Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, wrote this passage in his anthology The History of the Great Rebellion, composed years after the end of the Civil Wars. Clarendon referred, however, to debates which took place in Parliament on 14 and 15 October 1642. During these proceedings, both Houses agreed that ‘the Estates of Actors in the Commission of Array’, bishops, deans, chapters, and ‘notorious delinquents’ who had taken up arms against Parliament were to have their estates sequestered. Here, the Commons and the peers almost all agreed that the estates of those believed to have caused the outbreak of war between king and parliament were to be forfeited as punishment for their crimes. Yet, sequestration had been a financial penalty applied traditionally against Catholics since the second half of the sixteenth-century for their nonconformity, and the sudden sharp shift towards punishing delinquents and bishops did not mean that recusants escaped the penalty altogether. Sequestration legislation and its administrative organisation in 1640s England was part of an evolutionary process in which Catholics continued to face the prospect of estate forfeiture, but in a time in which the Long Parliament continuously adapted the legislation as the nature of war caused it to change its agenda towards certain types of enemies.

Prior to the war, Catholic sequestration had dramatically expanded to fund certain enterprises of King Charles I after his accession in 1625. The king was intent on raising as much revenue as possible from his Catholic subjects in return, theoretically, for release from further molestation for their religious nonconformity.