He, however, entreated Evellin not to compromise his own safety by acts of rashness, which could do his Prince no good, but to wait the return of Williams before he took the field. In raising a band of mountaineers, he had acted under the authority of the King's commission of array, against which Davies had preached, and Morgan had inveighed, not only with vehemence, but with falsehood. They had told the yeomen and peasants, that "some lords about the court said, twenty pounds a year was enough for any peasant to live upon, and, taking advantage of the commission being in Latin, they translated it into what English they pleased, persuading the freeholders, that at least two parts of their estates would be taken from them; and the poorer sort, that one day's labour in the week would be extorted as a tax to the King[1]." These calumnies were not peculiar to Ribblesdale, but unhappily were diffused over all the nation, in which a vast body of people were grown up, who, like Morgan, had acquired wealth, and were ambitious of equal consequence with the hereditary gentry and nobility, by whom they found themselves despised for their ignorance and coarse manners, and therefore endeavoured to supplant them. Such men were every-where fast friends to the Parliament, and by their freer intercourse with the common people, whose habits and ideas were originally their own, they misrepresented the King's designs, and counteracted the measures of those noble and brave patriots, who, notwithstanding their dislike of some former measures, felt it was their duty now to rally round the throne. "Nor can it be remembered without much horror, that this strange wild-fire among the people was not so much and so furiously kindled by the breath of the Parliament, as by that of their clergy, who both administered fuel and blowed the coals. These men having crept into and at last driven all learned and orthodox divines from the pulpits, had, from the commencement of this 'memorable Parliament,' under the notion of reformation and extirpation of popery, infused seditious inclinations into the hearts of men against the present government of the church with many libellous invectives against the state. But now they contained themselves in no bounds, and as freely and without controul inveighed against the person of the King, prophanely and blasphemously applying whatever had been spoken by God himself or the Prophets, against the most wicked and impious Kings, to incense and stir up the people against their most gracious Sovereign. Besides licensed divines, preaching and praying was at that time practiced by almost all men in the kingdom except scholars."