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Cromwell And The Parliament
by
“Fetch him down!” roared the general.
“Sir, I will lend you a hand,” said Harrison.
Speaker Lenthall left the chair. One man could not resist an army. Through the door glided, silent as ghosts, the members of Parliament.
“It is you that have forced me to this,” said Cromwell, with a shade of regret in his voice. “I have sought the Lord night and day, that He would rather slay me than put upon me the doing of this work.”
He had, doubtless; he was a man of deep piety and intense bigotry; but the Lord’s answer, it is to be feared, came out of the depths of his own consciousness. Men like Cromwell call upon God, but answer for Him themselves.
“What shall be done with this bauble?” said the general, lifting the sacred mace, the sign-manual of government by the representatives of the people. “Take it away!” he finished, handing it to a musketeer.
His flashing eyes followed the retiring members until they all had left the House. Then the musketeers filed out, followed by Cromwell and Harrison. The door was locked, and the key and mace carried away by Colonel Otley.
A few hours afterwards the Council of State, the executive committee of Parliament, was similarly dissolved by the lord-general, who, in person, bade its members to depart.
“We have heard,” cried John Bradshaw, one of its members, “what you have done this morning at the House, and in some hours all England will hear it. But you mistake, sir, if you think the Parliament dissolved. No power on earth can dissolve the Parliament but itself, be sure of that.”
The people did hear it,–and sustained Cromwell in his action. Of the two sets of usurpers, the army and a non-representative Parliament, they preferred the former.
“We did not hear a dog bark at their going,” said Cromwell, afterwards.
It was not the first time in history that the army had overturned representative government. In this case it was not done with the design of establishing a despotism. Cromwell was honest in his purpose of reforming the administration, and establishing a Parliamentary government. But he had to do with intractable elements. He called a constituent convention, giving to it the duty of paving the way to a constitutional Parliament. Instead of this, the convention began the work of reforming the constitution, and proposed such radical changes that the lord-general grew alarmed. Doubtless his musketeers would have dealt with the convention as they had done with the Rump Parliament, had it not fallen to pieces through its own dissensions. It handed back to Cromwell the power it had received from him. He became the lord protector of the realm. The revolutionary government had drifted, despite itself, into a despotism. A despotism it was to remain while Cromwell lived.