In 1642, a committee was appointed by the House of Commons to inquire “what malignant clergymen had benefices in and about London, which benefices, being sequestered, might be supplied by others, who should receive their profits;” and in the year following, the “Scandalous Committee” of 1640, and the “Plundering Committee” of 1642, (as the royalists called them,) were empowered to act in concert; and, by their united efforts, the Church was well-nigh cleared both of the clergymen who were immoral, and of those whose opinions did not harmonise with the opinions generally entertained by parliament. Many left their cures, and took sanctuary in the king’s armies; others were put under confinement in Lambeth, Winchester, and Ely; and about twenty were imprisoned beneath deck in ships on the river Thames, no friend being allowed to come near them. Several pious and worthy bishops and other clergymen, who desired to live peaceably without joining either side, had their estates and livings sequestered, and their houses and goods plundered, and were themselves reduced to live upon the fifths, a small pension from parliament. Among these may be mentioned, Archbishop Usher, Bishops Morton and Hall, and the no less renowned Jeremy Taylor, who, driven from his living at Uppingham, retired into Wales, and, while supporting himself and his family by teaching a school, there composed some of the greatest of his immortal works. For the space of about two years, the country might be said to be without any established form of worship. The clergy were left to read the liturgy, or not to read it, as they pleased, and to use equal discretion as to wearing the canonical habits, or the Geneva cloak. The ecclesiastical polity of the realm was in total confusion. Episcopacy was the form of government prescribed by the old law of the land, which was not repealed; but the form of government prescribed by parliamentary ordinance was presbyterian; and yet, neither the old law, nor the parliamentary ordinance, was practically in force. The Church actually established may be described as an irregular body, made up of a few presbyteries, and of many independent congregations, all held down and held together by the authority of government. Cathedral worship was almost everywhere abolished, and many of the sacred edifices themselves defaced and injured. By the parliamentary ordinance of 1643, clergymen, both bad and good, were ejected from their benefices by thousands; altars and stone tables in churches were destroyed; candlesticks, tapers, and basins standing upon communion tables were unsparingly removed; and all crosses, crucifixes, images, and superstitious pictures and paintings demolished. Churches and sepulchres, fine works of art and curious remains of antiquity, met with the same ruthless treatment. In Chichester Cathedral, the rabble, meeting with the portrait of King Edward VI., picked out its eyes, because Edward had established the Book of Common Prayer.