The Unplanned State: How Great Britain Came to Be
On July 12, 927, four people met on the banks of the River Eamont near Penrith. King Constantine II of Scots, Hywel Dda of Deheubarth, and the rulers of Strathclyde and Bamburgh recognized the overlordship of Æthelstan, King of Wessex, who had just captured Viking York. No document survives; a chronicler records that those assembled "promised peace and renounced all idolatry." Historians date England as a unified kingdom from this meeting.
Five hundred years before Eamont, the Romans left Britain. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes gradually migrated eastward; by the end of the fifth century, they had replaced the Celtic elite, and by the eighth century, they had formed seven kingdoms, later known as the Heptarchy—Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and East Anglia. The borders between them were fluid, hegemony shifted from one kingdom to another, but there was no common center.
An external blow arrived in 793, when Vikings sacked a monastery on Lindisfarne. Seventy years later, in 865, the Great Heathen Army, commanded by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson, landed on the coast of East Anglia—not for loot, but for land. By 878, only Wessex remained. King Alfred, defeated during the winter and hiding in the marshes of Somerset, returned in the summer and defeated Guthrum at Edington. The Treaty of Wedmore formalized the division of the island: the northeast, known as the Danelaw, remained with the Danes, the southwest with Alfred.
The unification then continued over generations. Alfred's daughter, Æthelflæd, the "Lady of the Mercians," recaptured Central England one burh (a burh is a medieval fortified settlement, castle, or stronghold in Western Europe (8th–9th centuries) that served as a refuge and administrative center) at a time. Her brother, Edward the Elder, moved north. Edward's son, Æthelstan, took York in 927 and forced his neighbors to Eamont.
In 973, Æthelstan's grandson, Edgar the Peacemaker, was crowned in Bath according to a specially designed rite that echoed imperial ceremonies. Soon after, he arrived in Chester, and, according to the chronicler John of Worcester, six subject kings rowed his longboat down the River Dee, with Edgar himself at the helm. The scene is semi-mythical, yet revealing: the English king was no longer claiming authority over the English people, but overlordship of the entire island.
The battle between the Anglo-Saxons Æthelstan and Edmund against a coalition of Vikings (Olaf Guthfrithsson), Scots (Constantine II), and Strathclyde (Eoghan I). Shown are hand-to-hand combat with cavalry versus infantry, and the flight of the vanquished to the ships..
The Norman Conquest of 1066 did not abolish this order. After the death of Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson ascended the throne. On September 25, he defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge; three days later, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey; and on October 14, Harold died at Hastings. By 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled, the English retained approximately five percent of their lands south of the River Tees. The elite and the language of the court had changed, but William built castles and consolidated the state of Æthelstan and Edgar into a tighter administrative grid rather than dismantling it.
The next step toward the island as a whole took place a century later and occurred almost by accident. In 1169, the deposed King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough, invited Norman mercenaries from Wales to help him reclaim the throne. The expedition was led by Richard de Clare, nicknamed Strongbow, and within two years, he had captured most of eastern Ireland. Henry II, alarmed by his vassals establishing their own kingdoms, landed himself in 1171 and accepted the homage of the Irish chieftains. From 1254, Ireland was formally considered a dependent kingdom of the Crown, but actual English control was limited to a fortified strip around Dublin known as the Pale. Outside this area, Irish customs prevailed, and the Anglo-Norman aristocracy gradually became Gaelicized.
Wales was absorbed more slowly and methodically. Edward I waged his first campaign in 1277, recapturing the coastal plains from the last Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Llywelyn accepted the terms, but rebelled again in 1282 and died in a skirmish on the River Irvon. His head was displayed in the Tower of London. The Statute of Rhuddlan of 1284 organized the conquered lands into a Principality of Wales consisting of six counties, preserving its separate status but integrating it with English law. Full unification only occurred under Henry VIII: the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542–1543 abolished Welsh law, made English the sole language of courts and administration, and granted Wales seats in the English parliament. The Welsh did not participate in the drafting of these acts.
That same year, 1542, Henry VIII passed the Crown Act of Ireland and declared himself King of Ireland, not Lord, as his predecessors had been since John Lackland. This was a largely symbolic gesture: outside of the Pale, the vast majority of the island continued to live as before.
