as abettors of Rome and as hostile to the religious settlement that had been accomplished. As a result of this controversy, in which the king sided with Laud and the High Church party against the Presbyterians and Calvinists,[10] Parliament, which supported the Puritans, clamoured incessantly for the execution of the penal laws. In the first Parliament, opened the day after Queen Henrietta's arrival in England (1625) a petition was presented to the king praying for the strict enforcement of the penal laws. Yielding to this petition Charles issued a proclamation ordering the bishops and officials to see that the laws were put into execution, but at the same time he took care to let it be known that the extraction of fines from the wealthy laymen and the imprisonment or transportation of priests would be more agreeable to him than the infliction of the death penalty. Louis XIII. and the Pope protested warmly against this breach of a solemn agreement. Charles replied that he had bound himself not to enforce the penal laws merely as a means of lulling the suspicions of Rome and of securing a dispensation for his marriage.[11] Still, though the queen's French household was dismissed, the king did everything he could to prevent the shedding of blood. The Parliamentarians, who were fighting for civil liberty for themselves, were annoyed that any measure of liberty should be conceded to their Catholic fellow-countrymen. They presented a petition to Charles at the very time they were safeguarding their own position by the Petition of Rights (1628) demanding that priests who returned to England should be put to death, and that the children of Catholic parents should be taken from their natural guardians and reared in the Protestant religion.[12] Charles defended his own policy of toleration on the ground that it was calculated to secure better treatment for Protestant minorities in other countries, yet at the same time he so far abandoned his policy of not shedding blood as to allow the death penalty to be inflicted on a Jesuit and a layman (1628).[13] So long however as he could secure money from the Catholics he was not particularly anxious about their religious opinions. Instead of the fines to which they had been accustomed, he compounded with them by agreeing not to enforce their presence at the Protestant service on condition that they paid an annual sum to be fixed by his commissioners according to the means of the individual recusants.