WI:No union of the crowns?

If Scotland doesn't enter into a personal union with England in 1603,what is likely to become of it?Will it be a state hostile to England,allying with states such as France to sustain it's independence?Become Finlandized?Or will it be conquered through military conquest by England?Or simply become a neutral state?POD could be Queen Elizabeth actually marrying and having a son.
 
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Don Quijote

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Added a new POD.Elizabeth marries sometime prior and actually gets a son.

Thanks, I wasn't sure where to start last time. Who she marries will be extremely important. Several potential husbands were English noblemen, but one that I thought was interesting was Prince Eric of Sweden. . Unfortunately, Eric in fact went mad in the 1560s while King of Sweden, and was deposed and probably poisoned.

If you could somehow get around this, and have Elizabeth marry a sane Eric and have a son, then England united with Sweden by marriage not long before the Thirty Years War might pull England in as a champion of Protestantism. Many Scottish volunteers fought with Sweden in OTL, so I think combined Swedish and English influence would put pressure on the Stuarts to join them in some sort of alliance, if not a union.

Sorry if I got a bit off-topic, but I think the consequences for England and Sweden (or any European power, depending on who she married) would be greater than for Scotland.
 
Who succeeds Elizabeth, then?

(And did you actually consider pausing for breath at any point...try reading your question out exactly the way it's posted and see what it sounds like.)

Nothing about mediaeval to early modern Scotland is simple, too many competing factions with too much bad blood between them, and James VI only first among equals at best.

Resistance to the English just about is the unifying national myth, one James was playing down in expectation of the union of the crowns but which had in living memory been fed by Henry VIII's "rough wooing"- more like attempted rape.

Without bribery and corruption, or a common enemy, there is no rational reason to build bridges over the existing pool of bad blood between the two.

Scotland has been, and there would be no good reason not to be, anybody else's ready ally against the English, an exporter mainly of people, and more interested in Europe than the English.

How it plays out in the wake of Elizabeth not allowing James to succeed her (which could easily have happened- for instance, if they had actually met, James being the scruffy, shifty, unmonarchial object he usually was and Elizabeth having strong opinions as she did on how things ought to look) is going to depend on who does, but a period of sharp pointy unhappiness followed by fourteenth to sixteenth century business as usual seems not unlikely.
 
If Scotland doesn't enter into a personal union with England in 1603,what is likely to become of it?Will it be a state hostile to England,allying with states such as France to sustain it's independence?Become Finlandized?Or will it be conquered through military conquest by England?Or simply become a neutral state?POD could be Queen Elizabeth actually marrying and having a son.

Scotland and France could be natural allies.
 
If that happens,wouldn't Scotland simply get conquered by England when the Royal Navy simply becomes the best navy in Europe?

I don´t know if it would be taht easy to conquer Scotland simply as a whole for British army at that time. Maybe if France aids Scotland militarily and the Dutch General States and Spain join in an attempt to hinder the swallowing of Scotland it could be prevented further ?

another thought : There had been talks OTL to send a Wittelsbach to Scotland for kingship.
 
Actually it is quite difficult to find an alternative which was why James became the obvious choice in most people's minds.
Most of Elizabeth's senior courtiers and her parliament wanted a man to succeed, preferably married and with a clear succession.
Elizabeth's last years were difficult in terms of an air of discontent and her overt favouritism to certain courtiers etc.
The only candidate that offered them that by the end of the reign was James VI.

There were really only two alternatives:

Edward Seymour - the eldest son of Lady Catherine Grey - however his parents' marriage had been declared invalid. Although in his thirties by the 1590s and married with children his own marriage had upset his father. Elizabeth had disliked her Grey cousins and it would take a lot for her to reverse her view of his illegitimacy and her own dubious history with the Seymour's won't do him any favours. To make him heir needs an early POD.

In default of Edward Seymour - you have the senior heir of Eleanor Brandon - the unmarried eldest daughter of the 5th Earl of Derby, Lady Anne Stanley. Not an ideal choice to the court or parliament (her younger sisters both married young one to John Egerton - the son of her mother's second husband - and the other to Lord Hastings the heir of the Earl of Huntingdon). The 5th Earl and his mother were mistrusted by Elizabeth so again it would take a lot to convince her.

If England and Scotland remain separate due to a different succession then of course Scotland remains a political threat however as a Protestant nation Scotlands foreign relations with old friends such as the French will be complex and the Stuart's choices in terms of consorts will be just as difficult.
 
Depends what kind of show we put up; the idiot politics around the Covenant that resulted in the theocratic purges of the army in 1646-7 are a perfect example of the Scots defeating ourselves, before the English even got a look in. And we don't talk about Dunbar.

(Earlier post was in response to the OP but overtaken by events, incidentally.)

The civil war example is the clearest example of how radically different from itself a Scots army can be- brilliant some days, pathetic on others; the quality is there, but whether it comes out to play is a matter of mood and internal politics. An essentially premodern characteristic, admittedly.
 
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