Argyll and the sixteen representative peers (if they were all Tories), together with the votes of those peers who were dependant upon Government subsidies would give the new Ministry of Harley enough votes in the upper house for almost any eventuality--even the impeachment of Marlborough. It is possible to speculate that this was the plum--command of the British armies in Europe--that induced Argyll's change from Whig to Tory in 1710. Argyll's jealousy and resentment of his commander had been a well known bit of gossip for some time, and it is very possible that Argyll saw a new Government as his chance to steal a march on Marlborough. Although Harley's Ministry did give the Order of the Garter to Argyll on 20 December 1710, he was never promoted over Marlborough, but that was not due to any lack of success in assuring a Tory victory in the election of the peers. Argyll's heavy-handed management of that election is the subject of Defoe's _Atalantis Major_. By birth and education Daniel Defoe was a member of the mercantile middle class. He was a Dissenter and his political and economic sympathies generally coincided with those of the moderate Whigs. A limited monarchy, the destruction of France's commercial empire, liberty of conscience for Dissenters and Nonconformists, and a Protestant (that is, Hanover) Succession were the imperatives which lay behind much of his political and economic thinking and writing. From as early as 1694 he had served William III as a pamphleteer-propagandist for the vigorous prosecution of the war with France. After his five-month imprisonment in 1703 for writing _The Shortest Way with Dissenters_, Defoe was employed as an agent and pamphleteer of the Government. First, in the service of Robert Harley, Godolphin's Secretary of State during the early moderate years of the Godolphin Administration (1704-08), and thereafter working for Godolphin himself, Defoe's _Review_ preached the gospel of national unity above party faction. When Harley replaced Godolphin as Treasurer in 1710, Defoe returned to his service.