment of the royal will, statutory law, international treaties, and even, for many, Anglican orthodoxy as it had been reformulated in the decades since 1689. A strange providence, indeed, that intervened to ensure the ordinary course of events.

That the death of the last Stuart monarch Queen Anne at age forty-nine and the accession of her second cousin, once removed Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover seemed to partake of the miraculous, in spite of all the international and domestic forces long at work to guarantee its consummation, illuminates something of the tensions and contradictions besetting British politics in the early eighteenth century.

The Hanoverian Succession did not have a uniform British impact. From an Anglocentric perspective, it consolidated the bipartisan Revolution of 1688–89 that was reaffirmed by the extension of the English state to include Scotland in 1707. The immediate impact of the Hanoverian Succession was to promote the Whig supremacy in Britain and Empire, albeit this was not fully secured until the defeat of the Jacobite rising of 1715–16. From a Scottish perspective, the Revolution of 1689–91 was an exclusive Whig achievement, uncompromised by any accommodation with the Tories. James VII was deposed in Scotland, whereas he was deemed, as James II, to have abdicated in England. Certainly, Whig interests at the Revolution in Scotland spilled over into the Union of 1707. However, there was no predetermined path from Revolution to Union. The English parliament rejected union with Scotland in 1689 and again in 1703, as also with Ireland in 1703, 1707 and 1709. The Irish parliament was subordinated to the British by the Declaratory Act of 1720.

Union with Scotland was driven on from 1705 by the English ministry. In part, this was because of the perceived threat of invasion from France through Scotland in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession. More pertinent were issues of political economy. The English state, during first the Nine Years War of 1688–97 and, subsequently, during the War of the Spanish Succession, had become increasingly disconcerted by the rogue behaviour of Scottish commercial networks as major interlopers in the colonial trade to the Americas. These networks circumvented the English Navigation Acts through tramptrading, a practice the Scots had exported from the Baltic to the Caribbean, through counterfeiting of shipping documentation and through the judicial packing of colonial courts, particularly in the Delaware. Networks operated not only from Scottish and colonial ports but through commercial hubs based in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Hamburg as well as London. The Union was specifically designed to bring these networks under control.

The Union did not close the door to foreign backing for Scottish Jacobitism which was offered variously from France, Spain, Sweden, Russia and the papacy before and after the Hanoverian Succession.

Global adventuring became a way of life for Scots in the seventeenth century. In the wake of the Treaty of Union, which incorporated Scotland and England from 1707, the traditional continental sojourning of Scots as soldiers and scholars was pressed into service of the inchoate yet expanding eighteenth-century British Empire. Scots became prominent in the British Army and Royal Navy. They also served with distinction on religious missions and in academic institutions that brought together enterprise and enlightenment. Enterprise, if not enlightenment, was a key feature of Scottish engagement in the tobacco and sugar trades from the Americas, in the tea, coffee and silk trades from Asia and in the slave trade from Africa. In the process, the high incidence and extent of Scottish mobility fostered identities that can readily be depicted as multi-polar or multi-faceted. To be understood, these identities must be weighted with respect to time and space and by the ways they were given particular focus by competing Scottish and British patriotisms originating in the internecine rivalry of Jacobites and Whigs, which was confessional and territorial as well as factional and political.

Scottish Jacobites sought the restoration of the house of Stuart exiled at the far from ‘glorious’ Revolution, the sundering of the Treaty of Union and the removal of the Presbyterian establishment in the Kirk that had been accomplished in 1689–90 and reaffirmed in 1707. British Whigs upheld the Revolution, the Union and, from 1714, the succession of the house of Hanover as monarchs.

In the summer of 1746, the Reverend Zachary MacAulay zealously assisted British forces searching on the island of Lewis for the fugitive Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite Prince decried by Whigs as the Young Pretender. Prince Charles escaped from Lewis unscathed, but Reverend MacAulay was forced off the island by parishioners disaffected by his Whig partisanship. A century later, his grandson Thomas Babington Macaulay brought cohesion, clarity and intellectual rigour to the Whig ideological perspective on the Revolution of 1689–91. The removal of James II and VII, the grandfather of Prince Charles, in favour of William of Orange, was resolutely presented as the triumph of Protestantism, property and progress. A historiographical tradition was thus firmly established that endured for most of the twentieth century. Jacobitism was treated dismissively. The principled commitment of the Jacobite supporters of the exiled house of Stuart was also belittled from an Anglocentric perspective. Irish and Scottish Jacobites died in considerable numbers during the Revolution deemed ‘Glorious’ by Whig historiography. Even though many more Scots and a few English died in the major rising of 1715–16 (hereafter the '15) and Scottish Highlanders in particular were brutalized in the aftermath of the last major rising in 1745–6 (hereafter the'45), the impact of Jacobitism was deemed peripheral to British state formation and global aspirations.