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.
The exclusionists might have concluded, both from the king's dissolution of the last parliament, and from his summoning of the present to meet at Oxford, that he was determined to maintain his declared resolution of rejecting their favorite bill; but they still flattered themselves, that his urgent necessities would influence his easy temper, and finally gain them the ascendant.

The leaders came to parliament, attended not only by their servants, but by numerous bands of their partisans.

The four city members in particular were followed by great multitudes, wearing ribbons, in which were woven these words, "No Popery! No slavery!" The king had his guards regularly mustered: his party likewise endeavored to make a show of their strength; and on the whole, the assembly at Oxford rather bore the appearance of a tumultuous Polish diet, than of a regular English parliament.
The king, who had hitherto employed the most gracious expressions to all his parliaments, particularly the two last, thought proper to address himself to the present in a more authoritative manner.

He complained of the unwarrantable proceedings of the former house of commons; and said, that, as he would never use arbitrary government himself, neither would he ever suffer it in others.

By calling, however, this parliament so soon, he had sufficiently shown, that no past irregularities could inspire him with a prejudice against those assemblies.