Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/300

 against the Turks (ib. p. 22, with a reference to family manuscripts), whom in one of his writings Fletcher calls ‘the common enemy of mankind.’ In his absence he was tried at Edinburgh, 4 Jan. 1686, for treasonable complicity in Monmouth's rebellion, when he was sentenced to death and his estate forfeited. One of the two witnesses on whose evidence he was condemned described him as ‘a little man,’ wearing ‘a brown periwig, of a lean face, pock-marked’ (State Trials, xi. 1054). Of the amnesty proclaimed by James II in his letter to the parliament of Scotland, 29 April 1686 (Acts, &c., viii. 879–80), Fletcher, unlike some other Scotchmen in his predicament, did not avail himself, because it was given in virtue of ‘the dispensing power,’ and not by an act of the legislature (see, p. 30, &c.)

Fletcher joined William of Orange at the Hague in 1688, and with the revolution returned to Scotland. He was not a member of the Scottish convention which met 14 March 1689, and which became a parliament in June 1690, when his estates were restored to him by a special act. He became, however, one of the busiest members of ‘the club’ (Leven and Melville Papers, p. 159), an association consisting mainly of the leaders and members of the majority of the parliamentary opposition formed soon after William's accession, ostensibly to diminish the power of the crown in Scotland. Fletcher, as a republican and a hater of English domination, naturally approved this object. He now began to attempt to create a Young Scotland and Scotch home rule party. When William Paterson proposed to form the association which became in 1695, by an act of the Scotch parliament, ‘The Company of Scotland trading with Africa and the Indies,’ the principal operation of which was the disastrous attempt to colonise the isthmus of Darien, Fletcher is said to have brought Paterson down from London to Salton, to have introduced him to his neighbour, the Marquis of Tweeddale, then minister for Scotland, and to have aided in persuading that nobleman to support the scheme (, vol. iii. pt. iii. p. 129;, p. 46). These statements are not supported by any contemporary authority. In the original list of shareholders (1696) Fletcher figures as the subscriber of 1,000l. to the stock of the company (Darien Papers, p. 373).

In 1698 appeared, without author's name, Fletcher's earliest published writings, three in number: 1. ‘A Discourse of Government relating to Militias,’ an able and vigorous contribution to a controversy which was at that time being fiercely waged in England. Fletcher argued that in warfare a militia was more effective than a standing army. He sketched a plan for the establishment of a national militia by the formation of camps of military instruction, in which all the adult youth of the country were to be trained and disciplined with Spartan rigour, and from which ecclesiastics were to be excluded. 2. ‘Two Discourses concerning the Affairs of Scotland, written in the year 1698.’ In the first of these Fletcher urged that the 84,000l. annually spent on maintaining a force of regulars in Scotland might be much more usefully employed in promoting industry. In the second ‘Discourse’ Fletcher proposed a sweeping measure of social reform. He estimated at two hundred thousand at that time of scarcity, and at one hundred thousand in ordinary times, the number of beggars and vagrants who infested and preyed upon Scotland. He proposed that every man of a certain estate should be obliged to take a proportional number of them into his service. They were to be servants not slaves, to call them so was to be punishable, and they were to be protected by law like ordinary servants, with the important exceptions that their servitude was to be compulsory and hereditary, and that they and their children might be ‘alienated,’ i.e. sold by their masters. Fletcher found precedents for his scheme in Scotch acts of parliament passed in 1579 and 1597, the first of which, Fletcher said, allowed the compulsory servitude of the children of beggars for a term of years, which the second extended to their lifetime. The act of 1579, as Fletcher failed to observe, permitted the compulsory servitude of even an adult beggar for a year, and this term also was extended to his lifetime by the act of 1597. In the same ‘Discourse’ Fletcher made suggestions for the improvement of the condition of the Scotch farmer. He denounced rack-renting, to which he ascribed the general poverty of Scotland. 3. ‘Discorso delle cose di Spagna scritto nel mese di Luglio, 1698,’ with the imprint ‘Napoli,’ but in all probability printed at Edinburgh. This curious Italian tractate, written at the time of the negotiation of the first partition treaty, shows how measures might be taken, unsuspected by any one except Fletcher himself, for the attainment of universal monarchy by Spain. There seems to have been a second edition of the ‘Discorso,’ to which Fletcher prefixed an ‘Aviso’ which was not in the first (see his Political Works, ed. 1737, p. 179). Fletcher returned to the subject of Spain in what professes to be ‘A Speech upon the State of the Nation in April 1701,’ but it probably never was spoken, and does not seem to have been published in Fletcher's