Agreeable to the present prosperity of public affairs was the universal joy and festivity diffused throughout the nation. The melancholy austerity of the fanatics fell into discredit together with their principles. The royalists, who had ever affected a contrary disposition, found in their recent success new motives for mirth and gayety; and it now belonged to them to give repute and fashion to their manners. From past experience it had sufficiently appeared, that gravity was very distinct from wisdom, formality from virtue, and hypocrisy from religion. The king himself, who bore a strong propensity to pleasure, served, by his powerful and engaging example, to banish those sour and malignant humors which had hitherto engendered such confusion. And though the just bounds were undoubtedly passed, when men returned from their former extreme, yet was the public happy in exchanging vices pernicious to society, for disorders hurtful chiefly to the individuals themselves who were guilty of them. It required some time before the several parts of the state, disfigured by war and faction, could recover their former arrangement; but the parliament immediately fell into good correspondence with the king; and they treated him with the same dutiful regard which had usually been paid to his predecessors. Being summoned without the king’s consent, they received, at first, only the title of a convention; and it was not till he passed an act for that purpose, that they were called by the appellation of parliament. All judicial proceedings, transacted in the name of the commonwealth or protector, were ratified by a new law. And both houses, acknowledging the guilt of the former rebellion, gratefully received, in their own name, and in that of all the subjects, his majesty’s gracious pardon and indemnity. The king, before his restoration, being afraid of reducing any of his enemies to despair, and at the same time unwilling that such enormous crimes as had been committed should receive a total impunity, had expressed himself very cautiously in his declaration of Breda, and had promised an indemnity to all criminals, but such as should be excepted by parliament. He now issued a proclamation declaring that such of the late king’s judges as did not yield themselves prisoners within fourteen days, should receive no pardon. Nine teen surrendered themselves; some were taken in their flight; others escaped beyond sea.