But the proceedings of this strange Parliament, in almost every one of its sessions, falsified all the predictions of politicians.  It had once been the most unmanageable of senates.  It was now the most obsequious.  Yet the old men had again met in the old hall.  There were all the most noisy agitators of the club, with the exception of Montgomery, who was dying of want and of a broken heart in a garret far from his native land.  There was the canting Ross and the perfidious Annandale.  There was Sir Patrick Hume, lately created a peer, and henceforth to be called Lord Polwarth, but still as eloquent as when his interminable declamations and dissertations ruined the expedition of Argyle.  But the whole spirit of the assembly had undergone a change.  The members listened with profound respect to the royal letter, and returned an answer in reverential and affectionate language.  An extraordinary aid of a hundred and fourteen thousand pounds sterling was granted to the Crown.  Severe laws were enacted against the Jacobites.  The legislation on ecclesiastical matters was as Erastian as William himself could have desired.  An Act was passed requiring all ministers of the Established Church to swear fealty to their Majesties, and directing the General Assembly to receive into communion those Episcopalian ministers, not yet deprived, who should declare that they conformed to the Presbyterian doctrine and discipline.417 Nay, the Estates carried adulation so far as to make it their humble request to the King that he would be pleased to confer a Scotch peerage on his favourite Portland.  This was indeed their chief petition.  They did not ask for redress of a single grievance.  They contented themselves with hinting in general terms that there were abuses which required correction, and with referring the King for fuller information to his own Ministers, the Lord High Commissioner and the Secretary of State.418

There was one subject on which it may seem strange that even the most servile of Scottish Parliaments should have kept silence.  More than a year had elapsed since the massacre of Glencoe; and it might have been expected that the whole assembly, peers, commissioners of shires, commissioners of burghs, would with one voice have demanded a strict investigation into that great crime.  It is certain, however, that no motion for investigation was made.  The state of the Gaelic clans was indeed taken into consideration.  A law was passed for the more effectual suppressing of depredations and outrages beyond the Highland line; and in that law was inserted a special proviso reserving to Mac Callum More his hereditary jurisdiction.  But it does not appear, either from the public records of the proceedings of the Estates, or from those private letters in which Johnstone regularly gave Carstairs an account of what had passed, that any speaker made any allusion to the fate of Mac Ian and his kinsmen.419 The only explanation of this extraordinary silence