Ex Uno Plura? The British experience

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore, in at least some of their aspects, the forces and processes that have led to, and the concepts and principles that have governed, the establishment and the possible dismantling of a United Kingdom in the British Isles. To discuss this subject in 1979 is, manifestly, to discuss something that is very much part of the stuff of current politics in Britain, and I shall indeed be concerned later with recent — even very recent — developments. But it is above all an historical perspective that I wish to present; and while recent and contemporary history has an obvious and immediate relevance, the problems must be understood in a chronological context of some considerable length. We need not indeed return to the days of the Heptarchy in England and the vexed question of the status of the Bretwalda. We shall not have to wrestle with the intricacies of Welsh kingship in the Dark Ages or of the evolving relationships between the Picts and the Scots in what some Victorians called, and may have thought of as, North Britain. The High Kings of Ireland need not detain us. Yet there is a medieval dimension to our subject, for it was in the Middle Ages that the notion was in some sense conceived of what, in the event, was to exist in practice for little more than an uneasy century, from 1800 to 1921: the notion of a comprehensive union under one authority of all the British Isles. It goes without saying that the notion was an English notion — though indeed one should perhaps say that it was in origin an Anglo-Norman notion. It was the penetration of Wales, of Scotland, and of Ireland by a Norman baronage backed by the Norman and Angevin kings of England that laid the foundations for the medieval phase in the process with which we are concerned. This is no more than a preamble to my main theme; but it may be worthwhile to pause briefly over it.