After petitions from the people, consultations with the Scotch, cautions from the Crown, and preparatory proceedings in the House, the grand debate came on respecting the "Root and Branch" Petition. The debate lasted throughout the 8th and 9th of February, 1641. In the course of it, the mercurial royalist, Lord Digby, observed, he had reason to believe that some aimed at a total extirpation of Episcopacy, yet, whilst opposing such extreme views, he was for clipping the wings of the prelates; and, though condemning the Petition, he thought no people had ever been more provoked than England of late years, by the insolence and exorbitance of the bishops. "For my part," declared he, "I profess I am inflamed with the sense of them, so that I find myself ready to cry out with the loudest of the 15,000, "down with them, down with them, even to the ground!" Let us not, however," he added, "destroy bishops, but make bishops such as they were in primitive times." The independent Nathaniel Fiennes opposed Episcopal rule, maintaining that until the Church Government of the country could "be framed of another twist," and more assimilated to that of the commonwealth, the ecclesiastical would be no good neighbour to the civil: for as with children afflicted with the rickets, all nourishment goes to the upper parts, so in the rickety condition of the Church, while the hierarchy became monstrously enlarged, the lower clergy pined away. Bishoprics, deaneries, and chapels, he compared to wasters in a wood. The official Sir Benjamin Rudyard condemned bishops unsparingly, yet advocated episcopal superintendence: and afterwards the learned Mr. Bagshawe pedantically distinguished between Episcopacy primitive _in statu puro_, and Episcopacy _in statu corrupto_, pleading, at the same time, for a thorough reformation of abuses, and an alteration of Ecclesiastical government into a Presbyterian form. Sir Harbottle Grimstone also asked for a diminution of prelatical power. [Sidenote: _Petitions._]