Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into being on 1 January 1801, following the passage of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland during the preceding year. The state of Great Britain was itself of recent origin, having been created in 1707 by the Act of Union between England and Scotland. England had incorporated Wales as well following another, earlier, set of Acts of Union, in 1536 and 1543. Such ‘unions’ had been preceded by dynastic mergers: Henry Tudor's victory over Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 at least allowed the Welsh the comfort of believing that one of their own race sat upon the English throne and, following the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England had replaced the ‘Welsh’ Tudor dynasty with that of the ‘Scottish’ Stuarts. The subsequent history of the ‘British’ monarchy was far from simple, as the events of the years 1649, 1688, 1715 and 1745 indicate, but it was stabilized under George III from 1760 and remains a key national institution to this day. However, the United Kingdom, as created in 1801, lasted just over one hundred and twenty years: in December 1922 Ireland was partitioned and the Irish Free State launched, leaving the United Kingdom as that of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At the time of writing that eighty-year-old version of unitary state formation appears ... log in or subscribe to read full text