We of the Committee of Parliament for the publick accompts continued our applications to the matters remitted to us till the Parliament met in September 1705. John, Duke of Argyle, a youth of about 23 years of age, was appointed her Majesty's High Commissioner, and in this station behaved himself in a manner far above what cou'd be expected from one of his years.... A ... great benefit I received by my intimacy with the Duke and his brother was to be recommended to the Queen for one of the Commissioners to be appointed by Her Majesty for the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland.... This choise, however honourable to me, was very far from giving me the least pleasure or satisfaction, for I had observed a great backwardness in the Parliament of Scotland for an Union with England of any kind whatsoever, and therefore doubted not but, after a great deal of expense in attending a Treaty in England, I should be oblidged to return with the uneasy reflexion of having either done nothing, or nothing to the purpose, as had been the case of former Commissioners appointed for this end. I was, in short, upon the point of refusing the Honour conferred upon me, and the rather that my Father, whom I always considered as an Oracle seldom mistaken, seemed not to approve of it. However, as at last he grew passive, and that the Duke of Queensberry threatened to withdraw all friendship for me, I suffered my self to be prevailed upon, and to take journey for London with other Commissioners, and arrived there on the 13 of Aprile 1706.

... The Commissioners of both nations met in different apartments in the Royal palace of Westminster, which commonly goes under the name of the Cockpit. There was one great Room where they all met when they were called upon to attend the Queen, or were to exchange papers, but they never met to hold conferences together except once, when the number of the Scotch Representatives for the two Houses of the British Parliament came to be debated, all their transactions were reduced in writings concerted in seperat apartments. When proposals or Conditions of the Union were to be made by the English Commissioners, the Scots were desired to meet them in the great Room, and their proposals were given in by the L^d Chancellor, or the Keeper of the great seal, who was at that time the Lord Cooper, and when the Commissioners for Scotland had any thing to propose, or had answers to be made to the Commissioners of England, these were presented by the L^d Seafield, then Chancellor for Scotland....

The first grand point debated by the Commissioners for Scotland amongst themselves was whether they should propose to the English a Federal union between the two nations, or an Incorporating union. The first was most favoured by the people of Scotland, but all the Scots Commissioners, to a Man, considered it ridiculous and impracticable, for that in all the Federal unions there behoved to be a supreme power lodged somewhere, and wherever this was lodged it henceforth became the States General, or, in our way of speaking, the Parliament of Great Britain, under the same royal power and authority as the two nations are at present. And in things of the greatest consequence to the two nations, as in Councils relating to peace and war and subsidies, it was impossible that the Representatives or their suffrages in both nations cou'd be equal, but must be regulated in proportion to the power and riches of the several publick burdens or Taxations that cou'd affect them; in a word, the Scots Commissioners saw that no Union cou'd subsist between the two nations but an incorporating perpetual one. But after all the trouble we gave ourselves to please the people of Scotland, we knew at the time that it was but losing our labour, for the English Commissioners were positively resolved to treat on no kind of union with us but what was to be incorporating and perpetual....

The Queen came among us three several times, once at our first or second meeting, to acquaint us of her intentions and ardent good wishes for our success and unanimity in this great Transaction. At about a month thereafter she came again to enquire of our success, and had most of our Minutes read to her, and for the last time of what we had done....

I was ... intrusted with another province by the Commissioners for Scotland, which was to review the Calculations made for the Equivalent to be paid to Scotland for bearing their share of the Debt of England, which were afterwards to be considered as the Debts of Great Britain. These calculations were chiefly made by Doctor Gregory, professor of Mathematicks in the College of Oxford, and a certain great accomptant and projector, one Patersone,[26] from Scotland, but bred in England from his infancy....

One day I had occasion to observe the Calamities which attend human nature even in the greatest dignities of Life. Her majesty was labouring under a fit of the Gout, and in extream pain and agony, and on this occasion every thing about her was much in the same disorder as about the meanest of her subjects. Her face, which was red and spotted, was rendered something frightful by her negligent dress, and the foot affected was tied up with a pultis and some nasty bandages. I was much affected at this sight, and the more when she had occasion to mention her people of Scotland, which she did frequently to the Duke. What are you, poor meanlike Mortal, thought I, who talks in the style of a Soveraign? Nature seems to be inverted when a poor infirm Woman becomes one of the Rulers of the World, but, as Tacitus observes, it is not the first time that Women have governed in Britain, and indeed they have sometimes done this to better purpose than the Men.

But to return to the Treaty of Union, the Articles were at last agreed to, sign'd, and sealed, by all the Commissioners, the 22 of July 1706. They were afterwards presented to the Queen at her palace of S^t James, before a very numerous Assembley.