This timeline depicts the siege of Drogheda in 1649, a key event during Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland
For the next century and a half, London attempted to change this by force. As early as 1366, the Statutes of Kilkenny prohibited English colonists from speaking Irish, wearing Irish clothing, and intermarrying with the locals. The statutes were largely ignored, but they cemented the island's division into "English" and "Irish" Ireland. In the early 17th century, under James I, the Plantation of Ulster began: Catholic Irish clans had their lands confiscated and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland and England. It was this demographic operation that three centuries later would determine the borders of Northern Ireland. From 1649 to 1653, Oliver Cromwell carried out a punitive campaign in Ireland that was remarkable for its brutality even by the standards of his era: the Drogheda and Wexford massacres, mass confiscations, and the exile of thousands of Irish to Barbados. By the end of the century, Catholics were left with less than a fifth of the land they had held before Cromwell's rise. The Penal Laws passed in England and the Irish Parliament at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries prohibited Catholics from holding public office, voting, studying abroad, buying land and holding property. weaponBy 1700, Ireland was no longer a separate kingdom in personal union, but a governed colony with a subordinate parliament and a discriminated majority of the population.
Further north, the opposite occurred. The kingdom, traditionally traced to Kenneth MacAlpin in 843, emerged from the confluence of Alba, Strathclyde, and Lothian, and by the 13th century, it had acquired borders that largely remain on the map today. The Treaty of York in 1237 between Henry III and Alexander II drew a line from the mouth of the Tweed to the Solway Firth; the Scottish kings renounced their claims to the northern English counties, while the English kings renounced their claims to the lands north of the new line. It was a treaty of equals.
Equality ended in 1296, when Edward I, taking advantage of the dynastic crisis following the death of Queen Margaret, attempted to subjugate Scotland in the same way he had Wales. Things turned out differently. The First War of Independence lasted thirty-two years, culminating in the execution of William Wallace and the victory of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. In 1328, the Treaty of Edinburgh sealed the deal: Edward III recognized Bruce as king of an independent Scotland. The Second War of 1332–1357 confirmed this outcome. Unlike Wales, Scotland proved impossible to conquer.
The painting depicts the Battle of Bannockburn, which took place on June 23–24, 1314. It was the decisive battle of the First War of Scottish Independence, in which the Scottish army, led by King Robert the Bruce, inflicted a crushing defeat on the superior forces of the English King Edward II.
It was reunited differently, and that took another century and a half. In 1503, James IV of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. The marriage was part of the peace treaty and didn't frighten anyone at the time: Henry had an heir, Arthur, and after his death, Henry VIII, who had children, and his children had prospects. The Stuarts were far down the line.
The line cleared within a century. Arthur died, leaving Henry VIII with three children from three marriages, each of whom ascended the throne, none of whom left any offspring. In March 1603, at Elizabeth I's deathbed, her advisers acknowledged that the closest legitimate heir was that very Margaret's great-grandson, James VI of Scotland. On March 24, a messenger rushed to Edinburgh. By summer, James entered London as James I of England.
It was called the Union of the Crowns, but strictly speaking, it was not a union. The two kingdoms retained their own parliaments, courts, churches, and armies; only the monarch was shared. James attempted to push for full unification, declaring that dividing what God had united was tantamount to cutting a living body, and threatening to bury opponents of the merger at the bottom of the sea. Neither the English nor the Scottish parliament supported him. The only practical consequence of the Union of the Crowns was the Edinburgh-London postal service, the ancestor of the Royal Mail.
The following hundred years of preparatory work, carried out against everyone's wishes, continued. James's son, Charles I, attempted to impose an Anglican church structure on Scotland, resulting in a rebellion, a civil war from the rebellion, and his own execution from the war. Oliver Cromwell, having seized power, in 1653–1654, for the first time in stories He politically united England, Scotland, and Ireland: his "Instrument of Government" declared them a single Commonwealth, granted Scotland thirty seats in a common parliament, and introduced a unified tax and customs system. This union was maintained by the army; in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II, it was abolished along with the other institutions of the Protectorate. But experience showed that unification was technically possible.
The next impetus came from religion. In 1685, the Catholic James II ascended the throne. As long as he had only two adult Protestant daughters, this was tolerated. When his wife gave birth to a son in June 1688, the prospect of a Catholic dynasty became a reality, and the "Immortal Seven" of English aristocrats invited James's son-in-law, the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, who was married to his eldest daughter, Mary. In November, William landed in Devon; by December, James had fled to France.
