But the law itself was to be modified in such a manner as to enable the King to violate the spirit of his promise whilst leaving him a verbal quibble with which to justify his breach of faith. On the 9th of February an Act was passed annulling the Parliament and Committees of 1649, that is, declaring those proceedings to be illegal, by which Presbyterianism had been established on its firmest foundations. Less than three weeks later, two other Acts were passed with a view to preparing the way for a complete revolution in Church matters. The first of them, known as the Act Rescissory, had for its objects the annulling of the ‘pretended Parliaments’ of the years 1640, 1641, 1644, 1645, 1646, and 1648—a measure which Principal Baillie described at the time as ‘pulling down all our laws at once which concerned our Church since 1633.’ The other, which purported to be ‘concerning religion and Church government,’ was substantially an assertion and recognition of the King’s claim to be considered as head of the Church. It declared that it was his full and firm intention to maintain the true reformed Protestant religion in its purity of doctrine and worship, as it had been established within the kingdom during the reigns of his father and of his grandfather; to promote the power of godliness; to encourage the exercises of religion, both public and private; and to suppress all profaneness and disorderly walking; and that, for this end he would give all due countenance and protection to the ministers of the Gospel, ‘they containing themselves within the bounds and limits of their ministerial calling and behaving themselves with that submission and obedience to his Majesty’s authority and commands that is suitable to the allegiance and duty of good subjects.’ A concluding clause provided that, notwithstanding the Rescissory Act, the ‘present administration by sessions, presbyteries, and synods—they keeping within bounds and behaving themselves’—should, ‘in the meantime’ be ‘allowed.’