However much members of the House of Commons might differ on the future government of the Church, they were still of one mind as to the necessity of changing the system under which it had been of late controlled. There may have been much to be said on behalf of an episcopacy exercising a moderating influence over the clergy, and guarding the rights of minorities against the oppressive instincts of a clerical majority. As a matter of fact this had not been the attitude of Charles's Bishops. Appointed by the Crown, and chosen out of one party only--and that the party of the minority amongst the clergy and the religious laity--they had seized the opportunity of giving free scope to their own practices and of hampering in every possible way the practices of those opposed to them. It was no Puritan, but Jeremy Taylor, the staunch defender of monarchy and episcopacy, who hit the nail on the head. "The interest of the bishops," he wrote, "is conjunct with the prosperity of the King, besides the interest of their own security, by the obligation of secular advantages. For they who have their livelihood from the King, and are in expectance of their fortune from him, are more likely to pay a tribute of exacted duty than others whose fortunes are not in such immediate dependency on His Majesty. It is but the common expectation of gratitude that a patron paramount shall be more assisted by his beneficiaries in cases of necessity than by those who receive nothing from him but the common influences of government." As usual, it was easier to mark the evil than to provide an adequate remedy. The party which numbered Hyde and Falkland in its ranks, and which afterwards developed into that of the Parliamentary Royalists, was alarmed lest a tyrannical episcopacy should be followed by a still more tyrannical Presbyterian discipline, and therefore strove to substitute for the existing system some scheme of modified episcopacy by which bishops should be in some way responsible to clerical councils. Cromwell was working hand in hand with men who strove to meet the difficulty in another way. The so-called Root-and-Branch Bill, said to have been drawn up by St. John, was brought to the House of Commons by himself and Vane. By them it was passed on to Hazlerigg, who in his turn passed it on to Sir Edward Dering, by whom it was actually moved in the House. As it was finally shaped in Committee, this bill, whilst absolutely abolishing archbishops, bishops, deans and chapters, transferred their ecclesiastical jurisdiction to bodies of Commissioners to be named by Parliament itself. Cromwell evidently had no more desire than Falkland to establish the Church Courts of the Scottish Presbyterian system in England.