Parliament formalized the Glorious Revolution with the Bill of Rights of 1689: the monarch rules by law, convenes Parliament regularly, does not repeal acts, and does not maintain an army without the consent of both Houses. The Act of Settlement of 1701 added a religious filter: the throne cannot be ascended by a Catholic, nor can it be ascended by the spouse of a Catholic. Since Anne, James II's youngest daughter, had no children surviving to adulthood, the English Parliament appointed Sophia of Hanover, the great-granddaughter of James I, as heir—beating out more than fifty Catholic Stuarts who were closer in line.
Scotland disagreed with this act. In 1704, its parliament passed the Act of Security: after Anne's death, the Scots would elect their own monarch, and it would not necessarily be the same person elected in London. England responded with the Foreign Act of 1705. If the Scottish Parliament did not accept the Hanoverian heir by Christmas, all Scots within English territory would be considered foreigners. In this case, trade with England and its colonies would cease.
The threat struck a nerve. A decade earlier, the Scottish elite had invested some five hundred thousand pounds—roughly a quarter of all the wealth in the country—in a colonial project on the Isthmus of Panama. The site chosen for the colony, "Caledonia," was on the marshy shores of the Gulf of Darien; of the two and a half thousand settlers who arrived, more than four-fifths died within a year, primarily from malaria and yellow fever; the rest were finished off by the Spanish blockade. Scotland was devastated and besieged. The English offer to negotiate union came at precisely the moment when refusal would have been suicidal.
Commissioners from both kingdoms met in London and agreed on the Treaty of Union on July 22, 1706. It contained twenty-five articles, fifteen of which were economic. It stipulated a single parliament in Westminster. Free trade within the new kingdom was guaranteed. The Church of Scotland would remain Presbyterian and established, Scots law and the High Court of Session would remain independent, and Scottish peers would be guaranteed seats in the House of Lords. Article 398 stipulated that Scotland would pay £085 10 shillings—the so-called "Equivalent," compensation for assuming the English national debt. A significant portion of this sum went to cover the losses of the Darien investors, that is, the very elite who voted.
The Edinburgh vote lasted three months. Crowds gathered in the streets, anti-union sermons were heard in churches, and parliamentary debates were disrupted by shouting. Scottish historian William Ferguson would later call the proceedings a "political operation" in which peerages, pensions, and direct payments were used as leverage. On January 16, 1707, the Act of Union passed: 110 votes in favor, 69 against. The English Parliament ratified the treaty quickly; Anne signed it on March 6. On May 1, 1707, the united Kingdom of Great Britain came into force. Scotland sent forty-five MPs to Westminster.
The last unification took shape in the same logic of fear. The French Revolution of 1789 transformed any weakness on the British border into a threat, and Ireland, with its Catholic majority, its own parliament, and simmering discontent, proved such a place. The 1798 rebellion, supported by a French expedition, was suppressed with great bloodshed, and William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, concluded that a separate Irish parliament could no longer be tolerated.
A painting depicting the Battle of Three Rocks (also known as the Battle of Fort Mountain), which took place on May 30, 1798, during the Irish Rebellion.
The Acts of Union of 1800 were passed as two parallel laws—the British on July 2, the Irish on August 1. Votes in Dublin, as in Edinburgh ninety-three years earlier, were purchased: with peerages, offices, and direct money. On January 1, 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into force; on January 22, the united Parliament convened for the first time. Ireland received one hundred seats in the House of Commons—half as many as it had in its own parliament.
This order lasted for one hundred and twenty years. The Irish War of Independence of 1919–1921 ended with a treaty under which twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties formed the Irish Free State; the six northeastern counties, with a Protestant majority and descendants of 17th-century Ulster settlers, remained within the Kingdom under the name Northern Ireland. In 1927, the state was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—its current name. In 1949, the Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland and finally left the British Empire.
In the thousand years between Eamont's Assembly and the 1927 Act, Great Britain was united around its Anglo-Saxon core four times—and divided once. None of these events were planned in advance. Æthelstan gathered the kings because he had taken York. Edward I marched on Wales because he could. The Scottish Parliament voted for union because the Panama colony had killed the colonists and their money. The Irish Parliament voted for it because it feared the French. The Irish Free State seceded because it could no longer be held together.
