It was necessary that one of the Secretaries of State for Scotland should be in attendance on the King.

The Master of Stair had therefore gone to the Continent.

His colleague, Johnstone, was chief manager for the Crown at Edinburgh, and was charged to correspond regularly with Carstairs, who never quitted William.

[415] It might naturally have been expected that the session would be turbulent.

The Parliament was that very Parliament which had in 1689 passed, by overwhelming majorities, all the most violent resolutions which Montgomery and his club could frame, which had refused supplies, which had proscribed the ministers of the Crown, which had closed the Courts of justice, which had seemed bent on turning Scotland into an oligarchical republic.