The Act of Explanation contains 234 clauses and occupies 136 folio pages. Forfeited lands were vested in the Crown as before, but decisions actually given under the former Act were confirmed. There was, however, no attempt to provide for further decrees of innocence, the power to grant which had expired on August 21, 1663. There had been over 800 decrees, but Plunket and his friends alleged that 8000 cases had been unheard for want of time, and Finch allowed that there were about 5000 such claims, including several that had been entered twice. By the Act of Settlement officers and soldiers were protected as to lands in their possession on May 7, 1659, but some doubts had arisen as to whether this did not exclude those who had left the army between that date and November 30, 1660, and it was now decreed that there was no such exclusion. It was laid down that Protestants should be first provided for, 'of whom his Majesty ever had and still hath greatest care and consideration in the settlement of this his kingdom,' and all Adventurers, officers, and soldiers were confirmed as to two-thirds of what they had held at the former date. Protestant purchasers of land from the transplanted in Connaught and Clare were confirmed, but Adventurers who claimed under the doubling ordinances of the Long Parliament had to be contented with the equivalent of what they had actually advanced. Of the thirty-eight persons specially named as restorable in the Act of Settlement, seventeen had received nothing, the stock of land available for reprisals having been exhausted. To these were now joined sixteen who had been mentioned but less particularly in the former Act, twenty-one fresh names were added, and the whole fifty-four were declared entitled to their principal houses and 2000 acres of land adjoining them. Very many of the provisos to which Clarendon objected were nevertheless included. The administration of the new Act and of the 'matters of the former Act which remain in force' was entrusted to five members of the former commission, Chief Justice Smith, Sir Edward Dering, Sir Alan Brodrick, Sir Winston Churchill, and Colonel Edward Cooke. Rainsford, now a judge in England, and Beverley, a master of requests, were very obnoxious to the English party in Ireland and were not reappointed, ostensibly by reason of their official duties. It was not till May 1665 that the Act was ready for transmission to Ireland, where it might be passed or rejected but not altered.[43] [Sidenote: Ormonde brings the Bill to Ireland.]