Kingdom of Great Britain

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kingdom of Great Britain came into being on the 1st of May 1707, not with a battle or a conquest, but with a signature. Two ancient kingdoms, England and Scotland, folded themselves into a single state through a Treaty of Union agreed in 1706, and ratified by separate Acts of Union in each parliament. One morning there were two crowns; by evening, there was one kingdom governing the entire island of Great Britain and most of its outlying islands.

  What made this moment so improbable was how long it had been resisted. For more than a century, ever since James VI of Scotland rode south to become King of England in 1603, politicians on both sides had attempted and abandoned a full political union. The personal union of the crowns had existed for over a hundred years without becoming a legislative one. So what finally changed?

  The answer involves a dying queen with no Protestant heir, a kingdom anxious about who would sit on its throne, and a parliament willing to act before disaster arrived. This documentary examines the state that emerged from that moment: how it was built, who shaped it, what it built across the globe, and why, less than a century later, it merged again into something larger.

• 2. The Union That Almost Was Not

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  Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch to rule England and Scotland separately, had a pressing problem. She produced no clear Protestant heir, and the laws of succession differed between her two kingdoms. Scotland's Act of Security 1704 threatened a path that could return the Roman Catholic House of Stuart to the Scottish throne, exiled since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That prospect alarmed English politicians enough to make a full political union seem necessary rather than merely convenient.

  Negotiations between representatives of both parliaments produced the Treaty of Union in 1706. Each parliament then passed its own Acts of Union, and on the 1st of May 1707 those acts came into force. Anne became the first monarch of Great Britain, and in line with Article 22 of the Treaty, both England and Scotland sent members to the new House of Commons at Westminster.

  Yet the union was not a clean merger. The two countries kept their distinct legal systems: English law and Scots law continued side by side. The Church of England and the Church of Scotland remained as the separate national churches of their respective countries. Scotland retained its own universities and its own system of courts. The Scottish Enlightenment, centred especially in Edinburgh, would go on to shape British, American, and European thinking. The ruling classes of both countries kept their grip on power; what changed was the chamber in which that power was exercised.

  The name itself came with a history. The term Great Britain had appeared in official contexts at least as early as the proclamation of Charles I's accession in 1625. It derived from the French habit of distinguishing between Britain and Brittany by calling the island la Grande Bretagne. The Treaty and Acts formalised what had been a geographical expression into the name of a sovereign state.

• 3. Parliament and Its New Shape

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  Both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland were abolished on the day the Acts of Union came into force, replaced by a single Parliament of Great Britain meeting at the Palace of Westminster. In practice, the new body was a continuation of the English parliament, expanded to include Scottish representation.

  The terms of that representation reflected a deliberate imbalance. Scottish peers were numerous, but only sixteen Scottish representative peers, elected from among their number, were permitted to sit in the House of Lords for the life of each parliament. In the Commons, the number of Scottish representatives was fixed at 45, proportioned to reflect the relative tax bases of the two countries rather than their populations. English and Welsh constituencies remained unchanged throughout the parliament's existence.

  Ireland's relationship with the new state was more complicated. Under Poynings' Law of 1495, the Parliament of Ireland had already been subordinate to the Parliament of England, and after 1707 it became subordinate to the Parliament of Great Britain. The Westminster parliament's Declaratory Act 1719 made that subordination explicit, asserting the right to make laws binding the Kingdom of Ireland. However, that act was repealed by 1782, and an Irish constitution of the same year produced a brief period of legislative freedom for Dublin.

  The Irish Rebellion of 1798, which sought to end Ireland's dependence on the British crown and establish a republic, ultimately had the opposite effect. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger concluded that only a full union could resolve the Irish question. The result was the Acts of Union 1800, which dissolved the Kingdom of Great Britain and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on the 1st of January 1801.

• 4. Robert Walpole and the Art of Power

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  Robert Walpole, born in 1676, was the son of a landed gentleman from Norfolk who rose to dominate British politics for more than two decades. He held the position of First Lord of the Treasury from 1721 to 1742, and the term "prime minister" was in use to describe him by 1727. No one before him had wielded such sustained influence over both the Crown and Parliament.

  His grip on power rested on an unabashed mastery of patronage. By 1742, over 140 members of parliament held positions thanks in part to Walpole, including 24 men at the royal court and 50 in government agencies. Sinecures and pensions in the range of £500 to £1,000 per year flowed to allies who in turn kept him in office. When the Court created the Order of the Bath in 1725, Walpole moved quickly to ensure that most of the 36 men honoured were peers and members of parliament who would strengthen his connections.

  His foreign policy rested on a single conviction: wars were expensive, and peace could be profitable. He boasted that 50,000 men had died in Europe in one year without a single Englishman among them. He worked with Cardinal Fleury, the elderly chief minister of King Louis XV, to prevent major conflict and allow both countries to recover from expensive campaigns. He reduced the land tax from four shillings in 1721, to three in 1728, two in 1731, and finally one shilling in 1732.

