The king passed some laws of no great importance: but the bill for repealing the thirty-fifth of Elizabeth, he privately ordered the clerk of the crown not to present to him. By this artifice, which was equally disobliging to the country party as if the bill had been rejected, and at the same time implied some timidity in the king, that salutary act was for the present eluded. The king had often of himself attempted, and sometimes by irregular means, to give indulgence to nonconformists: but besides that he had usually expected to comprehend the Catholics in this liberty, the present refractory disposition of the sectaries had much incensed him against them; and he was resolved, if possible, to keep them still at mercy. The last votes of the commons seemed to be an attempt of forming indirectly an association against the crown, after they found that their association bill could not pass: the dissenting interest, the city, and the duke of Monmouth, they endeavored to connect with the country party. A civil war indeed never appeared so likely as at present; and it was high time for the king to dissolve a parliament which seemed to have entertained such dangerous projects. Soon after, he summoned another. Though he observed, that the country party had established their interest so strongly in all the electing boroughs, that he could not hope for any disposition more favorable in the new parliament, this expedient was still a prosecution of his former project, of trying every method by which he might form an accommodation with the commons; and if all failed, he hoped that he could the better justify to his people, at least to his party, a final breach with them. It had always been much regretted by the royalists, during the civil wars, that the long parliament had been assembled at Westminster, and had thereby received force and encouragement from the vicinity of a potent and factious city, which had zealously embraced their party. Though the king was now possessed of guards, which in some measure overawed the populace, he was determined still further to obviate all inconveniences; and he summoned the new parliament to meet at Oxford. The city of London showed how just a judgment he had formed of their dispositions. Besides reelecting the same members, they voted thanks to them for their former behavior, in endeavoring to discover the depth of the horrid and hellish Popish plot, and to exclude the duke of York, the principal cause of the ruin and misery impending over the nation. Monmouth with fifteen peers presented a petition against assembling the parliament at Oxford, “where the two houses,” they said, “could not be in safety; but would be easily exposed to the swords of the Papists and their adherents, of whom too many had crept into his majesty’s guards.” These insinuations, which pointed so evidently at the king himself, were not calculated to persuade him, but to inflame the people.