The cause of English Episcopacy sank into a hopeless condition. Whatever streaks of light had just before been flickering on its horizon had now totally vanished; not that the removal of the prelates' bench from the House of Peers sealed its fate, for, apart from legislative authority and political position, Episcopal office and influence might have been retained. But the policy of Laud and Montague had been such as to estrange from the Order the affections of the Puritans, then the most active and influential part of the religious population of the country. The complicity of Church rulers in the unpopular proceedings of the High Commission and Star Chamber Courts, and their sympathy in Strafford's scheme of arbitrary rule, had torn away from them the last ties of attachment on the part of the middle classes, which, in modern England, form the only trustworthy stays of power in Church or State. The effect of the protest of Archbishop Williams and his associates had confirmed the mean opinion in which all the bishops were held, and had now rendered a case before very doubtful, wholly desperate. Charles, who from the beginning had been ready to stake the crown in his struggle for the Episcopal Church, had by his arrest of the five members exasperated to the utmost the supporters of the Constitution, and placed himself in a false position towards the House of Commons; so that, while imperilling his own prerogatives, he also injured the Church, with which he identified the interests of his throne. [Sidenote: 1641-2.] Even the secession of certain conspicuous advocates from the ranks of ecclesiastical reform to the opposite side served to weaken, not to help, the cause of ecclesiastical conservatism.