Crown of England post-1707? Read the Act!

 

As you can see from the above tweet (click to enlarge), Liberation Scotland – the people trying to have Scotland recognised by the UN as a ‘non self governing territory’ (see here) – are very excited by the discovery of what they believe is evidence of their theory that the Treaty of Union was never implemented and instead what happened was that England simply annexed and occupied Scotland with the consequence that the United Kingdom is really the pre-1707 Kingdom of England thinly disguised under a new name and with Scotland as a ‘non self governing territory’ (colony) of it.

The evidence in question is an Act of Parliament passed in 1772 (see it here (Chapter XXI)) which refers to ‘the Crown of England, or of Great Britain’. Liberation Scotland assume this to be alternative names for the same thing but alas they’ve made an elementary mistake: they didn’t bother to actually read the Act.

If they had, they'd have discovered that the references in it to ‘the Crown of England, or of Great Britain’ are actually references to two separate things: ‘the Crown of England before 1707, or, after that, the Crown of Great Britain’ in other words.

The context which reveals this is that the Act is naturalising as subjects of the Crown of Great Britain certain people who would not otherwise be entitled to that status but whose fathers had in the past been treated either as subjects of the Crown of England before 1707 or as subjects of the Crown of Great Britain after 1707 (or both). Note that the operative words of the Act – those which regulate what is to happen in 1772 (the year the Act was passed) and afterwards as opposed to narrating the historical background and are on lines 22-24 of page 20 of the volume linked to above – are that the people concerned

“are hereby declared and enacted to be, natural-born subjects of the Crown of Great Britain, to all intents constructions and purposes whatsoever, as if he and they had been and were born in this kingdom …”

No mention of the Crown of England in that present (1772) and future context.

So once you read the Act to put the references in it to the Crown of England in context, you discover they  are, in fact, entirely consistent with that Crown having ceased to exist in 1707 and replaced by the Crown of Great Britain, all as provided for in the Articles and Acts of Union.

This isn’t the first time people on this wing of the Scottish independence movement have made chumps of themselves by not actually reading the legislation they pontificate about. I’m referring to those who believe that the Acts of Union ratify the Claim of Right simply because the word ‘ratifies’ appears in the AoU in a context which also mentions the CoR. But if you actually read the AoU, you find it’s not the CoR that’s being ratified but something else as discussed here. And X (Twitter) user @SeannachaidhS who drew Liberation Scotland’s attention to the 1772 Naturalisation Act discussed above thought he’d found another example of the Crown of England being referred to as if it still existed in an Act of 1800 (I can’t link to the tweet because he’s blocked me). But if he’d actually read that Act (begins here, Chapter LXXXVIII, reference to Crown of England on next page, screenshot below) he’d have found the reference was in a narration of the terms of another earlier Act passed in 1702-03 when, of course, the Crown of England still existed.

Because it often consists of such massive long sentences,18th and early 19th century legislation is not an easy read. But it’s not impossible. And if you’re going to make controversial pronouncements on it so emphatically, I think it kind of behoves you to try.