Three weeks afterwards the Bishops and the Archbishop were summoned to appear before the Privy Council. Jeffreys insolently inquired whether they were ready to give recognisances to be tried for misdemeanours before the Court of the King’s Bench, and waiving their plea of being Peers of Parliament, he refused the prelates bail, and had them committed to the Tower. In order to avoid the demonstration in the Bishops’ favour, which both James and Jeffreys dreaded if they were taken through the streets of the city, they were conveyed to the Tower in the royal barge along the river. But their passage to the fortress was one long ovation, and as the barge approached the Tower, numbers of people rushed knee-deep into the water to receive the blessing of the prelates, and, on their arrival, even the warders received them kneeling at the landing-place. [Illustration: _The Seven Bishops._ _(From a Contemporary Print.)_] As the Seven Bishops passed under St Thomas’s Tower, and landed at the Traitor’s Gate, the bells of St Peter’s Chapel were ringing for evening service. Passing over the green, they entered the chapel and attended the service. The appropriateness of the second lesson struck all who were present, being a chapter in the 2nd of Corinthians—“Giving no offence in anything, that the ministry be not blamed: but in all things approving ourselves as the ministers of God, in much patience, in afflictions, in distresses, in imprisonments.” A most uncomfortable week must have been passed by these Reverend Fathers of the Church in the Tower, for they were all crowded together in the by no means spacious Martin Tower. On the 15th of June they were taken from the Tower to the bar of the Court of King’s Bench—on this occasion they were admitted to bail. Their trial began a fortnight later, taking place in Westminster Hall, and was one of the most memorable of the great historic events that that building has witnessed. When the verdict of “Not guilty” was pronounced, the old oak roof of William Rufus’s hall re-echoed with the shouts of the people gathered below; it was a moment, as Wakeman has eloquently written in his “History of the Church of England,” “unparalleled in the history of English courts of law. The crowd within and without Westminster Hall broke into a frenzy of enthusiastic joy. Men fell upon each other’s necks, and wept and shouted and laughed and wept again; and amid the cheers of men and the boom of cannon the heroes of the Church passed in safety to their homes.”