nce of their chartered
privileges and natural rights, not alone the British Crown, but the
English people. The disposition of the people of England to reap where
they had not sown had become very clear. In April, 1701, Connecticut was
named in the bill then introduced in Parliament to abrogate all American
charters. She resisted with all her might through her agent, but it
passed the second reading, and would have become a law but for the
breaking out of the French War. Its principle was supported by the
mercantile interests and the great men of England. Then for the first
time the people of Connecticut fully realized that their foes were to
be, not the exiled house of Stuart, but the English people themselves,
and that though they changed their dynasties they did not change their
own nature.

In 1707, the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colonies were ablaze
with war. Anne was Queen of England. In that very year she attached her
signature to that long projected and most important constitutional
arrangement, the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made
them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settlement passed a
few years before, had been forever vested in the person and heirs of
Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the present reigning dynasty. Anne's
accession to the throne in 1702 had been followed by the
acknowledgement, by Louis XIV, of the son of James II, the deposed and
fugitive king of England and the determined foe of the rights of the
Colonists, as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in
1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of perfidy
roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the war, then raging,
was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of Spain for his grandson
Philip despite a previous formal renunciation. But the immediate
occasion was his espousal of the cause of the son of James II as
pretender to the British throne, which enabled the English Government to
form a great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and prevent
Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe.

The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the pride and
ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies, at Ramillies by the Duke
of Marlborough, in Piedmont by Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord
Galway. Charles XII of Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an
English and Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the
combined fleets