The severity of his imprisonment was soon abated; and he was removed from the Tower to Windsor Castle,[117] and not long after, by the orders of Cromwell, was paroled _de die in diem_.[118] The comparative liberty he now enjoyed enabled him to repair the loss of his manuscripts after the battle of Worcester, and he set himself to make the best of the fragments he had recovered, and to prepare them for publication, as well as to compose new material. A paragraph in the Epilogue of one of his works, in which he describes his warm appreciation of the measure of freedom he now enjoyed, is worth quoting. "That I, whilst a prisoner," he says, "was able to digest and write this Treatise, is an effect meerly proceeding from the courtesie of my Lord General Cromwel, by whose recommendation to the Councel of State my parole being taken for my true imprisonment, I was by their favour enlarged to the extent of the lines of London's communication; for had I continued as before, coopt up within walls, or yet been attended still by a guard, as for a while I was, should the house of my confinement have never been so pleasant, or my keepers a very paragon of discretion, and that the conversation of the best wits in the world, with affluence of all manner of books, should have been allowed me for the diversion of my minde, yet such all antipathie I have to any kinde of restraint wherein myself is not entrusted, that notwithstanding these advantages, which to some spirits would make a jayl seem more delicious then [than] freedom without them, it could not in that eclipse of liberty lie in my power to frame myself to the couching of one sillable, or contriving of a fancie worthy the labour of putting pen to paper, no more then [than] a nightingale can warble it in a cage, or linet in a dungeon."[119]