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The seventeenth century marks a crucial watershed in the long redrawing of the Scottish identity between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. During that 200 year period, from c. 1560 to c. 1760, the fundamental features of what had been the medieval Scottish identity were given new shape by the changing relationship with England that led to Scotland being assimilated into Great Britain in 1707 and by the process of creating a protestant community. These two factors, statehood and religion, are at the core of all nation-state formation in the early modern period, and each played a considerable part in the forging of national identity. Until the mid sixteenth century, the Scots were Roman Catholic and were loyal to their own Stewart kings who ruled over what was an emerging nation-state. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Scots were overwhelmingly protestant, being predominantly Calvinist presbyterians, while their loyalty was now divided between an historic Scottish nation and a new British state with a growing imperial role in the world. These two very profound changes largely took place on either side of the seventeenth century regal union, the irrevocable shift towards protestantism being made between 1560 and c. 1600, while the successful reorientation towards a unionist and British perspective was completed between 1707 and c. 1760. What existed in the middle of these two fairly distinct phases was the regal union, a period delineated by the union of the crowns in 1603 and the union of the parliaments in 1707. Seventeenth-century Scots, therefore, inhabited a multi-state aggregate of kingdoms, one they shared with the English, Irish and Welsh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the later Stuart period the nations of the British Isles became increasingly aware that their political, economic and religious interests were interdependent. The British wars of religion of 1639 to 1651, the union of England, Scotland and Ireland under the Commonwealth, the anti-Jacobite wars in Scotland and Ireland which followed and secured the Glorious Revolution in England, and the union of the English and Scottish kingdoms of 1707, ensured that the subjects of the seventeenth-century Stuart multiple monarchy became conscious of their dependence on the workings of a ‘British’ three-kingdom system. However, it will be argued here that the sense that the Stuarts' British dominions comprised more than a dynastic ensemble was not reflected in the emergence of a common British identity during this period. First, the existing national traditions of England, Scotland and Ireland proved too resilient to be easily fused beneath an overarching pan-Britannic identity. Moreover, it will be suggested, these identities found expression in three incompatible discourses. The conflicting regnal claims and counter-claims which constituted the principal expression of English, Scottish and Irish national identities were exacerbated by the politics of the composite state. For instance, in the century after the union of the crowns, Scottish churchmen, Episcopalians as well as presbyterians, were particularly prone to fears of Anglican ecclesiastical imperialism. Such jurisdictional anxieties added to the more obvious confessional divisions which plagued British protestantism. It will be clear from the analysis that follows, therefore, that no plausible British identity capable of engaging the affections of the various British peoples emerged under the Stuart dynasty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]