been opposed, all his
followers would imitate his example. He soon found that it was much
easier to inflame animosities than to appease them. The great body Of
Whigs and Presbyterians shrank from the fellowship of the Jacobites.
Some waverers were purchased by the government; nor was the purchase
expensive, for a sum which would hardly be missed in the English
Treasury was immense in the estimation of the needy barons of the North,
[763] Thus the scale was turned; and, in the Scottish Parliaments
of that age, the turn of the scale was every thing; the tendency
of majorities was always to increase, the tendency of minorities to
diminish.

The first question on which a vote was taken related to the election for
a borough. The ministers carried their point by six voices, [764] In an
instant every thing was changed; the spell was broken; the Club, from
being a bugbear, became a laughingstock; the timid and the venal passed
over in crowds from the weaker to the stronger side. It was in vain that
the opposition attempted to revive the disputes of the preceding year.
The King had wisely authorised Melville to give up the Committee of
Articles. The Estates, on the other hand, showed no disposition to pass
another Act of Incapacitation, to censure the government for opening the
Courts of justice, or to question the right of the Sovereign to name
the judges. An extraordinary supply was voted, small, according to the
notions of English financiers, but large for the means of Scotland. The
sum granted was a hundred and sixty-two thousand pounds sterling, to be
raised in the course of four years, [765]

The Jacobites, who found that they had forsworn themselves to no
purpose, sate, bowed down by shame and writhing with vexation, while
Montgomery, who had deceived himself and them, and who, in his rage, had
utterly lost, not indeed his parts and his fluency, but all decorum and
selfcommand, scolded like a waterman on the Thames, and was answered
with equal asperity and even more than equal ability by Sir John
Dalrymple, [766]

The most important acts of this Session were those which fixed the
ecclesiastical constitution of Scotland. By the Claim of Right it
had been declared that the authority of Bishops was an insupportable
grievance; and William, by accepting the Crown, had bound himself not
to uphold an institution condemned by the very instrument on which his
title to the Crown depended. But the Claim of Right had not defined