These were days of widespread oppression, when Strafford, Laud, the Star Chamber, and ecclesiastical courts gave effect to the king’s eager longings for arbitrary power. The following is from a half-mad fanatic who has offended the relentless archbishop. “The petition of Richard Farnham, a prophet of the most high God, a true subject to my king, and a prisoner of my saviour Christ, in Newgate, to Archbishop Laud and the rest of the high commissioners, whom he prays to excuse his plainness, being no scholar.... Desires to know the cause of his being detained so long in prison, where he has been kept a year next April without coming to his answer. Thinks they have forgotten him. If he be a false prophet and a blasphemer and a seducer, as most people report that he is, the high commissioners would do well to bring him to trial. What he wrote before he came into prison and what he has written since he will stand to.... If he does not get his answer this summer he intends to complain to the king, believing that it is not his pleasure his subjects should suffer false imprisonment to satisfy the archbishop’s mind.” Of the same year and the same character is this other petition from William King, a prisoner in Newgate “for a little treatise delivered to Lord Leppington.” Has remained in thraldom twenty-seven months; expresses contrition and prays enlargement on bail, or that he may be called to answer. Forty years more were to elapse before the passing of the Habeas Corpus Act; but the forgoing will show how grievously this so-called palladium of an Englishman’s liberties was required.