report orderd by the Committee for the Bill of Conventicles, that the House be informed of severall Conventicles in Westminster which might be of dangerous consequences.  From hence arose much discourse; also of a report that Ludlow was in England, that Commonwealths-men flock about the town, and there were meetings said to be, where they talkt of New Modells of Government; so that the House ordered a Committee to receive informations both concerning Conventicles and these other dangerous meetings; and then entered a resolution upon their books without putting it to the question, That this House will adhere to His Majesty, and the Government of Church and State as now established, against all its enemyes.  Friday having bin appointed, as I told you in my former letter, for the House to sit in a grand Committee upon the motion for the King’s supply, was spent wholy in debate, whether they should do so or no, and concluded at last in a consent, that the sitting in a grand Committee upon the motion for the King’s supply should be put of till Friday next, and so it was ordered.  The reason of which kind of proceeding, lest you should thinke to arise from an indisposition of the House, I shall tell you as they appeare to me, to have been the expectation of what Bill will come from the Lords in stead of that of ours which they threw out, and a desire to redresse and see thoroughly into the miscarriages of mony before any more should be granted.  To-day the House hath bin upon the second observation, and after a debate till foure a’clock, have voted him guilty also of misdemeanor in that particular.  The Commissioners are ordered to attend the House again on Munday, which is done constantly for the illustration of any matter in their report, wherein the House is not cleare.  And to say the truth, the House receives great satisfaction from them, and shows them extraordinary respect.  These are the things of principall notice since my last.”

Carteret eventually was censured and suspended and dismissed.

The sudden incursion of religion during a financial debate is highly characteristic of the House of Commons.

Whilst Queen Elizabeth and her advisers did succeed in making some sort of a settlement of religion having regard to the questions of her time, the Restoration bishops, an inferior set of men, wholly failed.  The repressive legislation that followed upon the Act of Uniformity, succeeded in establishing and endowing (with voluntary contributions) what is sometimes called, absurdly enough, Political Dissent.  On points, not of doctrine, but of ceremony, and of church government, one half of the religiously-minded community were by oaths and declarations, and by employing the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as “a picklock to a place,” drawn out of the service of the State.  Excluded from Parliament and from all corporate bodies, from grammar-schools and universities, English Dissent learned to live its own life, remote from the army,