These things were done at the end of September. On November 21st the General Assembly was to meet at Glasgow. The intervening time was spent by Hamilton in vain attempts to influence the elections and to procure signatures for the new or King's Covenant, as it was called. In both he was equally unsuccessful. The Assembly was constituted after a fashion which left no doubt what its temper was likely to be. Going back to an Act of 1587, it was resolved to elect lay as well as ecclesiastical members. This was what Hamilton wished to prevent. The ministers alone he thought he might still be able to persuade to show some respect for the prerogative of a King who was ready to grant so much, and who had already shown himself both willing and able to make their position easier and more secure. Nor were the ministers themselves well pleased to see the office that was rightly theirs shared among men who, as they knew well, were for the most part influenced by no real love for religion, and whose lives were in too many instances at direct variance with its teaching. But the nobles, in Baillie's expressive phrase, had now got their feet in the stirrup, and were not to be stopped from the game they had started. Moreover, it was in them that the real strength of the Covenant as a national movement against an arbitrary king still lay. The people knew this, and the ministers were not strong enough to dictate to the people. The Tables were the controlling power of the elections, and of that body no member was now busier or more resolute than Montrose. The King's Covenant proved a lamentable failure. Few could be found to sign it compared with the crowds that still thronged daily to subscribe its rival, and of these nearly one-half came from Aberdeen and the neighbourhood, which through all the trouble had stood stoutly by the Throne; while a mad woman named Margaret Nicholson, who went about the country proclaiming herself empowered to declare the National Covenant a direct gift from heaven, and the King's from another place, was generally accepted as an inspired prophetess.