who occupied the houses with the greatest number of hearths. For instance, in 1673-4 the Earl of Exeter had to pay for 70 hearths at Burghley House. In contrast, most householders who were liable to pay tax had only one or two hearths and a significant proportion of householders were not liable to pay at all. The hearth tax was much resented because it often entailed inspection of the interior of dwellings by the sub-collectors and petty constables, who had legal authority to enter every property to check on the number of hearths. Some people stopped up their chimneys so that the tax was not due on them, but where this was discovered by the assessors the tax was doubled. On 31 July 1684, a fire in Churchill, Oxfordshire, destroyed 20 houses and many other buildings, and killed four people. It was apparently caused by a baker who, to avoid chimney tax, had knocked through the wall from her oven to her neighbour's chimney. Sir Courtenay Pole, its principal author, was attacked for having devised "the most vexatious tax on the people that ever was known." After the Glorious Revolution, the hearth tax was repealed by the newly empowered English Parliament and agreed to by the newly installed William III and Mary II in 1689, as not only a great oppression to the poorer sort, but a badge of slavery upon the whole people, exposing every man’s house to be entered into, and searched at pleasure, by persons unknown to him. At the end of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, William III and Mary II also agreed to and signed the English Bill of Rights 1689 marking a new level of co-operation and power sharing between the Parliament and the English monarchs. The cancellation of the hearth tax and the signing of the Bill of Rights, etc. led to a greater measure of legal protection for life, liberty, and property in England that encouraged and empowered the middle class at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This action both signalled the end of several centuries of tension and conflict between the crown and parliament, and the end of the idea that English kings had any divine rights and that England would be restored to Roman Catholicism. The new King William III and his wife Mary II were Protestant leaders from the Dutch Republic who were invited by Parliament to rule