not
reckoned on the outcome of the General Election called in October. "On
the day Godolphin fell, Harley expounded his 'moderate' programme in a
letter to the Duke of Newcastle: 'The Queen is assured you will approve
her proceedings, which are directed to the sole aim of making an
honourable and safe peace, securing her allies, reserving the liberty
and property of the subject, and the indulgence to Dissenters in
particular, and to perpetuate this by really securing the succession of
the House of Hanover.'"[1]

Alone, either the antagonism to the war or the intensity of feeling for
the High-Church cause which the Sacheverell affair engendered, would
have been sufficient to sweep the Whigs from power. Together, and
combined as they were with the prestige of the Queen's public support
of Harley and the newly appointed Tory Ministers, these issues were
irresistible. Harley found himself with an "immoderate" House of
Commons. The Tories held 320 seats, the Whigs only 150, and there were
40 seats whose votes were "doubtful."[2] Many of the new
Parliamentarians were High-Church zealots, and most were anxious to
turn the nation away from the policies of the Whig Administration of
Godolphin.

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