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came down." Cromwell then spoke again, and, addressing himself to the general body of the members, of whom there were present between eighty and a hundred, exclaimed, "It's you that have forced me to this; for I have sought the Lord night and day, that he would rather slay me than put me upon the doing of this work." Here Alderman Allen would have persuaded him to proceed no further, telling him that, if he would only order the soldiers to retire and the mace to be brought back, everything would go on as before; which may let us see the sort of notion the aldermen of that age had of the portentous phenomenon they had got among them. Cromwell, cutting short his smooth-tongued adviser, " charged him with an account of some hundred thousand pounds, for which he threatened to question him, he having been long treasurer for the army, and in a rage committed him to the custody of one of the musqueteers." Whitelock intimates that several members rose to address the House; but Cromwell, he adds, "would suffer none to speak but himself; which he did with so much arrogance in himself, and reproach to his fellow-members, that some of his privadoes were ashamed of it. But he and his officers and party would have it so; and among all the parliament-men, of whom many wore swords, and would sometimes brag high, not one man offered to draw his sword against Cromwell, or to make the least resistance against him, but all of them tamely departed the House."+ Ludlow's more detailed relation informs us that Cromwell, in the end," ordered the guard to see the House cleared of all the members, and then seized upon the records that were there and at Mr. Scobell's house. After which he went to the clerk, and, snatching the act of dissolution, which was ready to pass, out of his hand, he put it under his cloak, and, having commanded the doors to be locked up, went away to Whitehall." Whitelock expressly mentions that he stayed to see all the members out, and was himself the last that left the House. It is said that the next day a paper was * But Hazlerig, in his speech on the 7th of February, 1659, gave a different account :-"Our General told us we should sit no longer to cheat the people. The Speaker, a stout man, was not willing to go. He was so noble, that he frowned, and said he would not go out of the chair till he was plucked out; which was quickly done, without much compliment, by two soldiers, and the mace taken.”—Burton, iii. 98. In a speech delivered in the same parliament a few days after, a Mr. Reynolds said :-" Persons came to the door. One came in, and sweetly and kindly took your predecessor by the hand, and led him out of the chair. I say, sweetly and gently." But Ludlow's account is corroborated by Whitelock, who says:-"The Speaker not stirring from his seat, Colonel Harrison, who sat near the chair, rose up, and took him by the arm, to remove him from his chair, which when the Speaker saw he left his chair."—Memorials, p. 554.

"They that say, Set not up a King or House of Lords, for God has poured contempt upon them, let me retort upon them," said one of the speakers, Major-General Haines, in the parliament of 1677-8. "God has also poured contempt upon a Commonwealth. Was there so much as one drop of blood when it went out? Nay, I am confident it did extinguish with the least noise that ever Commonwealth did.”—Burton, iv. 416.

That our account of this remarkable affair may be as complete as possible, we add the very curious relation given in the Diary of the Earl of Liecester, the father of Algernon Sidney, as published in the 'Sydney Papers,' edited by R. W. Blencowe, 8vo. Lond. 1825. It contains several particulars not elsewhere noticed, and was no doubt principally derived from the information of Sidney, who, it will be seen, was present.

"The parliament sitting as usual, and being in debate upon the bill with the amendments, which it was thought would have been passed that day, the Lord General Cromwell came into the House, clad in plain black clothes and grey worsted stockings, and sate down, as he used to do, in an ordinary place. After a while he rose up, put off his hat, and spake. At the first, and for a good while, he spake to the commendation of the parliament for their pains and care of the public good; but afterwards he changed his style, told them of their injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, and other faults; then he said, 'Perhaps you think this is not parliamentary language: I confess it is not; neither are you to expect any such from me.' Then he put on his hat, went out of his place, and walked up and down the stage or floor in the middest of the House with his hat on his head, and chid them soundly, looking sometimes, and pointing particularly, upon some persons, as Sir R. Whitelock, one of

