lifetime. It attributes to William III a project for making himself an absolute monarch, in connivance with Louis XIV.
Fletcher entered, as a commissioner for East Lothian once more, the new Scotch parliament of 1703. The Scotch were irritated by the failure of the Darien scheme, and by the unsatisfactory character of the English proposals for a treaty of union. Fletcher and the national party saw an opportunity for wresting from Queen Anne a large measure of political independence for Scotland by making her acceptance of their terms a preliminary to their entering on the question of the succession. Fletcher took a very prominent part in the parliamentary controversy between the national and the court parties. On 27 May 1703 he carried a resolution to defer a grant of supply until guarantees were obtained for the security of the religion and liberties of Scotland. On 22 June he produced a draft act of security, which, if accepted by the parliament of Scotland and by Queen Anne, would have given after her death home rule to Scotland. Fletcher's scheme of security was only to take effect if Queen Anne's successor on the throne of England should also be sovereign of Scotland. He proposed that in this contingency the Scotch executive should be chosen not by the sovereign of both countries, but by a committee of the parliament of Scotland. The Scotch parliament was to meet annually, and the votes in it were to be taken by ballot. For every nobleman added to the parliament a ‘lesser baron,’ or county member, was to be added. A national militia was to be established as soon as the Act of Security became law. For these ‘limitations’ Fletcher pleaded throughout the stormy session of 1703. Among Fletcher's proposals, which were embodied in the Act of Security passed by the Scotch parliament, and in 1704 assented to by Queen Anne, was that for the immediate formation and arming of a Scotch national militia, a measure which was regarded by the English government and parliament as a menace of civil war. Another of his proposals, to deprive the sovereign of the power of declaring war and making peace, was embodied in a special act, which also was touched with the sceptre. When the queen's commissioner announced in the session of 1703 that all the acts passed by the parliament during it would be thus touched, except the Act of Security, Fletcher rose and moved a resolution declaring that ‘after the decease of her majesty we will separate our crown from that of England.’ Fletcher's defiant speeches, along with the adoption of some of the measures advocated in them, contributed powerfully to induce Queen Anne's advisers to revive, this time successfully, the project of a legislative union of England and Scotland.
Fletcher issued, without his name, in the year of their delivery, ‘Speeches by a Member of the Parliament which began at Edinburgh the 6th of May, 1703.’ In 1704 appeared, also anonymously, the most attractive, to modern readers, of his political writings, ‘An Account of a Conversation concerning a Right Regulation of Governments for the common good of Mankind. In a Letter to the Marquis of Montrose, the Earls of Rothes, Roxburg, and Haddington, from London the 1st of December, 1703’—a dialogue described in the text as between Fletcher himself, the Earl of Cr[o]m[a]rty, Sir Ed[ward] S[ey]m[ou]r, and Sir Chr[istopher] M[u]sgr[a]ve. Fletcher supports his theories with much dramatic force against his interlocutors. In the ‘imaginary conversation’ occurs an often quoted and misquoted remark of Fletcher's. ‘I knew,’ he says, ‘a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher's sentiment that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ In the remaining sessions, 1704 to 1707, of the Scotch parliament Fletcher continued very active, but with diminished influence, the majority deciding on assenting to the union. In all its sessions he displayed great irritability, the assembly having on several occasions to interfere to prevent him fighting duels with the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Stair, among others (see Sir David Hume, pp. 147, 160, &c., and a detailed narrative of a duel just on the point of being fought by him in Burton's Queen Anne, i. 164–5). Once, July 1705 (Sir David Hume, p. 167), he seems to have gone the length of proposing that the (first) king of Prussia should be named successor to Queen Anne in the sovereignty of Scotland. He and the Jacobites voted together against the chief clauses of the Act of Union. It had been touched by the sceptre when, 27 Jan. 1707, he made his last noticeable appearance in the last parliament of Scotland, with a motion, apparently successful, incapacitating noblemen's eldest sons for election by the expiring Scotch legislature to the first union parliament of Great Britain.
Fletcher was one of the members of the motley party opposed to the union who, in April 1708, were brought in custody to London on a suspicion of having been privy to the attempted French invasion of Scotland in the previous month in the interest of the Pretender (Boyer, History of Queen Anne, ed. 1722, p. 338); but he was soon discharged,
