and the resuscitation of the Rump Parliament, Maynard took no part in parliamentary business until 21 February 1659/60, when he was placed on the committee for drafting the bill to constitute the new council of state. He reported the bill the same day, and was himself voted a member of the council on the 23rd. He sat for Bere Alston, Devon, in the Convention Parliament, was one of the first Serjeants called at the Restoration (22 June 1660), and soon afterwards (9 November) was advanced to the rank of king's serjeant and knighted (16 November). With his brother-serjeant, Sir John Glynne, he rode in the coronation procession, on 23 April 1661, behind the attorney and solicitor-general, much to the disgust of Samuel Pepys, who regarded him as a turncoat. The reign of Charles II As king's serjeant, Maynard appeared for the crown at some of the state trials with which the new reign was inaugurated, among others that of Sir Henry Vane in Trinity term 1662. He represented Bere Alston in the Pensionary Parliament, 1661–79, and sat for Plymouth during the rest of Charles II's reign. He was the principal manager of the abortive impeachment of Lord Mordaunt in 1666–7, and constituted himself counsel for the defence in the proceedings against Lord Clarendon in the following October. He appeared for the House of Lords in the king's bench on the return to Lord Shaftesbury's habeas corpus on 29 June 1677, and sustained its sufficiency on the ground that, though a general warrant for commitment to prison would be invalid if issued by any court but the House of Lords, the king's bench had no jurisdiction to declare it so when issued by that house. In 1678 he made a spirited but ineffectual attempt to secure the conviction of Lord Cornwallis for the brutal murder of a boy in St. James's Park. The severe censure which Lord Campbell passed upon him for his conduct of this case is based upon an entire misapprehension of the facts. In the debate on Lord Danby's impeachment (December 1678) Maynard showed a regrettable disposition to strain the Treason Act 1351 (25 Edward III) to his disadvantage, maintaining that its scope might be enlarged by retrospective legislation, which caused Swift to denounce him, in a note to Burnet's Own Time, as 'a knave or a fool for all his law.' On constitutional questions he steered as