that, if they should, at the hazard of their lands and
lives, succeed in restoring him, all that he had to give would be given
to those who had deposed him. They too, when they read his letters,
knew, what he did not know when the letters were written, that he had
been duped by the confident boasts and promises of the apostate Whigs.
He imagined that the Club was omnipotent at Edinburgh; and, in truth,
the Club had become a mere byword of contempt. The Tory Jacobites easily
found pretexts for refusing to obey the Presbyterian Jacobites to whom
the banished King had delegated his authority. They complained that
Montgomery had not shown them all the despatches which he had received.
They affected to suspect that he had tampered with the seals. He called
God Almighty to witness that the suspicion was unfounded. But oaths were
very naturally regarded as insufficient guarantees by men who had just
been swearing allegiance to a King against whom they were conspiring.
There was a violent outbreak of passion on both sides; the coalition was
dissolved; the papers were flung into the fire; and, in a few days, the
infamous triumvirs who had been, in the short space of a year, violent
Williamites and violent Jacobites, became Williamites again, and
attempted to make their peace with the government by accusing each
other, [776]

Ross was the first who turned informer. After the fashion of the school
in which he had been bred, he committed this base action with all the
forms of sanctity. He pretended to be greatly troubled in mind, sent for
a celebrated Presbyterian minister named Dunlop, and bemoaned himself
piteously: "There is a load on my conscience; there is a secret which
I know that I ought to disclose; but I cannot bring myself to do it."
Dunlop prayed long and fervently; Ross groaned and wept; at last it
seemed that heaven had been stormed by the violence of supplication; the
truth came out, and many lies with it. The divine and the penitent then
returned thanks together. Dunlop went with the news to Melville. Ross
set off for England to make his peace at court, and performed his
journey in safety, though some of his accomplices, who had heard of
his repentance, but had been little edified by it, had laid plans for
cutting his throat by the way. At London he protested, on his honour
and on the word of a gentleman, that he had been drawn in, that he had
always disliked the plot, and that Montgomery and Ferguson were the real