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posted by somebody on the locked door, with the words, This House to be let, now unfurnished.'* Meanwhile the strange event had not passed without its regular official record: Scobell, the clerk, plying his task unmoved amid the hubbub, like the clock on the tower of a public building continuing to note the passing time and striking the hour while the surrounding walls are enveloped in flames, had quietly written down in the Journal before Cromwell took possession of it :—“ 20th April, 1653. This day his Excellency the Lord General dissolved this parliament." This entry, however, was ordered to be expunged by the restored Rump, on the 7th of January, 1660; on which occasion Scobell, being brought to the bar, " acknowledged," says the Journal, "that it was his own handwriting, and that he did it without direction of any person whatsoever." The Rump, of course, maintained that it was not dissolved at all—that, although thus shattered to pieces and scattered to the winds, it was still a proper legal parliament; and in fact, six years afterwards, on the 6th of May, 1659, when Cromwell no longer lived, they assembled again to the number of about seventy, with old Lenthall at their head, and resumed their function of legislation. But, after sitting about five months, they were, on the 13th of October, again suppressed by Lambert and his military associates; and, although they were once more restored to the possession of the House on the 24th of December, they were compelled by Monk, on the 21st of February thereafter, to admit among them the Presbyterian members that had been excluded in 1648; and on the 18th of March, 1660, this fag end of the celebrated Long Parliament was at length fairly and for ever annihilated by its own act. The Long Parliament had existed in one form or another from the 3rd of November, 1640, and its history is that of the great struggle between the crown and the House of Commons, between prerogative and popular rights, which has been styled the Grand Rebellion, from its commencement almost to its close.

Charles II. was recalled by acclamation, and seated on the throne of his ancestors, within a few weeks after the Long Parliament thus ceased to exist, and much of the old oppressive power of prerogative was brought back along with

the Commissioners of the Great Seal, Sir Henry Vane, to whom he gave very sharp language, though he named them not, but by his gestures it was well known that he meant them. After this he said to Colonel Harrison (who was a member of the House), 'Call them in.' Then Harrison went out, and presently brought in LieutenantColonel Wortley (who commanded the General's own regiment of foot), with five or six files of musqueteers, about twenty or thirty, with their musquets. Then the General, pointing to the Speaker in his chair, said to Harrison, 'Fetch him down." Harrison went to the Speaker, and spoke to him to come down, but the Speaker sate still and said nothing. Take him down,' said the General. Then Harrison went, and pulled the Speaker by the gown, and he came down. It happened that day that Algernon Sidney sate next to the Speaker on the right hand the General said to Harrison, 'Put him out; Harrison spake to Sidney to go out, but he said he would not go out, and sate still. The General said again, 'Put him out;' then Harrison and Wortley put their hands upon Sidney's shoulders, as if they would force him to go out: then he rose, and went towards the door. Then the General went to the table where the mace lay, which used to be carried before the Speaker, and said, 'Take away those baubles.' So the soldiers took away the mace, and all the House went out; and at the going out they say the General said to young Sir Henry Vane, calling him by his name, that he might have prevented this extraordinary course, but he was a juggler, and had not so much as common honesty. All being gone out, the door of the House was locked, and the key, with the mace, was carried away, as I heard, by Colonel Otley." The contradictions as to many little points in these various accounts of Ludlow, Whitelock, and Leicester, strikingly show the confusion and bewilderment into which those present were thrown. In the encounter between Cromwell and Vane, for instance, what was said about common honesty was apparently supposed by some of the hearers to have been spoken by the former, while others thought the words proceeded from the latter.

* Several Proceedings in Parliament, No. 186,

him; the effects of which were severely felt during his reign and that of his successor, till a new revolution, at the end of twenty-eight years, placed the crown once more in the hands of the people, and enabled them, grown wiser than on the former occasion, to bestow it with such conditions and restrictions as were deemed sufficient to secure to the House of Commons that place in the constitution which for at least sixty years before, or ever since the time of James I., it had decidedly manifested its determination to attain, and without the concession of which it was evident there could now be neither liberty nor peace in the country. It may appear as if the efforts of the House of Commons during the first years of the Long Parliament in the assertion of its own privileges and the vindication of the national liberties had all gone for nothing, seeing the ascendency which the crown regained after the Restoration; but a closer view of the matter will convince us that this was far from being the case. The Restoration was a restoration of too much, but by no means of everything, that had existed when the Long Parliament commenced its career. The Grand Rebellion, though it was at last put down, had not been altogether a failure. The ancient royal prerogative had been shaken in some parts by that assault beyond the possibility of repair. In fact, amid all the misgovernment of the reign of Charles II., the rights of the House of Commons and its true position in the constitution were recognised in a manner in which they never had been in the former days of the monarchy. Attempts were made to manage the parliament, and also to govern without it; but, when it was suffered to meet, its debates were nearly as free as they are at present, and took as wide a range as they have ever done since. The Commons for session after session during this reign discussed the question of excluding the heir presumptive to the throne, the King's own brother, and even passed a bill for that purpose. Would any approach to such an interference as that have been endured either by Elizabeth or James I.? Of a truth the day was now gone by when it could be pretended that the House had nothing to do with matters either of Church or State, or with any questions save such as the crown chose to permit it to discuss. And this change, this gain, had been brought about by the Long Parliament and the Grand Rebellion.

