Before this event, so important to Fletcher, took place, Hamilton, superseded by Melville, had retired in disgust from public life; and there is some reason to believe that it was Fletcher who was the means of bringing him back to support the Revolution principles in 1692, when the country was alarmed by the threat of a Jacobite invasion. ‘I know you will be surprised,’ Fletcher wrote to Hamilton in April of that year, ‘to receive a letter from me; but my writing to you in such an exigence shows the high esteem I must have of you, and of the true love you bear your religion and country. If, laying aside all other considerations, you do not come in presently, and assist in council, all things will go into confusion; and your presence there will easily retrieve all. The castle has been very nearly surprised, and an advertisement which Secretary Johnstone had from France, and wrote hither, has saved it. When things are any ways composed you may return to your former measures, for I do not approve of them. I do advise your Grace to the most honourable thing you can do; and without which your country must perish.’ This ‘spirited letter,’ as it is called by Dalrymple--in whose _Memoirs_ it is printed--is said to have induced Hamilton to make up his quarrel with the Court, and in the following year he was once more presiding over the debates of the Scottish Parliament. It was probably about this time, or soon after, that the project of forming the ‘Company of Scotland trading to Africa and the Indies’ first took shape in the fertile brain of William Paterson, who may perhaps have met Fletcher in Holland before the Revolution. He was in London in 1690; and Dalrymple says that in Scotland it was always believed that Fletcher brought him down to Saltoun, and presented him to the Marquis of Tweeddale, to whom Paterson unfolded the great scheme. Then Fletcher, ‘with that power which a vehement spirit always possesses over a diffident one, persuaded the Marquis, by arguments of public good, and of the honour which would redound to his administration, to adopt the scheme.’ Sir John Dalrymple of Stairs, Mr. Secretary Johnstone, and Sir James Stewart, then Lord Advocate, took the matter in hand, and the famous Act constituting the Company was passed by the Scottish Parliament, and received the royal assent on the 26th of June 1695. When the subscription list was opened, in February 1696, Fletcher put his name down for one thousand pounds’ worth of stock. The story of the expedition which the Company sent to Darien, and of the tragic fate of the adventurers, has been told and retold so often that every child from John o’ Groat’s House to the Cheviots knows it off by heart. It has never been forgotten in Scotland. England had to face the question--Shall we run the risk of a war with Spain to save the property of a Scottish trading Company, and the lives of some twelve hundred Scotsmen? And England answered--No.