The advanced Liberal Acts which were passed did not receive the touch of the sceptre from Hamilton, William's Commissioner: thus they were "vetoed," and of no effect. The old packed committee, "The Lords of the Articles," was denounced as a grievance; the king was to be permitted to appoint no officers of State without Parliament's approbation. Hamilton offered compromises, for William clung to "the Articles"; but he abandoned them in the following year, and thenceforth till the Union (1707) the Scottish was "a Free Parliament." Various measures of legislation for the Kirk---some to emancipate it as in its palmy days, some to keep it from meddling in politics--were proposed; some measures to abolish, some to retain lay patronage of livings, were mooted. The advanced party for a while put a stop to the appointment of judges, but in August came news of the Viscount Dundee in the north which terrified parliamentary politicians. Edinburgh Castle had been tamely yielded by the Duke of Gordon; Balcarres, the associate of Dundee, had been imprisoned; but Dundee himself, after being declared a rebel, in April raised the standard of King James. As against him the Whigs relied on Mackay, a brave officer who had been in Dutch service, and now commanded regiments of the Scots Brigade of Holland. Mackay pursued Dundee, as Baillie had pursued Montrose, through the north: at Inverness, Dundee picked up some Macdonalds under Keppoch, but Keppoch was not satisfactory, being something of a freebooter. The Viscount now rode to the centre of his hopes, to the Macdonalds of Glengarry, the Camerons of Lochiel, and the Macleans who had been robbed of their lands by the Earl of Argyll, executed in 1685. Dundee summoned them to Lochiel's house on Loch Arkaig for May 18; he visited Atholl and Badenoch; found a few mounted men as recruits at Dundee; returned through the wilds to Lochaber, and sent round that old summons to a rising, the Fiery Cross, charred and dipped in a goat's blood.