For no long time did the _Musaeum Minervae_ flourish. The King's troubles began; and in the storms of civil war the Academy for teaching the upper classes science and the fine arts, manners and accomplishments, fell to the ground and disappeared utterly. So bitter and inveterate was the feeling against the King, that, as Walpole says (and Walpole, be it remembered, cherished no reverence for Charles the First--quite otherwise--under a _facsimile_ of the warrant for the King's execution, he wrote 'Magna Charta,' and he often found pleasure in considering the monarch's fall), 'it seems to have become part of the religion of the time to war on the arts because they had been countenanced at Court.' So early as 1645, the Parliament had begun to sell the pictures at York House. On the 23d July in that year votes were passed ordering the sale, for the benefit of Ireland and the North, of all such pictures at York House 'as were without any superstition.' Pictures containing representations of the Second Person in the Trinity, or of the Virgin Mary, were judged to be superstitious, and ordered to be burned forthwith. Immediately after the King's death, votes were passed for the sale of all his pictures, statues, jewels, hangings, and goods. Cromwell, however, on his obtaining sole power, made some effort to stay the terrible sacrifice that was being made of the royal collections. There was thus an end of King Charles's _Musaeum Minervae_. Yet, if not absolutely founded on its ruins, at any rate in some measure following its example, we soon find record of the rise of a similar institution. One Sir Balthazar Gerbier, without Government aid or countenance, but acting entirely on his own responsibility, had opened an Academy 'on Bednall-green without Aldgate.' This was probably in the year 1649.