The Commons ordered all officers to attend their regiments, and sent down Commissioners to inform the army of the votes of the two Houses. The army gave the Commissioners such a reception as no Commissioners had ever witnessed before. Twenty-one thousand men had assembled to a rendezvous on Triploe Heath, near Royston; and the General and the Commissioners rode to each regiment, to acquaint them with the Parliamentary votes as to their instalment of pay, their disbanding, and their not approaching within twenty-five miles of London. The answer was sent up in shouts of "Justice! justice!" A petition also from the well-affected people of Essex was delivered on the field to the General in presence of the Commissioners, against the disbanding, declaring "that the Commonwealth had many enemies, who watched for such an opportunity to destroy the good people." A memorial was, moreover, drawn up and signed by the General and all the chief officers, to the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London, warning them against false representations of the intentions of the army, for that the war being at an end, all that they desired and prayed for was that the peace of the kingdom should be settled according to the declarations of Parliament before the army was called out, and that being done, the army should be paid before it was disbanded. So far from pacifying the Parliament, these proceedings alarmed it infinitely more, and it issued an order that the army should not come within forty-five miles of the capital. On its part, the army collected addresses from Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and the surrounding counties, praying the purgation of the House from all such members as were disqualified from sitting there by corruption, delinquency, abuse of the State, or undue election; and on the 16th of June, from its headquarters at St. Albans, the army formally impeached of high treason eleven of the most active Presbyterian members. This impeachment was presented to the House by twelve officers of the army--colonels, lieutenant-colonels, majors, and captains. Within a few days the General and officers sent a letter to the House, informing it that they would appoint proper persons to conduct the impeachment, and make good their charges; and desired the House to suspend the accused forthwith, as it was not fitting that those persons who had done their best to prejudice the army should sit as judges of their own actions. This, says Clarendon, was an arrow out of their own quiver, which the Commons did not expect; and though it was a legitimate consequence of the impeachments of Strafford, Laud, and others, they endeavoured to set it at defiance. The Parliament and its army were, in fact, come to the pass which the brave old Royalist, Sir Jacob Astley, had foreseen when he surrendered his regiment at Stowe, in 1646:--"You have done your work, my masters, and may go and play, unless you will fall out amongst yourselves."