1644 were not so great as it might appear at first sight. Lincoln was again attacked by the Royalists in 1648, when the bishop's palace was stormed and taken, and the city given over to plunder. In a description of the minster, published in 1771, the following account of the injury is given:--"Bishop Winniff had little Enjoyment of his Honor in presiding over this See; for in the Year 1645 ... he had the Mortification to see all the Brass Work of the Gravestones pulled up, the rich Brass Gates to the Choir and divers of the Chantries pulled down, and every regaining Beauty defaced; and his Church made Barracks; for the prevailing Parties in that unhappy Reign, and his Episcopal Palace totally destroyed, both at Lincoln and Buckden." During the time of the Commonwealth, the minster passed through a crisis such as it had never before experienced, and such as we may hope it will never experience again. "Certain godly ones," we are told, were "then gaping after its stone, timber, and lead," and the minster was in great danger of being demolished altogether. This fact has been recorded by the late Precentor Venables, who states that the fabric was "only rescued from threatened destruction by the civic worthy, Mr. Original Peart (Mayor in 1650 and Member of Parliament in 1654 and 1656), who represented to Cromwell that 'if the minster were down Lincoln would soon be one of the worst towns in the county.'" [Illustration: THE OBSERVATORY TOWER, LINCOLN CASTLE. _Photochrom Co. Ltd., Photo._] In 1654, on the 19th August, Evelyn visited the city. He has left to us in his Diary an interesting record of the Lincoln of the Commonwealth:--"Lincoln is an old confused town, very long, uneven, steep, and ragged, formerly full of good houses, especially churches and abbeys. The minster almost comparable to that of York itself, abounding with marble pillars, and having a fair front (here was interred Queen Eleanora, the loyal and loving wife who sucked the poison out of her husband's wound); the abbot founder, with rare carving in the stone; the great bell, or Tom, as they call it. I went up the steeple, from whence is a goodly prospect all over the county. The soldiers had lately knocked off most of the brasses from the gravestones, so as few inscriptions were left; they told us that these men went in with axes and hammers, and shut themselves in, till they had rent and torn off some barge-loads of metal, not sparing even the monuments of the dead; so hellish an avarice possessed them: besides which, they exceedingly ruined the city." At the Restoration, Robert Sanderson was rewarded for his long faithfulness to the royal house by the bishopric of Lincoln. He had been a chaplain to Charles I., who is reported to have said, "I carry my ears to hear other preachers, but I carry my conscience to hear Dr. Sanderson."