Petitions against the treaty rained down on Parliament, riots erupted in the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow and angry demonstrators burned the treaty in towns like Dumfries and Stirling.
Historians have tended to emphasise elite politics in explaining the ratification of the Treaty of Union, but a wider view of public debates and popular resistance indicates the importance of popular opinion in shaping the course of the 1706–7 session. Some Scots rejected the Presbyterian– Episcopalian conflicts of the prior century and saw incorporation as the only way to preserve protestantism in Europe, while also protecting Scottish religious interests and improving Scottish pros- perity. Many more people, as covenanting Presbyterians or Jacobite Episcopalians and as petty traders, artisans or simply consumers, saw reasons to question the security of their interests in a closer union with England. Incorporation challenged their deep-seated sense of Scottish national identity, provoking impassioned feelings for the ancient Scottish kingdom and resentment of English hegemony. Yet though ordinary Presbyterians and Jacobites could join in patriotic attacks on the treaty, their unity was compromised by their loyalties to divergent forms of church government and the monarchies that supported these churches. These differences contributed to the making of the Union by preventing the opposition from cooperating to the degree necessary to stop it in 1706–7. Despite deep popular dis- satisfaction with the idea and consequences of incorporation, the same dynamics underpinned the continuation of the union as the Jacobites failed to generate national risings to overturn incorporation in 1715 and 1745.