England is getting itself together
Five hundred years before Eamont, the Romans left Britain. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes gradually migrated eastward; by the end of the fifth century, they had replaced the Celtic elite, and by the eighth century, they had formed seven kingdoms, later known as the Heptarchy—Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and East Anglia. The borders between them were fluid, hegemony shifted from one kingdom to another, but there was no common center.
An external blow arrived in 793, when Vikings sacked a monastery on Lindisfarne. Seventy years later, in 865, the Great Heathen Army, commanded by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan Ragnarsson, landed on the coast of East Anglia—not for loot, but for land. By 878, only Wessex remained. King Alfred, defeated during the winter and hiding in the marshes of Somerset, returned in the summer and defeated Guthrum at Edington. The Treaty of Wedmore formalized the division of the island: the northeast, known as the Danelaw, remained with the Danes, the southwest with Alfred.
The unification then continued over generations. Alfred's daughter, Æthelflæd, the "Lady of the Mercians," recaptured Central England one burh (a burh is a medieval fortified settlement, castle, or stronghold in Western Europe (8th–9th centuries) that served as a refuge and administrative center) at a time. Her brother, Edward the Elder, moved north. Edward's son, Æthelstan, took York in 927 and forced his neighbors to Eamont.
In 973, Æthelstan's grandson, Edgar the Peacemaker, was crowned in Bath according to a specially designed rite that echoed imperial ceremonies. Soon after, he arrived in Chester, and, according to the chronicler John of Worcester, six subject kings rowed his longboat down the River Dee, with Edgar himself at the helm. The scene is semi-mythical, yet revealing: the English king was no longer claiming authority over the English people, but overlordship of the entire island.
The battle between the Anglo-Saxons Æthelstan and Edmund against a coalition of Vikings (Olaf Guthfrithsson), Scots (Constantine II), and Strathclyde (Eoghan I). Shown are hand-to-hand combat with cavalry versus infantry, and the flight of the vanquished to the ships..
The Norman Conquest of 1066 did not abolish this order. After the death of Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwinson ascended the throne. On September 25, he defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge; three days later, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey; and on October 14, Harold died at Hastings. By 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled, the English retained approximately five percent of their lands south of the River Tees. The elite and the language of the court had changed, but William built castles and consolidated the state of Æthelstan and Edgar into a tighter administrative grid rather than dismantling it.
Wales and Ireland: Conquest without a plan
The next step toward the island as a whole took place a century later and occurred almost by accident. In 1169, the deposed King of Leinster, Dermot MacMurrough, invited Norman mercenaries from Wales to help him reclaim the throne. The expedition was led by Richard de Clare, nicknamed Strongbow, and within two years, he had captured most of eastern Ireland. Henry II, alarmed by his vassals establishing their own kingdoms, landed himself in 1171 and accepted the homage of the Irish chieftains. From 1254, Ireland was formally considered a dependent kingdom of the Crown, but actual English control was limited to a fortified strip around Dublin known as the Pale. Outside this area, Irish customs prevailed, and the Anglo-Norman aristocracy gradually became Gaelicized.
Wales was absorbed more slowly and methodically. Edward I waged his first campaign in 1277, recapturing the coastal plains from the last Welsh prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. Llywelyn accepted the terms, but rebelled again in 1282 and died in a skirmish on the River Irvon. His head was displayed in the Tower of London. The Statute of Rhuddlan of 1284 organized the conquered lands into a Principality of Wales consisting of six counties, preserving its separate status but integrating it with English law. Full unification only occurred under Henry VIII: the Acts of Union of 1536 and 1542–1543 abolished Welsh law, made English the sole language of courts and administration, and granted Wales seats in the English parliament. The Welsh did not participate in the drafting of these acts.
That same year, 1542, Henry VIII passed the Crown Act of Ireland and declared himself King of Ireland, not Lord, as his predecessors had been since John Lackland. This was a largely symbolic gesture: outside of the Pale, the vast majority of the island continued to live as before.
