With these exceptions, all political offences, committed before the day on which the royal signature was affixed to the Act, were covered with a general oblivion, [617] Even the criminals who were by name excluded had little to fear.

Many of them were in foreign countries; and those who were in England were well assured that, unless they committed some new fault, they would not be molested.
The Act of Grace the nation owed to William alone; and it is one of his noblest and purest titles to renown.

From the commencement of the civil troubles of the seventeenth century down to the Revolution, every victory gained by either party had been followed by a sanguinary proscription.

When the Roundheads triumphed over the Cavaliers, when the Cavaliers triumphed over the Roundheads, when the fable of the Popish plot gave the ascendency to the Whigs, when the detection of the Rye House Plot transferred the ascendency to the Tories, blood, and more blood, and still more blood had flowed.

Every great explosion and every great recoil of public feeling had been accompanied by severities which, at the time, the predominant faction loudly applauded, but which, on a calm review, history and posterity have condemned.