Contrary to what you've apparently read in the Record, political union wasn't down to James, but to his great-granddaughter Anne, the last Stuart monarch, and she, unlike her continental-based Stuart cousins, didn't even bother to get her fat backside up the Great North Road to set foot in the Kingdom of Scotland; either side of 1707.
True but the political union was a Stuart ambition from the moment James I an IV climbed onto the throne of England. It just took 104 years to achieve.