"His first care," says his biographer Innes, "was to purge the corporations from that leaven which was in danger of corrupting the whole kingdom; so he appointed certain regulators to inspect the conduct of several borough towns, to correct abuses where it was practicable, and where not, by forfeiting their charters, to turn out such rotten members as infected the rest. But in this, as in most other cases, the king had the fortune to choose persons not too well qualified for such an employment, and extremely disagreeable to the people; it was a sort of motley council made up of catholics and presbyterians, a composition which was sure never to hold long together, or that could probably unite in any method suitable to both their interests; it served therefore only to increase the public odium by their too arbitrary ways of turning out and putting in; and yet those who were thus intruded, as it were, by force, being of the presbyterian party, were by this time become as little inclinable to favour the king's intentions as the excluded members."[118] This endeavour to violate the legal rights of electors as well as to take away other vested franchises, by new modelling corporations through commissions granted to regulators, was the most capital delinquency of the king's government; because it tended to preclude any reparation for the rest, and directly attacked the fundamental constitution of the state.[119] But, like all his other measures, it displayed not more ill-will to the liberties of the nation than inability to overthrow them. The catholics were so small a body, and so weak, especially in corporate towns, that the whole effect produced by the regulators was to place municipal power and trust in the hands of the nonconformists, those precarious and unfaithful allies of the court, whose resentment of past oppression, hereditary attachment to popular principles of government, and inveterate abhorrence of popery, were not to be effaced by an unnatural coalition. Hence, though they availed themselves, and surely without reproach, of the toleration held out to them, and even took the benefit of the scheme of regulation, so as to fill the corporation of London and many others, they were, as is confessed above, too much of Englishmen and protestants for the purposes of the court. The wiser part of the churchmen made secret overtures to their party; and by assurances of a toleration, if not also of a comprehension within the Anglican pale, won them over to a hearty concurrence in the great project that was on foot.[120] The king found it necessary to descend so much from the haughty attitude he had taken at the outset of his reign, as personally to solicit men of rank and local influence for their votes on the two great measures of repealing the test and penal laws. The country gentlemen, in their different counties, were tried with circular questions, whether they would comply with the king in their elections,