In their support of the crown by technical legality and practical injustice the courts lost all repute as temples of the law. Even that high royalist, Lord Clarendon, recognised that reliance upon such means was a cause of weakness, not of strength, and that men ceased to respect judicial decisions when they were used to cloak the designs of government. “When they saw,” he writes, “in a court of law (that law that gave them a title to the possession of all they had) reason of state urged as elements of law, judges as sharp-sighted as secretaries of state, and in the mysteries of state, ... they had no reason to hope that doctrine, or the promoter of it, would be contained within any bounds. And here the damage and mischief cannot be expressed that the crown and state sustained by the deserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges; there being no possibility to preserve the dignity, reverence, and estimation of the laws themselves but by the integrity and innocency of the judges.”[488] To the thorough supporter of the administration the matter appeared in a different light. When the two dissenting judges gave way under pressure and adhered to the report of the majority in favour of ship-money, they were told by Lord Wentworth that it was the greatest service the legal profession had rendered to the crown during this period.[489] For good or evil the work of reducing the bench to an arm of the administration had been done, and from this political degradation it did not recover for nearly three-quarters of a century, until William III was seated on the throne and the judges became independent of the crown.