Walpole's instinct had conducted him right. The reading of the message, which Walpole delivered with great rhetorical effect, carried confusion into the Tory ranks. Two hundred and four members voted for the Address, two hundred and thirty-four voted against it. The King's friends were in a majority of thirty. Archdeacon Coxe in his "Life of Walpole" gives it as his opinion that the victory was obtained because some forty-five of the Tories quitted the House in a body before the division, believing that they were thus acting on constitutional principles, and that the interference of the House of Commons would be an unconstitutional, democratic, and dangerous innovation. But it is hardly possible to believe that the managers of the prince's case could have been kept in total ignorance up to the last moment of the fact that forty-five Tories were determined to regard the interference of Parliament as unconstitutional, and to abstain from taking part in the division. It is declared to be positively certain that the "whips," as we should now call them, of the prince's party had canvassed every man on their own side, if not on both sides. They could not have made up anything like the number they announced in anticipation to the prince if they had taken into account forty-five probable or possible abstentions among their own men. The truth evidently is that the reading of the King's message compelled a good many Tories to withdraw who already were somewhat uncertain as to the constitutionalism, in the Tory sense, of the course their leaders were taking. They would probably have swallowed {89} their scruples but for the message; that dexterous stroke of policy was too much for them. How can we--they probably thus reasoned with themselves--back up to the last a prince who positively refused to listen to the offer of a compromise spontaneously made by his father?