By a clever manœuvre of her friends the ministers were next cast into a minority. The House had gone into committee on the divorce clause. The clause was distasteful to some of the bishops. Dr. Howley, indeed, is said to have held that the King could do no wrong, even if he broke the seventh commandment. Others, however, thought that a man so notoriously guilty in that respect was not justified in seeking to destroy his wife, even if she were as guilty as _he_ was. The clause was objected to by many peers, and _popularly_ it was distasteful for something of the same reasons. The ministers, thinking to gain a point by abandoning a clause, moved the omission of this very clause of divorce. But the Queen’s friends immediately saw that, by the retaining of the clause, the bishops and others who preferred the bill without it would be less likely to vote for the passing of the bill itself. They accordingly voted that the divorce clause should be retained, and the ministers, in a minority on this point, proposed the third reading of the bill with the clause in question in the body of it. One hundred and eight voted for it, and ninety-nine against it. The ministry were thus only in a majority of nine--exactly the number of the peers who were members of the cabinet--and after a short delay Lord Liverpool made a merit of surrendering the measure as an offering to popular feeling, although they had carried the bill--with too small a majority, as he confessed, to enable ministers to act upon it.