The Act depriving the Presbyterians of the franchise had been annulled, and the elections had gone strongly in favour of the Whigs.  Hamilton had been chosen President by a majority of forty votes over Athole, whereupon twenty ardent Jacobites went straightway over to the other side.  The next thing to be done was to get rid of Gordon.  It was impossible, they said, for a free Parliament to deliberate under the shadow of hostile guns.  Two of his friends, the Earls of Lothian and Tweeddale, were accordingly sent to the Duke with a message from the Convention, offering him favourable terms of surrender.  He asked a night for consideration; but during the night he was also visited by Dundee and Balcarres.  They showed him the commissions entrusted to them by James, and told him that if things did not go better for their party they had resolved to exercise their power of summoning a new Convention to Stirling.  At his request Dundee also gave him a paper guaranteeing his action in holding the castle as most necessary to the cause.  On the following day, when the earls returned, Gordon told them he had decided not to surrender his trust except upon terms too extravagant to be seriously considered.  He was accordingly summoned in form by the heralds:  guards were posted round the castle, and all communications between it and the town declared treasonable.  The Duke replied by a largess of money to the heralds to drink King James’s health, telling them that they should in common decency have turned the King’s coats they wore on their backs before they came to declare the King’s subjects traitors.

Meanwhile a messenger had arrived with a sealed despatch for the Estates from James.  It seemed strange both to Dundee and Balcarres that the message had not been to them, or at least accompanied by a letter informing them of its purport; but they had no suspicion of its contents, and willingly agreed to the terms on which the Whigs consented to hear it read.  These terms were, that the Convention was a legal and free meeting, and would accept no order to dissolve until it had secured the liberty and religion of Scotland.  The vote was passed, and the letter was read, to the consternation of the Jacobites and the delight of the Whigs.  Of all the foolish acts committed by James the despatch of this letter was, in the circumstances, the most foolish.  Not a word did it contain of any intention to respect the religion or the liberty of men whom it still professed to address as subjects.  Pardon was promised to all who should return to their allegiance within a fortnight:  to all others punishment was threatened in this world, and damnation in the next.  Nothing was wanting to heighten the imprudence.  The letter was in the handwriting of Melfort, who was equally odious to both parties; and it had been preceded by one from William expressed in terms as wise and moderate as the others were headstrong and foolish.  But the feeling of the more temperate Jacobites will best be shown in the account Balcarres himself gave to his master of the effect produced by this fatal epistle.  “When the messenger was announced,” he wrote,