This timeline depicts the siege of Drogheda in 1649, a key event during Oliver Cromwell's conquest of Ireland
For the next century and a half, London attempted to change this by force. As early as 1366, the Statutes of Kilkenny prohibited English colonists from speaking Irish, wearing Irish clothing, and intermarrying with the locals. The statutes were largely ignored, but they cemented the island's division into "English" and "Irish" Ireland. In the early 17th century, under James I, the Plantation of Ulster began: Catholic Irish clans had their lands confiscated and given to Protestant settlers from Scotland and England. It was this demographic operation that three centuries later would determine the borders of Northern Ireland. From 1649 to 1653, Oliver Cromwell carried out a punitive campaign in Ireland that was remarkable for its brutality even by the standards of his era: the Drogheda and Wexford massacres, mass confiscations, and the exile of thousands of Irish to Barbados. By the end of the century, Catholics were left with less than a fifth of the land they had held before Cromwell's rise. The Penal Laws passed in England and the Irish Parliament at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries prohibited Catholics from holding public office, voting, studying abroad, buying land and holding property. weaponBy 1700, Ireland was no longer a separate kingdom in personal union, but a governed colony with a subordinate parliament and a discriminated majority of the population.
Scotland has been holding out for four centuries
Further north, the opposite occurred. The kingdom, traditionally traced to Kenneth MacAlpin in 843, emerged from the confluence of Alba, Strathclyde, and Lothian, and by the 13th century, it had acquired borders that largely remain on the map today. The Treaty of York in 1237 between Henry III and Alexander II drew a line from the mouth of the Tweed to the Solway Firth; the Scottish kings renounced their claims to the northern English counties, while the English kings renounced their claims to the lands north of the new line. It was a treaty of equals.
Equality ended in 1296, when Edward I, taking advantage of the dynastic crisis following the death of Queen Margaret, attempted to subjugate Scotland in the same way he had Wales. Things turned out differently. The First War of Independence lasted thirty-two years, culminating in the execution of William Wallace and the victory of Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn. In 1328, the Treaty of Edinburgh sealed the deal: Edward III recognized Bruce as king of an independent Scotland. The Second War of 1332–1357 confirmed this outcome. Unlike Wales, Scotland proved impossible to conquer.
The painting depicts the Battle of Bannockburn, which took place on June 23–24, 1314. It was the decisive battle of the First War of Scottish Independence, in which the Scottish army, led by King Robert the Bruce, inflicted a crushing defeat on the superior forces of the English King Edward II.
It was reunited differently, and that took another century and a half. In 1503, James IV of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. The marriage was part of the peace treaty and didn't frighten anyone at the time: Henry had an heir, Arthur, and after his death, Henry VIII, who had children, and his children had prospects. The Stuarts were far down the line.
The line cleared within a century. Arthur died, leaving Henry VIII with three children from three marriages, each of whom ascended the throne, none of whom left any offspring. In March 1603, at Elizabeth I's deathbed, her advisers acknowledged that the closest legitimate heir was that very Margaret's great-grandson, James VI of Scotland. On March 24, a messenger rushed to Edinburgh. By summer, James entered London as James I of England.
It was called the Union of the Crowns, but strictly speaking, it was not a union. The two kingdoms retained their own parliaments, courts, churches, and armies; only the monarch was shared. James attempted to push for full unification, declaring that dividing what God had united was tantamount to cutting a living body, and threatening to bury opponents of the merger at the bottom of the sea. Neither the English nor the Scottish parliament supported him. The only practical consequence of the Union of the Crowns was the Edinburgh-London postal service, the ancestor of the Royal Mail.
Money, Fear, and the Union of 1707
The following hundred years of preparatory work, carried out against everyone's wishes, continued. James's son, Charles I, attempted to impose an Anglican church structure on Scotland, resulting in a rebellion, a civil war from the rebellion, and his own execution from the war. Oliver Cromwell, having seized power, in 1653–1654, for the first time in stories He politically united England, Scotland, and Ireland: his "Instrument of Government" declared them a single Commonwealth, granted Scotland thirty seats in a common parliament, and introduced a unified tax and customs system. This union was maintained by the army; in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II, it was abolished along with the other institutions of the Protectorate. But experience showed that unification was technically possible.
The next impetus came from religion. In 1685, the Catholic James II ascended the throne. As long as he had only two adult Protestant daughters, this was tolerated. When his wife gave birth to a son in June 1688, the prospect of a Catholic dynasty became a reality, and the "Immortal Seven" of English aristocrats invited James's son-in-law, the Dutch stadtholder William of Orange, who was married to his eldest daughter, Mary. In November, William landed in Devon; by December, James had fled to France.
