Anecdotes are related serving to shew that even after the opening of the Long Parliament, the reformers had not definitely made up their minds as to what should be done. One "fine evening," Nathaniel Fiennes, after dining at Pym's lodgings with Mr. Hyde, afterwards Lord Clarendon, rode out with him on horseback "in the fields between Westminster and Chelsea." Hyde, in the course of conversation, asked Fiennes, "what government do you mean to introduce if the existing constitution of the Church were altered?" To this he replied "there will be time enough to think of that;" but he "assured him, and wished him to remember what he said, that if the King resolved to defend the bishops, it would cost the kingdom much blood, and would be the occasion of as sharp a war as had ever been in England; for that there was so great a number of good men who resolved to lose their lives before they would ever submit to that government."[85] These words were uttered in the summer of 1641, when the Long Parliament had been sitting seven or eight months. At an earlier period, Sir Philip Warwick--the Court gentleman who quizzed Cromwell's clothes--met the rough-looking man in the lobby of the House, and wished to know what the real objects of his party were. "I can tell you," he bluntly replied, "what I would _not_ have, if I cannot what I _would_." We are convinced that Cromwell spoke the truth in relation to his views of both the political and ecclesiastical changes on the brink of which the nation stood. Changes hovered not in the distance but at hand, and amongst them some which must modify the ecclesiastical establishment; but how far, looking at the different opinions of the country, reform ought to be carried, did not at once appear. Some few had republican theories--for example, Vane and Marten--and possibly at an early period they contemplated the overthrow of the monarchy, and with it the Episcopal Church. The latter of these gentlemen blurted out as much, with regard to monarchy, only two days after Fiennes' talk with Hyde, intimating his design to employ certain persons up to a certain point, and then to use them "as they had used others." But there is no solid ground for believing that the greater number of the reformers had at first any further object than that of effectually curbing kingly prerogative in the state, and bringing down the pomp and pride of episcopacy in the Church. The course which they actually pursued shaped itself according to the discipline of circumstances. Their views widened as they went along. As is often the case in times of change, these reformers in the end were forced to seek more than they originally imagined. First denied the little which might have contented them, they felt prompted to a further struggle, and naturally claimed more and more: it was but the story of the Sybil, with her books, repeated once again. Easy is it to point out apparent inconsistencies