The Confederates believed that their aspirations were best served by alliance with the royalist cause and therefore made supporting the King a central part of their strategy. This was because some English MPs and Scottish Covenanters had threatened before the war to invade Ireland and destroy the Catholic religion and Irish land-owning class, but the threat was never official policy. The King, by contrast, had repeatedly promised them some concessions. The difficulty for Charles was that he was horrified at the 1641 rebellion and had signed the Adventurers Act into law in 1642, which proposed confiscating all rebel held lands in Ireland. A new policy of refusing pardon to any Irish rebels had also been agreed in London and Dublin (issuing pardons had been a common method to end Irish conflicts in the previous century). Therefore, his forces remained hostile to the Confederates until 1643, when his military position in England started to weaken. Many of the Confederate gentry stood to lose their land under the Adventurers Act; it galvanised their efforts and they realised that it could only be repealed by taking a loyal stance.