Parliament formalized the Glorious Revolution with the Bill of Rights of 1689: the monarch rules by law, convenes Parliament regularly, does not repeal acts, and does not maintain an army without the consent of both Houses. The Act of Settlement of 1701 added a religious filter: the throne cannot be ascended by a Catholic, nor can it be ascended by the spouse of a Catholic. Since Anne, James II's youngest daughter, had no children surviving to adulthood, the English Parliament appointed Sophia of Hanover, the great-granddaughter of James I, as heir—beating out more than fifty Catholic Stuarts who were closer in line.
Scotland disagreed with this act. In 1704, its parliament passed the Act of Security: after Anne's death, the Scots would elect their own monarch, and it would not necessarily be the same person elected in London. England responded with the Foreign Act of 1705. If the Scottish Parliament did not accept the Hanoverian heir by Christmas, all Scots within English territory would be considered foreigners. In this case, trade with England and its colonies would cease.
The threat struck a nerve. A decade earlier, the Scottish elite had invested some five hundred thousand pounds—roughly a quarter of all the wealth in the country—in a colonial project on the Isthmus of Panama. The site chosen for the colony, "Caledonia," was on the marshy shores of the Gulf of Darien; of the two and a half thousand settlers who arrived, more than four-fifths died within a year, primarily from malaria and yellow fever; the rest were finished off by the Spanish blockade. Scotland was devastated and besieged. The English offer to negotiate union came at precisely the moment when refusal would have been suicidal.
Commissioners from both kingdoms met in London and agreed on the Treaty of Union on July 22, 1706. It contained twenty-five articles, fifteen of which were economic. It stipulated a single parliament in Westminster. Free trade within the new kingdom was guaranteed. The Church of Scotland would remain Presbyterian and established, Scots law and the High Court of Session would remain independent, and Scottish peers would be guaranteed seats in the House of Lords. Article 398 stipulated that Scotland would pay £085 10 shillings—the so-called "Equivalent," compensation for assuming the English national debt. A significant portion of this sum went to cover the losses of the Darien investors, that is, the very elite who voted.
The Edinburgh vote lasted three months. Crowds gathered in the streets, anti-union sermons were heard in churches, and parliamentary debates were disrupted by shouting. Scottish historian William Ferguson would later call the proceedings a "political operation" in which peerages, pensions, and direct payments were used as leverage. On January 16, 1707, the Act of Union passed: 110 votes in favor, 69 against. The English Parliament ratified the treaty quickly; Anne signed it on March 6. On May 1, 1707, the united Kingdom of Great Britain came into force. Scotland sent forty-five MPs to Westminster.
Ireland and the Reverse
The last unification took shape in the same logic of fear. The French Revolution of 1789 transformed any weakness on the British border into a threat, and Ireland, with its Catholic majority, its own parliament, and simmering discontent, proved such a place. The 1798 rebellion, supported by a French expedition, was suppressed with great bloodshed, and William Pitt the Younger, the Prime Minister, concluded that a separate Irish parliament could no longer be tolerated.
A painting depicting the Battle of Three Rocks (also known as the Battle of Fort Mountain), which took place on May 30, 1798, during the Irish Rebellion.
The Acts of Union of 1800 were passed as two parallel laws—the British on July 2, the Irish on August 1. Votes in Dublin, as in Edinburgh ninety-three years earlier, were purchased: with peerages, offices, and direct money. On January 1, 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland came into force; on January 22, the united Parliament convened for the first time. Ireland received one hundred seats in the House of Commons—half as many as it had in its own parliament.
This order lasted for one hundred and twenty years. The Irish War of Independence of 1919–1921 ended with a treaty under which twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties formed the Irish Free State; the six northeastern counties, with a Protestant majority and descendants of 17th-century Ulster settlers, remained within the Kingdom under the name Northern Ireland. In 1927, the state was renamed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—its current name. In 1949, the Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland and finally left the British Empire.
In the thousand years between Eamont's Assembly and the 1927 Act, Great Britain was united around its Anglo-Saxon core four times—and divided once. None of these events were planned in advance. Æthelstan gathered the kings because he had taken York. Edward I marched on Wales because he could. The Scottish Parliament voted for union because the Panama colony had killed the colonists and their money. The Irish Parliament voted for it because it feared the French. The Irish Free State seceded because it could no longer be held together.
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