But the opponents of lighthouses did not rest with the improvement in the lights. The Trinity House continued to excite opposition, and the corporation of Rye—quaint, sleepy old Rye, then very wide awake to its own interests—seems to have considered it a favourable opportunity for possessing itself of some one else’s property without paying for it. It remembered that the first idea of a lighthouse at Dungeness emanated from a townsman of Rye, and begged the gentleman at Lincoln’s Inn who fought their legal battles for them, to draft a Bill to be prosecuted in Parliament for vesting the title to the lighthouse in the mayor and jurats of Rye, who promised to bestow the profits on the repair of their much decayed harbour. That man of law was also a man of the world. In acknowledging their instructions, he advised the jurats to ‘make Mr. Speaker’ their ‘friend’; he evidently thought that so doing assisted Parliamentary procedure considerably! Perhaps the jurats neglected this sage advice: perhaps the price of friendship was too high. The Bill was drafted, the man of law did his part, but there the matter ended: the Bill remained a bud, it never blossomed into an Act, and Lamplough’s patent again resisted attack; he, in 1635, pulling down the then existing tower, and building one altogether more substantial, that stood till a century ago, when the lighthouse now there was erected. We hear no more of the ‘hindrance’ and ‘inconveniency’ of Dungeness lighthouse after this; its popularity was general, so much so that when, in Cromwell’s time, the Earl of Thanet, who was the ground-landlord, threatened the then owner, whose rent was in arrear, ‘to pull downe’ the structure, the latter did not pay, he only appealed to England’s Protector, who held that it was not a fitting state of affairs that ‘the safety of many lives and of the State’s ships should be left to the will of the Earl of Thanet’—and he granted the owner protection. After the Restoration there was a deal of squabbling over, and confusion about, the title to Dungeness light. The former owner had forfeited his right to it for adhering to the crown, and now the crown was once again a power in the land, and the ‘Parliament man,’ to whom the lighthouse land been given, would not quit, alleging a title by purchase; but into all that the reader need not go. The only point in it that will interest him is that at least one, probably more, of the Winstanley family had an interest in the title. Can these Winstanleys have been ancestors of Henry of Eddystone fame? If so, then we have, perhaps, a clue to what gave him the idea of erecting a lighthouse as an object of profit.