James's portrayal of the Borders to the English parliament in 1607 owed more to wishful thinking than to reality. Similarly hopeful had been his pronouncement in 1604 that the geographical unity of Scotland and England was ‘by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discerne their owne limits’. With such protestations James intended to convince a sceptical, somewhat hostile, English audience of the benefits of the ‘union of the crowns’: if the English recognised these, they might agree to extend the dynastic union into a full political or ‘perfect union’. The transformation of the Borders was intended to have epitomised the unification of England and Scotland: the ‘Middles Shires’ were to have become a microcosm of the unified kingdoms; standardised judicial procedures in the English and Scottish Borders were supposed to have exemplified the uniformity that James vi and i desired within throughout his kingdoms; and the pacification was to have demonstrated a new co-operation between previously hostile administrations.

James's descriptions, however, were a little premature. Enduring hostility, mutual suspicion and separate administrative and legal systems continued to demonstrate the divisions between Scotland and England within a region still demarcated by a frontier. Alan Macinnes's assessment of James's ‘civilising projects’ is surely right to qualify their success in the Borders, that they were only ‘partially pacified’. James did not fully achieve his plan ‘to extinguishe as well the name, as the substance of the bordours [and] the difference betwene thaime and other pairts of the kingdome’. Indeed, the existence of institutions such as the border commissioners or the triumvirate continued to mark out the Borders region as different or separate to any other part of Scotland, if only in administrative terms.