The House of Lords, however, remained a bastion of Whig strength. As an hereditary body the House of Lords was simply not subject to the same opportunity for change as the elected House of Commons. Consequently, in 1710, as a result of the Glorious Revolution, the long reign of William III, and the Godolphin Ministry, the majority of the members of the House of Lords were of Whig or Revolution Settlement policies. Therein lay Harley's problem in late October of 1710: to obtain a Lords to match the Commons he had been given. Any early eighteenth-century Ministry--Whig or Tory--could count on having the support of those peers whose poverty made them dependent on governmental subsidies, but this number would not have given Harley even a bare majority in the strongly Whig House of Lords. And there Harley needed at least enough strength to ensure success for some of the measures designed to satisfy the demands of the newly Tory House of Commons, particularly if his Ministry was to be able to negotiate a satisfactory treaty of peace with France. To obtain a Tory majority in the House of Lords commensurate with the one in Commons, Harley could have seen to the creation of a sufficient number of new peerages; but this would have alienated too many factions and the recently completed Union with Scotland (1707) offered what appeared to be a far simpler expedient. The Act of Union provided for the election of sixteen Scottish peers who would represent all of the Scottish nobility in the House of Lords.[3] If he could ensure that all sixteen of these peers were Tory, Harley would be certain of a large block of loyal votes in the upper house, or, at worst, he would have to arrange for the creation of only a few new peers to neutralize the Whigs' strength. To John Campbell, the second Duke of Argyll, Harley assigned the task of orchestrating a Tory sweep in this election. The Duke of Argyll sat in the House of Lords as the Earl of Greenwich (an English title), not as one of the elected peers, and, as such, he was not elegible to stand as a candidate or to vote in this election. Argyll had supported the Whig Junto and held the rank of Lieutenant General under Marlborough in France, but in 1710 (seeing the direction the political tide was taking) he abandoned his support of Godolphin's Ministry. So that, "by the time the [Sacheverell] Trial was finished, it was known that the great chief of the Campbells and of the Scottish Whigs had gone into opposition to the Government [of Godolphin] in league with Harley, although he voted for the Doctor's condemnation...."[4]