1603 The Union of the Crowns

Between 2 am and 3 am on 24 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth I of England turned to face the wall and passed peacefully away: in the words of her chaplain, "mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree". Just before the end Elizabeth acknowledged James VI of Scots - son of Mary, Queen of Scots, her cousin, enemy and victim, as her heir. Asked to name her successor, Elizabeth had replied, "Who should that be but our cousin of Scotland?" Robert Cecil, the Queen's chief minister, had already paved the way. Thus, the English monarchy passed from the Tudors, a Welsh family, to the Stuarts, a Scottish one.

During the 16th century there were occasional calls for union between England and Scotland. Some believed that, following the Treaty of Perpetual Peace of 1502, the marriage of Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII, to James IV of Scots in August 1503, "the marriage of the Thistle and the Rose" would facilitate such an outcome but it was, at best, a remote possibility.

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