National animosity had been inflamed to a passionate pitch by the Darien disaster and the Massacre of Glencoe.

The people listened readily to the insinuations of hot-headed men that the English wished to have everything their own way.

The counter-charge about the Scotch found equally willing hearers among the mass in England.

Never had cool-headed statesmen a harder task in preventing two nations from coming to blows.
All the time that the Treaty of Union was being negotiated which King William had earnestly urged from his deathbed, throughout the first half of Queen Anne's reign they worked under a continual apprehension lest the negotiations should end in a violent and irreconcilable rupture.
Defoe might well say that he was pursuing the same blessed subject of Peace in trying to reconcile these two most enraged nations, and writing with all his might for the Union.

An Act enabling the Queen to appoint Commissioners on the English side to arrange the terms of the Treaty had been passed in the first year of her reign, but difficulties had arisen about the appointment of the Scottish Commissioners, and it was not till the Spring of 1706 that the two Commissions came together.