ABSTRACT
The parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707, and the accompanying measure of administrative integration, finally realized the implications present since the Union of the Crowns, while persistent obscurities in the constitutional relationship between England and Ireland were dispelled in a different but equally decisive manner by the English Declaratory Act of 1720. This chapter describes how the terminus had been reached; more specifically perhaps, to explains why legislative union had been seen as the answer to the Scottish question but not to the Irish. Behind the legislative experiments that mark the period can be found traditional calculations of political expediency, and the interplay between the two shaped the settlements which emerged. The necessity for additional taxation to finance European military commitments, and a simultaneous retreat from pro-active domestic policies, induced the post-Revolution monarchy to seek the cooperation of representative institutions in all three kingdoms in the hope of securing government by consensus.
