After the 1701 peace treaty with the French, the Iroquois remained mostly neutral even though during Queen Anne’s War (North American part of the War of the Spanish Succession) they were involved in some planned attacks against the French. Four delegates of the Iroquoian Confederacy, the “Indian kings”, travelled to London in 1710 to meet Queen Anne in an effort to seal an alliance with the British. Queen Anne was so impressed by her visitors that she commissioned their portraits by court painter John Verelst. The portraits are believed to be some of the earliest surviving oil portraits of Aboriginal peoples taken from life.
In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the Tuscarora fled north from the British colonization of North Carolina and petitioned to become the sixth nation. This was a non-voting position but placed them under the protection of the Confederacy.
In 1721 and 1722, Lt. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia concluded a new Treaty at Albany with the Iroquois, renewing the Covenant Chain and agreeing to recognize the Blue Ridge as the demarcation between Virginia Colony and the Iroquois. However, as white settlers began to move beyond the Blue Ridge and into the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730s, the Iroquois objected and were told that the agreed demarcation merely prevented them from trespassing east of the Blue Ridge, but it did not prevent English from expanding west of them. The Iroquois were on the verge of going to war with the Virginia Colony, when in 1743, Governor Gooch paid them the sum of 100 pounds sterling for any settled land in the Valley that was claimed by the Iroquois. The following year at the Treaty of Lancaster, the Iroquois sold Virginia all their remaining claims on the Shenandoah Valley for 200 pounds in gold.
During the French and Indian War (North American part of the Seven Years’ War), the Iroquois sided with the British against the French and their Algonquian allies, both traditional enemies of the Iroquois. The Iroquois hoped that aiding the British would also bring favours after the war. Practically, few Iroquois joined the campaign, and in the Battle of Lake George, a group of Mohawk and French ambushed a Mohawk-led British column. The British government issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 after the war, which forbade white settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains, but this was largely ignored by the settlers, and the Iroquois agreed to adjust this line again at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768), whereby they sold the British Crown all their remaining claim to the lands between the Ohio
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