hills; but the chief himself and over thirty others were murdered in cold blood.  The news of the massacre roused a fierce flame of indignation, not only in the Highlands, but throughout the Lowlands as well, and the Jacobites did not fail to make use of it.  A commission was appointed to enquire into the circumstances, and it severely censured Dalrymple, and charged Breadalbane with treason, while many blamed, possibly unjustly, the king himself.

The other grievance was of a different nature.  About 1695, William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, suggested the formation of a Scottish company to trade to Africa and the Indies.  It was originally known as the African Company, but it was destined to be popularly remembered by the name of its most notable failure—­the Darien Company.  It received very full powers from the Scottish Parliament, powers of military colonization as well as trading privileges.  These powers aroused great jealousy and indignation in England, and the House of Commons decided that, as the company had its headquarters in London, the directors were guilty of high crimes and misdemeanours.  There followed a failure of the English capital on which the promoters had reckoned, but shares to the value of L400,000 (on which L219,094 was paid up) were subscribed in Scotland.  At first the company was a prosperous trading concern, but its only attempt at colonization involved it in ruin.  Paterson wished his fellow-countrymen to found a colony in the Isthmus of Panama, and to attract thither the whole trade of North and South America.  The ports of the colony were to be open to ships of all nations.  In the end of 1698 twelve hundred Scots landed on the shore of the Gulf of Darien, without organization and without the restraint of responsibility to any government.  They soon had difficulties with their Spanish neighbours, and the English colonists at New York, Barbadoes, and Jamaica were warned to render them no assistance.  Disease and famine completed the tale of misery, and the first colonists deserted their posts.  Their successors, who arrived to find empty huts, surrounded by lonely Scottish graves, were soon in worse plight, and they were driven out by a band of Spaniards.  The unfortunate company lingered on for some time, but merely as traders.  The Scots blamed the king’s ill-will for their failure, and he became more than ever unpopular in Scotland.  The moral of the whole story was that only through the corporate union of the two countries could trade jealousies and the danger of rival schemes of colonization be avoided.

In the reign of Charles II the Scots, who felt keenly the loss of the freedom of trade which they had enjoyed under Cromwell, had themselves broached the question of union, and William had brought it forward at the beginning of his reign.  It was, however, reserved for his successor to see it carried.  In March, 1702, the king died.  The death of “William II”, as his title ran in the kingdom of Scotland,