It appears that Mr.Vassal opposed from the beginning the new system of Church and proscriptive civil government set up at Massachusetts Bay, and therefore came under Mr.Bancroft's category of "disturbers of the public security," and Mr.Palfrey's designation of "conspirators;" but was in reality a liberal and a loyalist, not to King Charles indeed, but to the Commonwealth of England.

I give Mr.Palfrey's statements, in his own words, in a note.[92] The spirit and sentiments of Mr.Palfrey are identical with those which I have quoted of Mr.Bancroft; but while Mr.Bancroft speaks contemptuously of the authors of the petition for equal civil and religious rights, Mr.Palfrey traces the movement to Mr.William Vassal, one of the founders and first Council of the Massachusetts Colony, and progenitor of the famous Whig family of Holland House.

Nor does Mr.
Palfrey venture to question the doctrine or one of the statements of the petitioners, though he calls them "conspirators." Mr.Palfrey--very unfairly, I think--imputes to the petitioners a design to subvert the Congregational worship and establish the Presbyterian worship in its place; and to give force to his imputations says that a numerous party in the English Parliament "were bent on setting up Presbytery as the established religion in England and _its dependencies_." There is not the slightest ground for asserting that any party in the Long Parliament, any more than in Massachusetts, designed the setting up of Presbytery as _the_ established worship in the "_dependencies_ of England." King Charles the First, on his first sitting in judgment on complaints against the proceedings of the Massachusetts Bay Council, declared to his Privy Council, in 1632, that he had never intended to impose the Church ceremonies, objected to by the Puritan clergy of the time, upon the colonists of Massachusetts.
Charles the Second, thirty years afterwards, declared the same, and acted upon it during the quarter of a century of his reign.

The Long Parliament acted upon the same principle.

There is not an instance, during the whole sixty years of the first Massachusetts Charter, of any attempt, on the part of either King or Commonwealth, to suppress or interfere with the Congregational worship in New England; all that was asked by the King, or any party in Massachusetts, was _toleration_ of other forms of Protestant worship as well as that of the Congregational.
The very petition, whose promoters are represented as movers of sedition, asked for no exclusive establishment of Presbyterianism, but for the toleration of both the Episcopal and Presbyterian worship, and the worship of other Protestant Churches existing in England; and their petition was addressed to a Legislature of Congregationalists, elected by Congregationalists alone; and it was only in the event of their reasonable requests not being granted by the local Legislature that they proposed to present their grievances to the Imperial Parliament.