The high-handedly Anglocentric attitudes of James’s son Charles I (1625-49), together with his fondness for religious ritual, and high levels of taxation to pay for foreign wars, did little to endear him to Scotland’s leaders. His attempts to introduce a new prayer book led to the signing of the 1638 National Covenant, which rallied support to the opposition, with the Covenanters’ army roundly defeating Charles in the Bishops’ Wars of 1639-40. After the English Civil War broke out in 1642 between Charles and Parliamentarians, the General Assembly met the following year and pledged allegiance to his opponents, couched in religious terms by the Solemn League and Covenant.

Despite the Scots' contribution to the war effort – it was to a Scottish army that Charles eventually surrendered, at Southwell in 1646 – they received few if any special favours under the subsequent rule of Oliver Cromwell, thanks in part to the counter-insurgency efforts of royalist Scots after Charles’s execution in 1649. Taking control in 1652, Cromwell imposed full parliamentary union with England, maintained by an occupying army.

During this period, against a backdrop of military conflict with the French and mounting Scottish demand for access to the international markets still controlled by England, the idea of political union - mooted since the reign of James VI and I - began to gain favour.

The financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the Darien Scheme, Scotland’s attempt to establish its own colony in Panama, hastened this process, leading to the eventual passage of the Act of Union in 1707, and the end of Scotland’s independent nationhood. Although the material inducements offered to the Scottish signatories has seen them popularly condemned as (in Robert Burns’s words) 'a parcel o’rogues', the Act did contain many important concessions to Scotland, including the retention and protection of its own separate ecclesiastical, legal and justice systems.