This assumption of ecclesiastical power, on the part of Convocation, was most offensively absurd. The nation for years had been divided both in politics and religion; and it was not to be expected that such decrees could be issued without provoking resistance and creating trouble. Hence, in the same year, and in the year following, we find a crowd of events which exerted a most powerful influence on the subsequent history of the nation. The House of Commons, which, after an interval of eleven years, was again brought together, appointed a grand committee of the whole house to inquire into the scandalous immoralities of the clergy. Above two thousand cases were presented, and the work of cleansing the Augean stable became so heavy, that the grand committee had to divide itself into four or five sub-committees, called White’s, Corbett’s, Harlow’s, and Dearing’s committees, after the chairman of each. An act also was passed by the House of Commons, that the clergy should not be magistrates, neither should officiate as judges in civil courts. Lord Strafford—eloquent and bold, but imperious and cruel, Charles’s most trusted counsellor, and one whose object it had been to make his royal master as absolute a monarch as any in Europe—was arrested, tried, and beheaded. The Star Chamber and the High Commission courts, the former a political, the latter a religious inquisition, were abolished. Thirteen bishops were impeached by the Lower House of Parliament, Archbishop Laud being one of them. The London apprentices began their riots. Two hundred thousand Protestant men, women, and children, were massacred in Ireland, and thousands more had to flee to England, naked and famished, to obtain subsistence. The papistical butchers, not satisfied with this, proceeded to threaten that, when they had wreaked their vengeance on the handful left in Ireland, they would come to England, and inflict upon the Protestants there the same barbarities. It was impossible for such events to happen without public feeling being excited to the highest pitch. The parliament was aroused; the country rose to arms; and the civil wars commenced. The Commons passed a resolution that they would never consent to any toleration of the popish religion, either in Ireland or any other part of his majesty’s dominions; and another bill was passed excluding bishops from the House of Lords. From this date, the Church of England, if not entirely demolished, may be regarded as a ruin.