Union of the Crowns create a new "imperial" throne of "Great Britain". England and Scotland continued as autonomous states sharing a monarch with Ireland (with an interregnum in the 1650s during the republican unitary state of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate), until the Acts of Union of 1707 during the reign of the last Stuart monarch, Anne. In August 1503, James IV of Scotland married Margaret, eldest daughter of Henry VII of England, and the spirit of the new age was celebrated by the poet William Dunbar in "The Thrissil and the Rois". The marriage was the outcome of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace,
Acts of Union 1707 between the Church of England and the kirk. While it referred repeatedly to 'union' between England, Scotland, and Ireland, it did not explicitly commit to political union which had little support even among their English supporters. Even religious union was fiercely opposed by the Episcopalian majority in the Church of England and Independents like Oliver Cromwell. The Scots and English Presbyterians came to see the Independents who dominated the New Model Army as a bigger threat than the Royalists and when Charles I surrendered in 1646, they agreed to restore him to the English throne. Both Royalists and Covenanters agreed