  His one significant domestic defeat came in 1733, when he attempted to replace land taxes with excise taxes on wine and tobacco. The proposal was extremely unpopular because the tax was to be collected at warehouses rather than ports, which alarmed merchants about the supervision it would involve. Walpole withdrew the plan. Opposition continued to build, and in early 1742 a narrow parliamentary margin finally forced him from office. He was created Earl of Orford and was succeeded as prime minister by Henry Pelham.

• 5. The South Sea Catastrophe

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  On the 25th of June 1720, stock in the South Sea Company reached £1,060. By the end of September, it had fallen to £150. The collapse ruined hundreds of prominent men who had borrowed to buy shares at the peak, and it very nearly took the Hanoverian government down with it.

  The South Sea Company had been set up originally to trade with the Spanish Empire, but had turned most of its attention to high-risk financing. It managed approximately £30 million of debt, around 60 per cent of the entire British national debt at the time. The scheme invited stock owners to exchange their certificates for company shares at a par value of £100, on the assumption that rising prices would generate profits. The fever spread across the financial world, and many other schemes found willing investors.

  When Parliament investigated after the collapse, it found widespread fraud by company directors and corruption reaching into the Cabinet. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Postmaster General, and a Secretary of State were among those implicated, along with Lord Stanhope and Lord Sunderland. Confidence in the entire national financial system broke down.

  Walpole had speculated himself but was not a major player. He stepped into the crisis as First Lord of the Treasury, working with financiers to restore confidence in the system. He supervised the removal of all 33 company directors and stripped them of an average of 82 per cent of their wealth, redistributing the proceeds to victims. He ensured that King George I and his mistresses were not embarrassed by the scandal, and by a margin of three votes he saved several key government officials from impeachment. Stanhope and Sunderland both died of natural causes in the aftermath, leaving Walpole as the unchallenged dominant figure in British politics for another two decades.

• 6. Empire and Its Costs

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  Victory in the Seven Years' War, which ran from 1756 to 1763, transformed Britain into the world's foremost colonial power. The war was fought on a global scale, with British forces engaged in Europe, India, North America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and coastal Africa. The year 1759, which became known as the "Annus Mirabilis" or miracle year, saw victories on every front: Fort Ticonderoga was captured, Quebec City fell after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the sugar island of Guadeloupe was taken in the West Indies, and the French navy was defeated at the Battle of Lagos and the Battle of Quiberon Bay. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 handed New France to Britain and left France's military presence in India so restricted that the subcontinent's future effectively belonged to the East India Company.

  That company, known informally as the John Company, was not a government body but a private, for-profit corporation with its own army. It had gained control over Bengal through Robert Clive's victories at the Battle of Plassey and the Battle of Buxar. The company commanded what were known as presidency armies, with British officers leading native Indian troops called sepoys.

  The cost of empire eventually arrived from across the Atlantic. During the 1760s and 1770s, Parliament's insistence on taxing the Thirteen Colonies without their consent, partly to recover costs from the French and Indian War, turned a manageable tension into open revolt. The American Revolutionary War began in 1775 at the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July 1776. Britain captured two main British armies in 1777 and 1781, and the Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognised the United States as independent. Approximately 8,500 British troops were killed in action during the war.

  The loss of those colonies did not end imperial ambition. In 1770, explorer James Cook had mapped Australia's eastern coast. By 1783, American Loyalist James Matra had submitted a formal proposal to establish a settlement in New South Wales. Lord Sydney suggested adding convicts to the plan. The government adopted the basics of Matra's proposal in 1784, and in 1787 the First Fleet set sail. It arrived in January 1788.

• 7. Religion, Reform, and the Kingdom's End

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  John Wesley, who lived from 1703 to 1791, delivered an estimated 52,000 sermons over the course of his life, calling on his listeners to "redeem the time" and save their souls. He always worked inside the Church of England, but at his death the movement he had shaped became the Methodist Church, a separate institution standing alongside Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Unitarians, and Quakers.

  Within the Church of England itself, an evangelical faction centred on what was called the Low Church gained influence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its leaders included William Wilberforce and Hannah More, and it reached the upper classes through a network known as the Clapham Sect. The evangelicals did not seek to change the hierarchical structure of English society. They sought instead to change behaviour: freeing enslaved people, abolishing duelling, prohibiting cruelty to children and animals, and discouraging gambling and Sabbath frivolity.

  The French Revolution of 1789 and the wars that followed it produced a different kind of unity. With the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793, anti-Catholicism became a binding force across the three kingdoms. The Napoleonic Wars, which ran until 1815, required sustained military and financial commitment. French ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy. Napoleon, who came to power in 1799, threatened invasion of Britain itself.

  In Ireland, the French Revolution revived older grievances. Irish nationalists plotted the rebellion of 1798, hoping for French assistance that never arrived. The uprising was quickly suppressed; the total death toll was estimated at between 10,000 and 30,000. Pitt the Younger concluded that only a formal union could stabilise the situation. The Acts of Union 1800 merged Great Britain and Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on the 1st of January 1801, and with that George III, who had been King of Great Britain since 1760, became King of the United Kingdom until his death in 1820.