From 1688 British relations with the continent took on a new dimension that was precipitated by events in Europe in the preceding decades. In allying himself with Louis XIV in the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–4) Charles II had increased fears across Europe that a papist and arbitrary government would be imposed on Britain with the help of the French King. These fears were exacerbated further when the Treaty of Nijmegen concluded the Franco-Dutch War in 1678. Concerns shifted with the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 and the rise of Jacobitism – the Franco-Dutch War had established William of Orange as the chief opponent of France's ambitions in Europe, and on acquiring the British thrones William immediately became embroiled in war against France. Though the Glorious Revolution was an internal conflict, ‘in a wide historical perspective it is arbitrary to make any separation of the Revolution of 1688–9 from the war which followed’. William's antagonism towards France manifested itself first in the Nine Years’ War, lasting until the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, and then in preparations for the War of the Spanish Succession. In 1702 Queen Anne completed these preparations by declaring war on France just two months after succeeding to the British thrones.

As with all early modern conflict, both of these wars comprised open declarations of hostility, embargoes on commerce and domestic pressures on men, ships and finance, and the Franco-Scottish commercial relationship has been seen as particularly vulnerable. Following William's accession to the British thrones any remaining vestige of this historic association allegedly disappeared as a direct consequence of war, which ‘undermined relations with France and wiped out the special privileges Scotland had enjoyed a hundred years before, under the Auld Alliance’.