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Despite the Protestantism established in all three kingdoms, the Revolution had a more limited impact on the promotion of civil society than that accorded in Whig ideology and historiography. The traditional extended family, associated with all rural kin-based societies, had not irrevocably given way to the nuclear. Personal authority remained a vital aspect of social ordering, albeit that the English belief in institutional authority underscored the fiscal, military and judicial powers of coercion at the disposal of the state. Societies for the Reformation of Manners, and for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, may have had improving objectives, but they came to consolidate the class divisions that accompanied commercialism.

Widening opportunities for higher education were sacrificed to social order, particularly on the Celtic peripheries. Meanwhile, the expansion of grammar schools, particularly in the south-cast, and of university colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, confirmed the selectivity of English education, although the establishment of academics compensated to some extent for their exclusion of dissenters. Cambridge, in particular, achieved international scientific excellence among the scholars associated with Sir Isaac Newton, who was to become the president of the Royal Society in 1703. Wales was generously provided with basic elementary education, but more advanced education entailed migration and cultural assimilation, notably in Jesus College, Oxford. Trinity College, Dublin, remained the intellectual bastion of the English interest in Ireland, while Catholic schooling was essentially a missionary endeavour. In Scotland, education was a communal pursuit with intellectual progression sponsored by local taxes as well as university bursaries. This long-term community commitment to erudition, which took precedence over short-term poor relief, was underscored by the Education Act of 1696 that, in the midst of endemic famine, upheld the ideal of a school in every parish.

The unfortunate Thomas Aikenhead was executed for blasphemy while a student at Edinburgh University at the behest of the city's Presbyterian ministers in 1695. Nonetheless, the five Scottish universities (there was the same number, two, in Aberdeen as in the whole of England) remained more committed to international scholarship than religious orthodoxy. Sectarianism in all three kingdoms was compounded by the English-led, latitudinarian challenge, that upheld the reasonableness of religion over evangelical revelations of faith. Deism was an attempt to bridge such sectarianism, notably when applied through Freemasonry which was spread, primarily by Scots or Irishmen educated in Scotland, to France, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Despite the religious exclusivity of the revolution settlements, plurality was a feature of political life in all three kingdoms. In England, a 'rage for party', which became evident in parliamentary and local government elections, was consolidated by the coffee houses, clubs and societies and the removal of press licensing from 1695. Clear ground opened up between the Whigs and Tories on such issues as enforcing limitations on monarchy, religious toleration of dissent, prolonged engagement in continental warfare, fiscal burdens and commercial regulation. However, a sizeable minority in the Commons, as in the Lords, were not enlisted in either party, being content to ally with one or the other when the Anglican ascendancy, rights of property, trading privileges and agricultural prosperity were threatened. Political power was increasingly focused on the ruling ministry who dominated the Cabinet Council which was emerging as the inner core of the Privy Council, which advised the monarchy on executive issues. Yet, the ruling ministry was rarely composed of one party. Moreover, the governing ministry had to have the confidence of both the crown and the parliament. Accordingly, a further parliamentary cleavage was occasioned by divisions between court and country interests on the accountability of the ministry, its fiscal probity, the role of placemen, levels of taxation and conduct of war.

While party divisions had some mileage in Wales, the cleft between court and country had greater validity in Ireland and Scotland. Given the growing intrusiveness of the English ministry in the affairs of both kingdoms, support for the exiled house of Stuart was manifested as Jacobitism, posing a military as well as a political threat to the revolution settlements. Jacobitism could tap into religious dissent, social disorder and commercial discrimination, and carried a counter-revolutionary potential enhanced by its appeals to traditional social ordering, not only in Ireland and Scotland but also in Wales and the north of England. Although Jacobitism was apparently emasculated in Ireland by military defeat in 1691 and the exile of prominent supporters, recruitment to the Irish brigades in France and Spain gave hope for the dream of a Stuart restoration well into the 18th century. For over six decades, Jacobitism remained a vibrant alternative political culture in Scotland, not least because the unilaterally imposed Act of Settlement of 1701 which followed on from the death in 1700 of William, Duke of Gloucester, the only surviving child of the future Queen Anne, and paved the way for the Hanoverian succession - signposted the anglocentric nature of British state formation.

The extent to which there was a dominant British identity prior to the Union remains problematic. Undoubtedly a political elite, commercial as well as baronial, was becoming more cohesive through metropolitan and imperial networks. That the Scots, any more than the English, were conditioned politically, economically and intellectually to adopt dual nationality is a neo-Whiggish contention; it sits uncomfortably with the multi-polar conflicts of the British nations that were occasioned by confessional, commercial and cultural pluralism as well as by traditional territorial disputes. These conflicts were by no means resolved by 1707, as the persistence of Jacobitism attests.

Two concluding illustrations of the complexity of British identities will suffice. Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, an Episcopalian and stalwart of the Jacobite rising of 1689-91, had been a colonial investor in East New Jersey who continued to dabble in the American land market in association with Bristol merchants; yet he consistently opposed union. Conversely, Anndra Mac an Easbuig, also an Episcopalian and one of the gentry of the Macleans of Duart, a Jacobite clan, was a Gaelic poet who contributed to the comparative ethnology compiled by Edward Lhuyd, the Welsh keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, that was published in 1707 as Archaeologica Biitannica. Two years earlier, the poet had anticipated a publication presaging union as a commendable reminder of 'the brotherhood of the Gael to the Men of England'. ENDS