Petitions afterwards flowed in on the other side from Wales, Lancashire, Staffordshire, and other counties.[141] High Churchmen talked about the way in which the Puritans and Presbyterians got up these documents. The signatures were fictitious. People were cajoled into writing their names--intended for one purpose, they were perverted for another. Such things might not be altogether without truth. But we are safe in believing, if tricks were played by one party they were played by the other also; and as at present, so then, whatever was done by either faction came in for an unmerciful, and often unrighteous, share of criticism from exasperated opponents.[142] [Sidenote: _Petitions._] While petitioners were busy, and the House of Commons had enough to do to hear their grievances, and debates were earnest, and two potent principles were embodied in the strife, the King watched it all with alarm for Episcopacy rather than with any apprehensions for his own personal safety. For his subjects were loyal and dutiful, and, according to Baillie, "feared his frown." He summoned both Houses of Parliament to Whitehall, on the 25th January, 1641, and, after professing willingness to concur in the reformation of the Church, added the following characteristic sentences: "I will show you some _rubs_, and must needs take notice of some very strange (I know not what term to give them) petitions given in the names of divers counties, against the present established Government, and of the great threatenings against the bishops, that they will make them to be but cyphers, or, at least, their voices to be taken away. Now I must tell you, that I make a great difference between reformation and alteration of Government, though I am for the former, I cannot give way to the latter. If some of them have overstretched their power, I shall not be unwilling these things should be redressed and reformed--nay, further, if upon serious debate you shall show me that bishops have some temporal authority inconvenient to the State, I shall not be unwilling to desire them to lay it down. But this must not be understood, that I shall in any way consent that their voices in Parliament should be taken away; for in all the times of my predecessors since the Conquest, and before, they have enjoyed it, and I am bound to maintain them in it as one of the fundamental constitutions of this kingdom."[143] [Sidenote: 1641, February.]