The Commons were not content with addressing the throne.  They instituted an inquiry into the proceedings of the Scotch Company in London.  Belhaven made his escape to his own country, and was there beyond the reach of the Serjeant-at-Arms.  But Paterson and some of his confederates were severely examined.  It soon appeared that the Board which was sitting in Clement’s Lane had done things which were certainly imprudent and perhaps illegal.  The Act of Incorporation empowered the detectors to take and to administer to their servants an oath of fidelity.  But that Act was on the south of the Tweed a nullity.  Nevertheless the directors had, in the heart of the City of London, taken and administered this oath, and had thus, by implication, asserted that the powers conferred on them by the legislature of Scotland accompanied them to England.  It was resolved that they had been guilty of a high crime and misdemeanour, and that they should be impeached.  A committee was appointed to frame articles of impeachment; but the task proved a difficult one; and the prosecution was suffered to drop, not however till the few English capitalists who had at first been friendly to Paterson’s project had been terrified into renouncing all connection with him.

Now, surely, if not before, Paterson ought to have seen that his project could end in nothing but shame to himself and ruin to his worshippers.  From the first it had been clear that England alone could protect his Company against the enmity of Spain; and it was now clear that Spain would be a less formidable enemy than England.  It was impossible that his plan could excite greater indignation in the Council of the Indies at Madrid, or in the House of Trade at Seville, than it had excited in London.  Unhappily he was given over to a strong delusion, and the blind multitude eagerly followed their blind leader.  Indeed his dupes were maddened by that which should have sobered them.  The proceedings of the Parliament which sate at Westminster, proceedings just and reasonable in substance, but in manner doubtless harsh and insolent, had roused the angry passions of a nation, feeble indeed in numbers and in material resources, but eminently high spirited.  The proverbial pride of the Scotch was too much for their proverbial shrewdness.  The votes of the English Lords and Commons were treated with marked contempt.  The populace of Edinburgh burned Rochester in effigy.  Money was poured faster than ever into the treasury of the Company.  A stately house, in Milne Square, then the most modern and fashionable part of Edinburgh, was purchased and fitted up at once as an office and a warehouse.  Ships adapted both for war and for trade were required; but the means of building such ships did not exist in Scotland; and no firm in the south of the island was disposed to enter into a contract which might not improbably be considered by the House of Commons as an impeachable offence.  It was necessary to have recourse to the dockyards of Amsterdam and Hamburg.  At an expense of fifty thousand pounds a few vessels were procured, the largest of which would hardly have ranked as sixtieth in the English navy; and with this force, a force not sufficient to keep the pirates of Sallee in check, the Company threw down the gauntlet to all the maritime powers in the world.