Indeed, as we have said, the Revolution of 1688 added little if anything to what are commonly called the privileges of the House of Commons. These, in so far as they have been recognised and acted upon in later times, are almost wholly founded upon precedents older than the Revolution, and mostly upon such as must be considered the legacy of the Long Parliament, or as having incontrovertibly been established through the attitude assumed and the powers exercised by that assembly, although its proceedings are never quoted nor its name breathed by the authorities on the subject. For how else could they have been acquired? To what other period in the history of the Constitution can they be traced? In the obscurity that rests upon the imperfectly recorded transactions of the carliest times of the monarchy, it is indeed possible for ingenious theorymongers to rear out of the mist and ruins any visionary scheme of the Constitution which may best please their fancy; but at any rate this much is demonstrable and certain, that from the middle of the sixteenth century the House of Commons, whatever tone might be assumed or principles avowed by individual members, was never once able to make its pretended rights good against the

crown,-nay more, that as a body it never once persisted in the attempt to do so till the year 1621, when it did indeed carry its resistance to the royal domination as far as was possible, but was nevertheless in the end completely foiled and defeated. The facts that establish this position are not a few insulated or selected instances, but the entire stream of our parliamentary history during the period in question. If therefore the House of Commons had ever, as is pretended, been able to set the crown at defiance in earlier times, it had lost that power for many years before the Long Parliament met; and, if we find the power ever after in existence and constant exercise, it must have been the Long Parliament that at least recovered it from abeyance and secured it from being ever again lost or called in question.

The Revolution of 1688 itself, indeed, was the legacy of the Grand Rebellion, or rather that, and not the Restoration, was the true completion of the long contest of which what is called the Rebellion was the first stage. But for the war, not of mere words but of arms, waged by the parliament against the prerogative in the middle of the seventeenth century, we should not have had the easy, bloodless settlement of the constitution at its close. And the Revolution of 1688, if it did not enlarge what are properly called the privileges of the House of Commons, no doubt greatly augmented the real power and importance of that branch of the legislature, were it only by the blow which it struck at the great rival power of the prerogative. If Charles II. no longer ventured to throw the members into prison when they uttered anything that displeased him, as had been done by his father and his grandfather, yet he exercised the right of interfering with the deliberations of the House by dissolutions and prorogations to an extent incompatible with the exercise of any effective control over public affairs by the representatives of the people. The great fundamental principle of the responsibility of the ministers of the crown to parliament had as yet been but ineffectually asserted. In the establishment of this principle, more than in anything else, consisted the popular victory that was gained at the Revolution. And the principle was established mainly by the shock, or rather complete explosion, that was then given to the old notion of divine right in the crown-a notion which what was done at the Restoration eight-and-twenty years before had rather helped to extend and strengthen. The Revolution, if it was nothing more, was at least emphatically a protest against that absurd and pernicious pretension.

From this date the popular branch of the legislature has continued on the whole to acquire more and more the ascendency in the Constitution, and the war of politics has been chiefly carried on in the House of Commons. The great days of that House, however, as an arena of debate, scarcely began till towards the close of the long administration of Sir Robert Walpole, or about the year 1740. At least we have no full or tolerably satisfactory record of the debates before that date. The fierce contests between Walpole and his opponents, Windham, Pulteney, and others, had indeed for some years before this time attracted much attention to the proceedings of the House, and they had been regularly reported every month both in the Gentleman's and the London Magazine, the former of which publications commenced in January 1731, the latter in April 1732; but no attempt can be said to have been made to convey more than the substance of the speeches till that department of the Gentleman's Magazine was confided to

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Samuel Johnson in November 1740. Johnson, indeed, appears to have given his readers more of his own eloquence than of what had actually been uttered in parliament; but still what he did was in all probability only to substitute one kind of eloquence for another, a better for a worse, or, it might be, sometimes a worse for a better-and therefore on the whole the speeches written by him, though less true to the letter than those given by his predecessors, may be received as a more living, and as such a truer, representation of the real debates than had ever before been produced. He would not take the trouble, or be guilty of the absurdity, of expending his rhetoric upon the version of a debate or a speech which had not really excited attention by that quality, but, we may suppose, would reserve his strength for occasions on which those who had heard, or heard of, the original oration would look for something more brilliant than usual. But the history of the House of Commons, considered as a theatre of debate, and viewed in connection with the subject of reporting, is far too large to be entered upon now. After what we may call the age of Walpole and Pulteney comes that of the first William Pitt and his great compeers-then

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