Royalists of the Civil War period readily employed the English legal system to recover lost estates, even at the nadir of their political fortunes, namely the years just after the king's defeat. Rather than accept the verdict of a war lost, royalist and Catholic ‘delinquents’ successfully sought their own verdicts at law against former tenants for rents on lands that had been confiscated by parliament. The radical MPs staffing the Indemnity Committee respected the principles of due process of law and, ironically, given the fact that the committee's purpose was to protect parliament's supporters, upheld royalist claims to confiscated lands, thereby assisting the law courts in thwarting parliament's plan to repay war debts with rents collected from losers' property. So pervasive was the legalistic mindset in both the courts and the Indemnity Committee that royalists received favourable rulings against many on the winning side of the conflict, including famous leaders such as Sir William Brereton.