This petition, along with some others of a similar character, was remitted to a committee of Parliament for inquiry. There was a long delay; and at last Fletcher was put forward to complain to the Duke of Hamilton, who was then Commissioner. So he went to Hamilton, and said it was unfair that Argyll’s forfeiture should have been reversed without delay, while he and others, who had suffered unjustly, should have to wait so long. Having lodged this complaint, he asked Hamilton to mention the matter to the King.
‘Tell the King,’ he said, ‘that Fletcher of Saltoun has a better right to his estate than his Majesty has to the Crown.’
‘Devil take me,’ said the Duke in reply, ‘if it isn’t true!’
At last, on the 30th of June 1690, an Act was passed, rescinding the forfeiture, and putting Fletcher once more in possession of his family estate.
Before this event, so important to Fletcher, took place, Hamilton, superseded by Melville, had retired in disgust from public life; and there is some reason to believe that it was Fletcher who was the means of bringing him back to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.
Fletcher was a rich man, and the disaster at Darien did not mean ruin to him, as it did to so many of his countrymen. But the sight of their sufferings, the callous indifference of the English Government, and the knowledge that there was not one London merchant in a hundred who did not, in his heart, rejoice in the ruin which had befallen the Scottish traders, made him, as it made most Scotsmen, distrust England, and devote himself, heart and soul, for the rest of his life, to the cause of Scottish independence.