“Good women, your Petition with the reasons hath been read in the House and is thankfully accepted of, and is come in a seasonable time. You will, God willing, receive from us all the satisfaction which we can possibly give to your just and lawful desires. We intreat you, therefore, to repair to your houses and turn your petition which you have delivered here into prayers at home for us, for we have been and are and shall be, to our utmost power, ready to relieve you, your husbands and children, and to perform the trust committed unto us, towards God, our king and country, as becometh faithful Christian and loyal subjects.” Although there was no longer a king upon the throne, Pym speaks as if he still had a sovereign to whom he owed obedience. A few years later, in October, 1651, the women are petitioning the government again, but with a very different object. It is a memorial to Cromwell against imprisonment for debt, a grievance not to be remedied for many a year. The petition sets forth-- “That the Norman yoke of bondage and oppression is still continued upon this nation by the impious, oppressive, delatory, and most chargeable practice of the law, and destructive imprisonment of men and women for debt in the several prisons, goals, counters, holes, and dungeons of cruelty in this land.” The petitioners complain that the Act for the relief of poor debtors is no benefit, and-- “that the present intricate, delatory, chargeable, oppressive, endless practise of the Law, is become an abettor, encouragement and prop to all oppressors and defrauders, and an Egyptian reed and discouragement to most men, but in especial to all the poor who thereby are utterly disabled and disheartened from suing for their debts, rights, and inheritances, violently held from them by the rich and mighty. And if at any time (by the law) their debts and rights are seemingly recovered, yet then their able debtors have freedom (by the law and strength of their purses) to vacate judgements to arrest and imprison poor creditors upon false and strained actions (for many years) thereby enforcing some of them to compound with them at their own rates; others of them to perish miserably in goals, and so to lose both their debts and lives; whereby their wives and children are exposed to unexpressible misery; besides the many other unexpressible oppressions daylie practised by the rich and mighty on poor and simple hearted men and women in this land by sons of Belial.” Cromwell is exhorted to act as “a faithful Joshua with the zeal of Nehemiah,” and the petition proceeds--