ome particulars with the Royal requirements in regard to the oath of
allegiance, and administering the law, so far appeased the King's
Government that further action was suspended for a time in regard to
enforcing the granting of the elective franchise, eligibility to office,
and liberty of worship to other than Congregationalists,[159] especially
as the attention of Charles was absorbed by exciting questions at home,
by his war with Holland, which he bitterly hated, and his intrigues with
France, on which he became a paid dependant. But the complaints and
appeals to the King from neighbouring colonies of the invasion of
individual and territorial rights by the Court of Massachusetts Bay, and
from the persecuted and proscribed inhabitants of their own colony,
awakened at last the renewed attention of the King's Government to the
proceedings of the Massachusetts Bay rulers. The letter which the King
was advised to address to them is kind and conciliatory in its tone; but
it shows that while the King, as he had declared in his first letter,
addressed to them seventeen years before, recognized the "Congregational
way of worship," he insisted on toleration of the worship of
Episcopalians, Baptists, etc., and the civil rights and privileges of
their members,[161] denied by these "fathers of American liberty" to
the very last; until then, power of proscription and persecution was
wrested from them by the cancelling of their Charter.

The chief requirements of this letter were, as stated by Mr. Hutchinson:

"1. That agents be sent over in six months, fully instructed to answer
and transact what was undetermined at that time.

"2. That freedom and liberty of conscience be given to such persons as
desire to serve God in the way of the Church of England, so as not to
be thereby made obnoxious, or discountenanced from their sharing in the
government, much less that they, or any other of his Majesty's subjects
(not being Papists) who do not agree in the Congregational way, be by
law subject to fines or forfeitures or other incapacities.

"3. That no other distinction be observed in making freemen than that
they be men of competent estates, rateable at ten shillings, according
to the rules of the place, and that such in their turns be capable of
the magistracy, and all laws made void that obstruct the same.

"4. That the ancient number of eighteen assistants be observed, as by
Charter. (They had been limited to eight or ten.)