Through the Personal Rule of Charles Stuart in the 1630s, the Laudians had pushed the definition of prayer book conformity to a different place, one many old style conformists in the Church of England – Peter Smart among them – had trouble recognizing. So stark had this shift apparently been that the Long Parliament, called at last in 1640, felt a comprehensive purge was warranted. In short, the Laudian clergy had drawn such hostility that calls for radical reform were dominant. While no one knew exactly where established religion was heading in the early 1640s, the power relationships had certainly changed, even before the outbreak of war in 1642. Clearly there was a desire among a significant segment of parliament and of the population in general to overhaul everything in church and state. Popular pamphlets and graphic satires flooded the market denouncing the bishops as power hungry and enemies of true religion. Regarding a move to simply reduce the authority of the bishops, Thomas Wilson, the puritan minister of Otham, Kent, asserted in sweeping and colourful language, ‘O think it not enough to clip their wings when Christ is against the being of a such a body’. Wilson, like Smart, had spent time in jail in the 1630s. Having his cause taken up by Sir Edward Dering in his very first speech in the Long Parliament in November 1640, Wilson was not atypical at this moment.