In 1707, the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colonies were ablaze with war. Anne was Queen of England. In that very year she attached her signature to that long projected and most important constitutional arrangement, the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settlement passed a few years before, had been forever vested in the person and heirs of Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the present reigning dynasty. Anne's accession to the throne in 1702 had been followed by the acknowledgement, by Louis XIV, of the son of James II, the deposed and fugitive king of England and the determined foe of the rights of the Colonists, as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of perfidy roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the war, then raging, was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of Spain for his grandson Philip despite a previous formal renunciation. But the immediate occasion was his espousal of the cause of the son of James II as pretender to the British throne, which enabled the English Government to form a great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and prevent Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe. The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the pride and ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies, at Ramillies by the Duke of Marlborough, in Piedmont by Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord Galway. Charles XII of Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an English and Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the combined fleets of Spain and France upon Charlestown, S. C., then claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed by the vigor and martial skill of the Colonial authorities.