In September 2022, the body of Queen Elizabeth was driven across Scotland from Balmoral Castle, where she died, to the royal palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The coffin was draped in the Royal Standard of Scotland and carried by members of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, who wore tartan kilts. For the first six days after her death, the queen’s passing seemed a very Scottish affair indeed. Only then was her body flown south to London, where the rest of the United Kingdom got to show its respects.
This last journey echoed another royal passage, prompted by the death of a previous Elizabeth, that can reasonably be taken as a point of origin for the United Kingdom itself. In April 1603, King James VI of Scotland, then just 36, began a much slower ride from Edinburgh to London, where he would succeed the childless Queen Elizabeth I as James I of England and Wales. A year later, in his first address to the English Parliament, he compared the union of his two kingdoms to a marriage from which there could be no divorce: “What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” Taking the hint, James’s court dramatist, William Shakespeare, wrote his most terrifying play, King Lear. It warns of all the dreadful things that can happen if a united kingdom is foolishly broken up.