1603 and All That: Thomas Craig and the Union of the Crowns

Abstract

Following the Stuart accession to the English throne, there was an outpouring of unionist literature on both sides of the border promoting the idea of constructing a new Kingdom, or perhaps Empire, of Great Britain. Foremost among the unionist authors, north and south of Hadrian’s Wall, was the Edinburgh jurist Thomas Craig, whose De unione regnorum Britanniae or “Treatise on the union of the kingdoms of Britain” runs to about 95,000 words in the Latin. While the union project was unpopular on both sides of the border, it remains a recurring theme in all of Craig’s writings and seems to represent a personal preoccupation. The De unione was only one of a number of unionist works written in response to the union of the crowns, but it is both the longest and by far the most sophisticated work of Jacobean unionism possessing a deeper intellectual foundation than most of the others. This paper will show that Craig’s argumentation in the De unione is circumscribed by his deep Protestant faith but also by a lingering insecurity about the future of British Protestantism in a world dominated by Catholic Spain. Craig envisioned British history as a repeating cycle of internal division which led inevitably to foreign conquest, beginning with the Romans and ending with the Normans. This history of relations between Scotland and England, meanwhile, was of internecine warfare between co-religionists which had provoked God’s anger and allowed the rise of an apocalyptic enemy in the form of Catholic Spain. Union, for Craig, was a political and religious imperative that was necessary to preserve the Reformation in the British Isles. While his thinking was informed by classical and mediaeval thought and was shaped by the Old Testament, he ultimately understood union as something that could only be realised within a feudal-legal framework.