The treatment of the men who had been foremost in what the Royalists called the Great Rebellion, affords a further and a critical instance of the temper of Parliament. At first, and for some little time afterwards, the majority supported a large measure of oblivion. Not more than seven persons were excepted from the Act of Indemnity. But the number speedily increased to twenty-nine.[159] Afterwards it was proposed that all who sat on the trial of Charles I., and had not surrendered according to a late Proclamation, were to be excluded from the Act of Oblivion,--a point carried without any division. The Lords made the Bill more stringent. They determined to exclude all who had signed the death-warrant, or were sitting in the court when sentence was pronounced, whether they had submitted since the Restoration or not; to these the Lords added the names of Hacker, Vane, Lambert, Haselrig, and Axtell. Yet they struck out a clause, reserving Lenthall and others for future punishment. The Commons had been slow with the Act of Indemnity, notwithstanding the salvation of many of their old friends was involved in it. The Lords were slower still, and both had to be spurred on by Royal messages. When the Bill, in its increased severity, came down from the Lords, the Commons resisted the sweeping amendment which excluded all the members of the High Court of Justice from the general amnesty. They pleaded that such an exclusion would violate the promise from Breda, and the terms of the recent Proclamation. Repeated conferences took place between the Houses, and it is visible that the spirit of resistance to the vindictiveness of the Lords gradually gave way, and that the violent Royalists were gaining ground amongst them. The Commons entered into a compromise. Most of the judges were excepted; others were reserved for lesser penalties. About twenty persons, besides those who had pronounced sentence in the High Court of Justice, were incapacitated for any civil or military office.[160] The regicides being excluded from the Act of Oblivion, some of them were tried at the Old Bailey, in the month of October, 1660. Amongst those who then stood at the bar were four persons who have appeared, more or less conspicuously, in connection with the Ecclesiastical History of the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth. [Sidenote: 1660.]