On this day, Queen Anne withheld royal assent from the Scottish Militia Bill in case the militia raised in Scotland was disloyal and decided to side with the Jacobites. Although England and Scotland had officially become a single political state, Great Britain, after the ratification of the Acts of Union the previous year, there was still considerable dissent among the Scottish people. When the news arrived that the French were preparing to send a large military force to Scotland to help the Jacobites restore James Francis Edward Stuart to the throne of Great Britain, Anne’s ministers strongly advised her to veto the bill which had already been passed by both houses of parliament. No English monarch has ever vetoed a parliamentary bill since that day.
