Prisoners still continued to come to the Tower, and in 1631, Mervin, Lord Audley, was executed on Tower Hill for a crime not of a political nature. Six years later a very distinguished ecclesiastic, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was imprisoned for four years within the Tower walls. Williams, who was a Privy Councillor, had repeated some remarks made by the King, in which His Majesty had advocated greater leniency in the treatment of the Puritans, and was accused of revealing Charles’s private conversation, and being an enemy of Laud’s was very hardly dealt with in consequence. He was deposed from his bishopric, fined £10,000, and imprisoned in the Tower, where he caused some surprise, if not scandal, by not attending the church services in the fortress. However, after his release, Williams was reconciled to the King, and in 1641 became Archbishop of York. He had been successively Dean of Salisbury and Dean of Westminster, and had succeeded Bacon as Lord Chancellor in 1621, just before he had been appointed to the See of Lincoln. Williams certainly belonged to the Church Militant, and during the Civil War defended Conway Castle most gallantly for the royal cause. At the end of December 1641, he was back again in the Tower, with ten other Bishops who had protested that, owing to their being kept out of the House of Lords by the violence of the mob, all Acts passed during their absence were illegal. The Peers arrested the protesting Bishops on a charge of high treason; and on a very cold and snowy December night they were all sent to the Tower, where they remained until the May of 1642.