Since the passing of the Act of Succession in 1700 under King William, and Lord Macclesfield’s mission to Hanover in 1701, when he presented a copy of the Act to the Electress Sophia, and since the recognition by Anne of the _status quo_ on her accession in 1702, the English prospects of the electoral family had sensibly improved, and the Hanoverian succession had quitted the region of abstract theories to enter the realm of practical politics. The time-servers in England showed their sensible appreciation of this by turning their attention from St. Germains to Hanover. Marlborough, the arch time-server of them all, was at Hanover at the end of 1704, and Prince Ernest Augustus, the youngest son of the Electress Sophia, had fought under him in one of his campaigns. Marlborough was said at one time to have entertained the project of marrying his third daughter to the Electoral Prince as a return for his powerful aid to the electoral family, but the scheme fell through, if it were ever seriously considered. It might have been, for Marlborough’s support was very valuable. Party feeling ran very high in England, and there was a strong Jacobite faction which heavily discounted the prospects of the Hanoverian succession. At the beginning of her reign, Anne, apprehensive that the Jacobites might become too powerful and shake her position on the throne, to which her title was none too sure, leant, or appeared to lean, in the direction of Hanover. The question was complicated, too, by the fact that the Scottish Parliament had rejected the Bill for the Hanoverian succession with every mark of contempt, and had passed a measure which seemed to settle the succession of the Scottish crown upon the Duke of Hamilton. At least, it excluded the House of Hanover as aliens, and for a time there was the anomaly that though the Electress Sophia might have succeeded to the throne of England, she could not have worn the crown of Scotland, and the kingdoms would again have become divided. It was largely to end these complications that the Act of Union between England and Scotland was brought forward, and one of its most important clauses was that the succession of the crown of Scotland, like that of England, should be vested in the Electress Sophia, and her heirs, being Protestant, a clause which was hotly debated. An Act was also passed to naturalise the electoral family.