The city seethed with exasperated discontent, and the very day after the travellers arrived they found themselves in the heart of the struggle. It was Sunday, and they had gone to morning service at one of the City churches, where all had seemed tranquil enough. But at the time of giving out notices the Bishop’s Chancellor roused the congregation to fury by calling upon the churchwardens to take the oath to present offenders against the ecclesiastical law. All the wrath which had been gathering through the long years of tyranny, all the hatred of Laud’s unwise revival of obsolete lawrs and punishments seemed to concentrate itself in the shouts of “No oath! no oath!” which burst from the congregation. Gabriel was startled, but the next moment all his sympathies were with the people, for an apparitor stood up angrily haranguing the objectors and most foolishly dubbing them “A company of Puritan dogs.” This was too much to be tamely endured; the people rose in wrath and hustled the apparitor, while the Sheriff, who had been called to restore order, had the good sense to do so by taking the obnoxious apparitor to gaol, the Chancellor making his escape in such haste that he left his hat behind him. Gabriel, remembering how galling the prosecution of his own father had been, remembering, too, how Peter Waghorn’s old father lay dead at Bosbury, a victim of the same overbearing _régime_, could not but rejoice in the people’s triumph. The only marvel was that they had so long endured the intolerable tyranny--a tyranny which, during the last eleven years, had driven twenty thousand English Puritans to seek a new home in America. Meanwhile the King had found himself between the devil and the deep sea; Strafford’s infamous scheme of debasing the coinage had been checkmated by the firmness of the London merchants in the summer. It was impossible to raise money anymore after the illegal fashion of the past eleven years, and, hemmed in by his angry Scotch subjects in the north and his indignant English subjects in the south, Charles at length, in his speech to the great Council assembled in the hall of the Deanery at York, announced the issue of writs for a Parliament to meet on November the third. Sir Robert Harley lost no time in establishing his son and Gabriel Harford in chambers at Lincoln’s Inn, then returned once more to Brampton to be again elected one of the Members for Herefordshire.