This visitation, as might be expected, was construed as a Divine judgment for the sins of the City; different parties of course pointing at the iniquities of their opponents as the cause of the fiery overthrow. Fanatics believed that it was the vengeance of Heaven against English barbarity in burning the Islands of Vlie and Schelling, and against national sins in general. A Quaker, near Windsor, was reported to have heard a miraculous voice saying, that "they have had the pestilence, and fire, and other calamities, and yet are not amended; but a worse plague has yet to come on them and the nation." "They clearly intimate in their letters," it was said of the same sect, "no sorrow for the late burning down so many steeple-houses (as they call them) in all the City."[509] [Sidenote: FIRE OF LONDON.] Yet human agency of some kind was, of course, admitted to be at the bottom. The Republicans, the Dutch, and the French, were suspected; the opinion most prevalent being that the Papists were authors of the mischief. This idea extensively prevailed. Probably it helped to induce the House of Commons first to present a petition to His Majesty asking for the banishment of priests and Jesuits, for the enforcement of the laws against them, and all other Roman Catholics, and for disarming everybody who refused the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy; and secondly, to resolve that all the members of the House should receive the Lord's Supper, under penalty of imprisonment for refusal.[510] Certainly, upon the return of Gunpowder Plot Day, the inculpation of the Papists kindled anew the eloquence of the clergy, and strengthened the stock argument that the "Mother of Abominations" remained unchanged. Yet the evidence adduced to establish the guilt of the accused was utterly unsatisfactory. The only person convicted was a Frenchman, and his conviction rested on his own assertion that he had fired the City--an assertion which must have proceeded from a morbid love of notoriety, or from some other unaccountable freak--for the fellow, at the gallows, just before being turned off, acknowledged that what he had said was altogether a lie. No doubt, the conclusion reached by the Government is correct,--"That, notwithstanding that many examinations have been taken, with great care, by the Lords of the Council and His Majesty's Ministers, yet nothing hath been yet found to argue it to have been other than the hand of God upon us, a great wind, and the season so very dry."[511] [Sidenote: 1666.]