But Bermingham, who was Arnold's principal adviser, understood the duties of the Commission differently. According to his view every officer, from the Lord-Lieutenant downwards, was to be visited with extreme penalties for every technical error. No allowance was to be made for men who were irregularly and not highly paid, and who had too often to make her Majesty's bricks without straw. It was hard in Queen Elizabeth's time--it is hard enough in Queen Victoria's--to apportion the blame between the English Government and its servants in Ireland, but the irregularities themselves were scandalous enough. Even Bermingham had some doubts about the policy of employing anyone living in Ireland to inquire into matters personally affecting the Queen's representative, but the Commissioners were peremptory, and he had to deliver a book of exceptions to the Lord-Lieutenant's muster. A roll of his own, accompanying this document, contained 213 names, but of these twenty-five were holders of other offices, thirty were occasionally employed by other captains, and sixty-four were of Irish birth, though by rights all but eight should have been Englishmen. Of the Englishmen born ten were no soldiers, but at best retainers. A soldier's pay was drawn in the name of the clerk of Christ Church, and still more strangely in the name of Adam Loftus, 'primate and bishop of Armagh, almost these two years.' Sussex could muster 155 men, but no more than forty-three were really fit for service, and of these twenty-eight were officers. Thomas Smythe, the apothecary, who probably kept drugs for poisoning as well as for healing, was borne on the strength, and so were butchers, carters, woodcutters, scullions, makers of arras, musicians, a mariner, an old fisherman, a blind man, and a dead man. Brian Fitzwilliam's company should have mustered 200, exclusive of officers, whereas the rank and file in reality only numbered 128. Captain Fortescue's followers were found to be nearly all Irish; they were disbanded, and as Fortescue declined to account, he was committed to prison.[79] [Sidenote: Wrothe is recalled, 1564. Irregularities in the army. Proceedings against the officers.]