them were so utterly false and shameless as the leading Scottish
politicians. Hamilton was, in morality and honour, rather above than
below his fellows; and even Hamilton was fickle, false and greedy.
"I wish to heaven," William was once provoked into exclaiming, "that
Scotland were a thousand miles off, and that the Duke of Hamilton were
King of it. Then I should be rid of them both."

After much deliberation William determined to send Melville down to
Edinburgh as Lord High Commissioner. Melville was not a great
statesman; he was not a great orator; he did not look or move like the
representative of royalty; his character was not of more than standard
purity; and the standard of purity among Scottish senators was not
high; but he was by no means deficient in prudence or temper; and he
succeeded, on the whole, better than a man of much higher qualities
might have done.

During the first days of the Session, the friends of the government
desponded, and the chiefs of the opposition were sanguine. Montgomery's
head, though by no means a weak one, had been turned by the triumphs of
the preceding year. He believed that his intrigues and his rhetoric had
completely subjugated the Estates. It seemed to him impossible that,
having exercised a boundless empire in the Parliament House when the
Jacobites were absent, he should be defeated when they were present, and
ready to support whatever he proposed. He had not indeed found it
easy to prevail on them to attend: for they could not take their seats
without taking the oaths. A few of them had some slight scruple of
conscience about foreswearing themselves; and many, who did not know
what a scruple of conscience meant, were apprehensive that they might
offend the rightful King by vowing fealty to the actual King. Some
Lords, however, who were supposed to be in the confidence of James,
asserted that, to their knowledge, he wished his friends to perjure
themselves; and this assertion induced most of the Jacobites, with
Balcarras at their head, to be guilty of perfidy aggravated by impiety,
[762]

It soon appeared, however, that Montgomery's faction, even with this
reinforcement, was no longer a majority of the legislature. For every
supporter that he had gained he had lost two. He had committed an
error which has more than once, in British history, been fatal to great
parliamentary leaders. He had imagined that, as soon as he chose to
coalesce with those to whom he had recently