Much damage, but of a more petty character, was done here by the Roundhead soldiery during the Civil War. In the middle of December, 1642, the city, having been taken by Waller, was pillaged and the Cathedral doors burst open. “As if they meant to invade God Himself as well as His profession,” writes Mercurius, “they enter the Church with colours flying, drums beating, matches fired; and that all might have their part in so horrid an attempt, some of their troops of horse also accompanied them in their march, and rode up through the body of the church and choir until they came to the altar: there they begin their work, they rudely plucked down the table and break the rail, and afterwards carried it to an alehouse; they set it on fire, and in that fire burnt the books of Common Prayer, and all the singing books belonging to the choir; they throw down the organ and break the stones of the Old and New Testament, curiously cut out in carved work, beautified with colours, and set round about the top of the stalls of the choir; from hence they turn to the monuments of the dead, some they utterly demolish, others they deface. They begin with Bishop Fox’s chapel which they utterly deface, they break all the glass windows of this chapel not because they had any pictures in them, but because they were of coloured glass, they demolished and overturned the monuments of Cardinal Beaufort, they deface the monument of William of Wayneflet, Bishop of Winchester, Lord Chancellor of England, and founder of Magdalen College, Oxford. From thence they go into Queen Mary’s Chapel, so called because in it she was married to King Philip of Spain; here they break the communion table in pieces, and the velvet chair whereon she sat when she was married.” After speaking of the chests containing the bones of kings and others, the narrative proceeds: “But these monsters of men to whom nothing is holy, nothing sacred, did not stick to profane and violate these cabinets of the dead, and to scatter their bones all over the pavement of the church; for on the north side of the choir they threw down the chests wherein were deposited the bones of the bishops; the like they did to the bones of William Rufus, of Queen Emma, of Harthacnut, and of Edward the Confessor, and were going on to practise the same impiety on the bones of all the rest of the West Saxon kings. But the outcry of the people detesting so great inhumanity, caused some of their commanders to come in amongst them and to restrain their madness. Those windows which they could not reach with their weapons they broke by throwing at them the bones of kings and saints. They broke off the swords from the brass statues of James I. and Charles I., which then stood at the entrance to the choir, breaking also the cross on the globe in the hand of Charles I., and hacked and hewed the crown on the head of it, swearing they would bring him back to his Parliament.... After all this, as if what they