The three commissioners wielded full authority. There was no appeal from that triumvirate, who at their will refused or granted licenses, and charged for them what they pleased, hungering after that one-fifth. They largely increased the number of inns, woefully oppressed honest men, wrung heavy fines from all for merely technical and inadvertent infractions of the licensing laws, and granted new licenses at exorbitant rates to infamous houses that had but recently been deprived of them. During more than four years these iniquities continued, side by side with the working of other monopolies, granted from time to time, but at last the gathering storm of indignation burst, in the House of Commons, in February, 1621. That was a Parliament already working with the leaven of a Puritanism which was presently to leaven the whole lump of English governance in a drastic manner then little dreamt of; and it was keen to scent and to abolish abuses. Thus we see the House, very stern and vindictive, inquiring into the conduct and working of the by now notorious Commission. In the result Mompesson and his associates were found to have prosecuted 3,320 innkeepers for technical infractions of obsolete statutes, and to have been guilty of many misdemeanours. Mompesson appealed to the mercy of the House, but was placed under arrest by the Sergeant-at-Arms while that assembly deliberated how it should act. Mompesson himself clearly expected to be severely dealt with, for at the earliest moment evaded his arrest and was off, across the Channel, where he learnt--no doubt with cynical amusement--that he had been “banished.” The judgment of the two Houses of Parliament was that he should be expelled the House, and be degraded from his knighthood and conducted on horseback along the Strand with his face to the horse’s tail. Further, he was to be fined £10,000, and for ever held an infamous person. Meanwhile, if Parliament failed to lay the chief offender by the heels, it did at least succeed in putting hand upon, and detaining, one of his equally infamous associates, himself a knight, and accordingly susceptible of some dramatic degradation, beyond anything to be possibly wreaked upon any common fellow. Sir Francis Mitchell, attorney-at-law, was consigned to the Tower, and then brought forth from it to have his spurs hacked off and thrown away, his sword broken over his head, and himself publicly called no longer knight, but “knave.” Then to the Fleet Prison, with certainty on the morrow of a public procession to Westminster, himself the central object, mounted, with face to tail, on the back of the sorriest horse to be found, and the target for all the missiles of the crowd: a prospect and programme duly realised and carried out.