was by then responding to the House of Lords, rather than the beleaguered King. Having received perhaps less than £5000, the engineer was continually in arrears for the wages of his workmen. During the Civil War, the drainage project was halted by the chaos of war. The original financiers – now headed by Bedford's heir William – began to seek an Act of Parliament to overturn the King's takeover of their project and to gain restoration of all of the first awarded in January 1630/31. By 29 May 1649, a few months after the King's execution, they had succeeded; an Act of Parliament (later known as "The Pretended Act") restored them to the undertaking and gave their claim to the enclosures the force of law. Before this time, Vermuyden's activities are not clear; there is some inconclusive evidence that one of his nephews may have acted as a colonel of horse in the parliamentary army, alongside Oliver Cromwell in the Eastern Association army. But with the beginning of the second phase of Bedford-led construction, Vermuyden was again appointed as the director of the works in January 1649/50. This second phase included continuing the work of both the first and the King's (1.5 phase). In addition, he dredged the New Bedford River (with a large area of wash between it and the Bedford River) and the Forty Foot Drain. He established Denver Sluice to stop tides and flood water from depositing silt into the Great Ouse to the east of Ely. The work did not include his projected "cutoff channel," which was designed to take flood water from the southern rivers, the Wissey, Little Ouse and Lark, away from Denver. As a result, the area suffered continued flooding, which was not controlled until a project of the early 1960s. Due to the high cost of labour, and the continuing unpopularity of the project among the local inhabitants, the government provided Vermuyden with Scottish and Dutch prisoners of war (after the Battle of Dunbar (1650) and the start of the war with the Dutch respectively) as labourers in this phase of construction. Vermuyden's relationship with the other adventurers was never easy and, by 1655, they had parted company altogether. Several other of his initiatives failed, including a proposal for a treaty between England and the States-General of the Netherlands which he made to Cromwell. In addition, Vermuyden was unable to gain support