So the castle came to the Royalists. They put in command of it Sir John Denham, who in that very same year had published, anonymously, his famous _Cooper's Hill_. Wither had left behind him three hundred sheep and a hundred oxen, so that the garrison was well victualled, and the poet-Governor ought to have been able to put up a fight against an enemy who had no artillery. Wither would have shown him how to do it. But Sir John had no idea of what a battle should be. One December morning, a few days after he had taken over the command, Sir William Waller, a Parliament General, rode up at the head of his dragoons and demanded surrender. Of course Sir John refused, and Sir William proceeded to fix a petard to the gate, to blow it in. A military genius like Wither would have ordered his men to fire their muskets at the enemy; but all the soldiers on both sides escaped that day. The explosive was securely fastened in position, the gate was shattered, the assailants rushed at the breach, and began at once to pull down the barricade of timber erected inside by the garrison. This done, the garrison surrendered, and the glorious day was over. But Sir John Denham got the best of Wither in the end. Not long afterwards Wither was taken prisoner by the Royalists, and Denham, who had wisely been set at liberty to rejoin the Royalist forces, begged for his rival's life. Mr. Wither, he pleaded, should not be hanged, for while Wither lived he was not himself the worst poet in England. The castle keep was never to be held by a successor to Wither and Denham. Sir William Waller blew up one of the walls when he took it from Sir John, and the year before Charles was executed Parliament ordered it to be dismantled altogether. The garrison fell to with enthusiasm, stripped the building of all the lead, wood, and glass they could lay their hands on, and sold the wreck to make up their back pay. At the Restoration, when Bishop Duppa came to the See, he found the castle almost uninhabitable. It cost him more than two thousand pounds to make it fit to live in, and his successor, Bishop Morley, spent even more. He actually laid out ten thousand pounds in improvements, only to meet with John Aubrey's criticism that he had repaired the building "without any regard to the rules of architecture." Doctor Peter Mew, who succeeded Morley, set about improving the castle from outside, and planted the top of the keep, into which the old walls had been tumbled, with fruit trees. Bishop Sumner, who held the See for forty-two years from 1827, turned the orchard into a garden.