The new Act regarding the Kirk permitted the holding of Synods and General Assemblies, to be summoned by permission of William or of the Privy Council, with a Royal Commissioner present to restrain the preachers from meddling, as a body, with secular politics. The Kirk was to be organised by the "Sixty Bishops," the survivors of the ministers ejected in 1663. The benefices of ejected Episcopalian conformists were declared to be vacant. Lay patronage was annulled: the congregations had the right to approve or disapprove of presentees. But the Kirk was deprived of her old weapon, the attachment of civil penalties (that is practical outlawry) to her sentences of excommunication (July 19, 1690). The Covenant was silently dropped. Thus ended, practically, the war between Kirk and State which had raged for nearly a hundred and twenty years. The cruel torturing of Nevile Payne, an English Jacobite taken in Scotland, showed that the new sovereigns and Privy Council retained the passions and methods of the old, but this was the last occasion of judicial torture for political offences in Scotland. Payne was silent, but was illegally imprisoned till his death. The proceedings of the restored General Assembly were awaited with anxiety by the Government. The extremists of the Remnant, the "Cameronians," sent deputies to the Kirk. They were opposed to acknowledging sovereigns who were "the head of the Prelatics" in England, and they, not being supported by the Assembly, remained apart from the Kirk and true to the Covenants. Much had passed which William disliked--the abolition of patronage, the persecution of Episcopalians--and Melville, in 1691, was removed by the king from the Commissionership.