Acts of Union 1707

The Acts of Union were a pair of Parliamentary Acts passed in 1706 and 1707 by, respectively, the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland, to make effective the Treaty of Union which had been negotiated between the two countries. The Acts joined the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland which had been separate states before, with separate legislatures but with the same monarch into a single United Kingdom of Great Britain. At that time the Union Flag became the national flag.

For over a hundred years since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from his cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, the two had been in personal union The Acts of Union took effect on 1 May 1707.

Acts Of Union 1707 Media

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  Cromwell at Dunbar, 1650: Scotland was incorporated into the Commonwealth after defeat in the 1650–1652 Anglo-Scots War

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  Queen Anne in 1702

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  18th-century French illustration of an opening of the Scottish Parliament

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  "Articles of Union otherwise known as Treaty of Union", 1707

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  Heraldic badge of Queen Anne, depicting the Tudor rose and the Scottish thistle growing from the same stem

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  Portrait of John Smith by Godfrey Kneller, 1708. Smith was one of the commissioners who negotiated the union and was Speaker of the House of Commons in the new united parliament. He is shown by Kneller holding a copy of the Act of Union.

References

• Herman, Arthur. How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Three Rivers Press, 2001. ISBN 0-609-80999-7

Related pages

• Parliament of the United Kingdom

Other websites

• Act of Union 1707 Archived 2007-08-31 at the UK Web Archive, the UK Parliament
• The Treaty of Union Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine, the Scottish Parliament
• Articles of Union 1707 Archived 2008-05-03 at the Wayback Machine at the Parliamentary Archives
• Image of the Treaty of Union Archived 2009-09-18 at the Wayback Machine courtesy of the National archives of Scotland, published by the Scottish Council on Archives
• Union with England Act and Union with Scotland Act - Full original text Archived 2014-09-23 at the Wayback Machine
• Treaty of Union and the Darien Experiment, University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Library and Archives Canada