Scotland had been on the island of Great Britain longer than England had, at least according to the Scots. And the rivalry between England and Scotland was a blood feud, even after the union of the crowns and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. The union would last only a little longer than a century. During the chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon managed to clandestinely feeding arms and weapons to Scottish nationalists, who lacked a true Jacobite heir to the throne.
Despite this, in 1807, rebellions broke out across the Highlands, from Argyll to Aberdeen. As they made gains, the United Kingdom's attention was split away from the continent. By 1809, the Scottish Nationalists had begun moving down into the Lowlands, where they had begun to get more support over time. This lead to new resources being available for their uprising, and furthered the chaos.
In 1811, the Nationalists had begun to seize more land and territory in a sort of pseudo-guerilla war against the British and the "Loyalists". The war with Napoleon was already distracting them massively, and then a third problem came up when the United States declared war on the United Kingdom over a plethora of issues. Britain was now stretched three different ways, and it especially came to a head with the Battle of the Dover Strait, a British loss that eliminated any latent pride from the Battle of Trafalgar, damaging the British navy to a point that the UK was desperate for peace lest they risk an invasion of England proper.
As such, the United Kingdom was taken to the negotiating table. The Treaty of London (1814) had several very negative repercussions for England. Among them was the recognition of the French Empire's hegemony over the continent (which was somewhat shortsighted, as a disastrous invasion of Russia just two years later would begin the downfall of Napoleon's empire), a renegotiation of the United States - United Kingdom border, but perhaps most important of all, lead to the severing of the 1707 Acts of Union.
The unrest had extended abroad as well. The United States and France had both taken interest in propping up an independent Scotland, and as such, they saw a chance to cut Britain down further abroad as well. The colonies of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island had experienced a large amount of unrest as well from their massive Scottish diaspora. Eager to weaken the United Kingdom's influence just north of them, the United States managed to get London to transfer those colonies to Scottish control, which the newly independent Kingdom of Scotland. Scotland soon organized this as the Dominion of Nova Scotia, with its capital in Halifax. At the same time, London was also pressured into giving over a Caribbean island to Scotland, which they did with the British Virgin Islands, small islands of little consequence.
With the treaties arranged, Scotland became formally independent in 1815, and promptly remained neutral in the last days of the Napoleonic Wars. In this time, Scotland was busy trying to pull itself together, and one of the biggest issues was who the new monarch of the Kingdom would be. With the Stuart line dead since the 1700s, the Scots turned to the continent. After studying the Jacobite line of succession, it was determined that Maria Beatrice of Savoy had the strongest claim to a restored Scottish throne, but a problem lay in that she was Catholic. Out of pragmatism, Scotland modified an existing code forbidding Catholics from taking the throne even after converting to allow Catholics that had converted to the Church of Scotland to take the throne. Maria consented to become the new monarch, converted to the Church of Scotland, and was coronated as Queen Mary III of Scotland after her marriage to Francis IV of Modena was annulled. As Modena already had an heir in the form of the future Francis V, Mary III's heir in Scotland was selected to be her eldest child and daughter Maria Theresa of Austria-Este.
With the dawning of 1836, the Kingdom of Scotland had been revived, had formed a parliament, and already had several colonies of her own. Her destiny lay before her, and all of Scotland was ready to take it.
