[Illustration: ANDREW FLETCHER OF SALTOUN.]
In the first year of Queen Anne, commissioners were appointed to treat for an Union. They met at Westminster in October 1702, and agreed that the two countries should become one monarchy, with one Parliament, and a system of internal free trade. The English consented, though reluctantly, to allow the Scots to trade with the colonies; but on the subject of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies no agreement was found to be possible. The English commissioners maintained that the privileges of the Scottish Company interfered with the interests of the East India Company: “Two companies existing together in the same kingdom, and carrying on the same traffic, are destructive to trade.” To this the Scottish commissioners replied by a claim for compensation, if the Scottish Company, whose losses in the Darien expedition had been so disastrous, was abolished. “If,” they said, “the existing of companies for carrying on the same traffic, do appear to your Lordships destructive of trade; it is not expected that your Lordships will insist, that, therefore, the privileges of the _Scots_ Company should be abandoned, without offering at the same time to purchase their right at the public expense.” This brought matters to a deadlock; the commissioners separated; and the negotiations were ultimately abandoned.
Defoe describes these proceedings as a “Sham Treaty,” and, in his opinion, religion was the real, though secret, difficulty. “The jealousies,” he says, “on both sides about Church affairs, in respect to the Union, were ground of such difficulties as no Body could surmount, and lay as a Secret Mine, with which that Party who designed to keep the nation divided, were sure to blow it up at last, and therefore knew that all they did till that Point was discust signified nothing, and that whenever they pleased to put an end to it, they had an immediate opportunity.”
But even if the commissioners had come to terms on the questions of the Scottish Trading Company and of the Church, there can be no doubt that the Scottish Estates would not have ratified the treaty; for, as the proceedings of the first Parliament of Queen Anne proved, Scotland was now so exasperated against England that nearly five years of turmoil and danger were to pass away before the statesmen of the two countries, brought face to face with something more than the possibility of civil war, at last succeeded in carrying the Union of 1707, in the terms of which, apart from the loss of the right of complete self-government through their own Parliament, the advantages lay, upon the whole, with the Scottish people.