Whether this address to Parliament (a copy of it being enclosed with an address to Cromwell) had ever at that time been made public, or whether King Charles the Second had then seen it, does not appear; but it is not easy to conceive statements and words more opposite than those addressed by the General Court of Massachusetts Bay to the Parliament in 1651, and to the King, Charles the Second, in 1661.
On the contrasts of acts themselves, the reader will make his own remarks and inferences. The King received and answered their address very graciously.[119] They professed to receive it gratefully; but their consciousness of past unfaithfulness and transgressions, and their jealous suspicions, apprehended evil from the general terms of the King's reply, his reference to his Royal predecessors and religious liberty, which above all things they most dreaded, desiring religious liberty for themselves alone, but not for any Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Baptist, or Quaker. They seem, however, to have been surprised at the kindness of the King's answer, considering their former conduct towards him and his Royal father, and towards the colonies that loyally adhered to their King; and professed to have been excited to an ecstasy of inexpressible delight and gratitude at the gracious words of the best of kings.[120] Their address presented a curious mixture of professed self-abasement, weakness, isolation, and affliction, with fulsome adulation not surpassed by anything that could have been indited by the most devout loyalist. But this honeymoon of adulation to the restored King was not of long duration; the order of the King, September 8, 1661, to cease persecuting the Quakers, was received and submitted to with remonstrance; and obedience to it was refused as far as sending the accused Quakers to England for trial, as that would bring the Government of Massachusetts Bay before the English tribunals.[121]
But petitions and representations poured in upon the King and Council from Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, etc., from Massachusetts Bay, and their friends in England, complaining that they were denied liberty of worship, the ordinance of Baptism and the Lord's Supper to their families and themselves, that they were deprived of even the elective franchise because of their not being members of the Congregational Church, and praying for the redress of their grievances.[122]