The first four decades of the seventeenth century were a time of relative peace and increasing prosperity for the fledgling College, but in 1641 all was to change, in the wake of the political upheavals under way across the water. Wentworth, the former Lord Deputy and later Earl of Strafford, was executed in May 1641. Four years later the same fate befell William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of the University of Dublin. In 1640, James Ussher, who was the Vice-Chancellor, as well as Archbishop of Armagh, made a routine visit to England, from which he never returned. Rebellion broke out in Ireland in October 1641, and the Provost, Richard Washington, along with several of the Fellows, followed the Vice-Chancellor to England. The College, which had already been forbidden by Parliament to elect any more Fellows, remained without a Provost until 1645. Throughout the anarchy of the 1640s it staggered on, receiving very few students and being forced to sell plate to survive, because many of its estates had fallen into the hands of the insurgents and income from rents had almost dried up. It received a little help from the government in the form of small grants, but these were hard won. One petition to the Lords Justices described the College as being in danger of having to be dissolved through poverty, and pleaded that, even if the scholars could not be kept together, ‘for the preservation of learning…at least the fabric of the house and public library may be preserved’.