The action of these courageous but wary statesmen was based, not on theory, but on sound information and calculation of all the forces on the board. … - G. M. Trevelyan

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The action of these courageous but wary statesmen was based, not on theory, but on sound information and calculation of all the forces on the board. Such was the method of the Whigs and Tories who made the Revolution Settlement of 1689, the Act of Settlement of 1701 that fixed the Succession on the House of Hanover, and half-a-dozen years later this Union with Scotland. These three settlements, on which the British Constitution has rested ever since, are parts of a single scheme; they were all of them made in the same spirit of compromise between parties, churches, and nations, and therefore they were never over-set. The not very idealistic statesmen of that Augustan age laid the foundation of modern Britain more wisely and well than the passionate Cavaliers and Roundheads of an earlier time had been able to do. It was the heroic idealists—Laud, Hampden, Cromwell, Montrose—who had rough-hewn the issues of controversy, but the terms of settlement were drawn up by their prudently compromising successors in the reigns of William and Anne. The Scottish Union was a piece of their most characteristic and successful work.