By permission of the Corporation of Liverpool.

CROMWELL REFUSING THE CROWN, 1657.

From the Picture by J. SCHEX in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

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ARREST OF CONSPIRATORS AT THE "MERMAID." (See p. [147].)

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The year 1658 opened by the meeting of the new Parliament. It was a critical venture, and not destined to succeed better than the former ones. To constitute the new House, called the Other House, Cromwell had been obliged to remove to it most of the best-affected members of the Commons. To comply with the "Petition and Advice," he had been forced to admit into the Commons many who had been expelled from former Parliaments for their violent Republicanism. The consequences at once appeared. The Other House consisted of sixty-three members. It included six of the ancient Peers—the Earls of Manchester, Warwick, Mulgrave, Falconberg, Saye and Sele, and Lord Eure. But none but Eure and Falconberg took their seats, not even the Earl of Warwick, whose son and heir, Lord Rich, had just married the Protector's daughter. He and the others objected to sit in the same House with General Hewson, who had once been a shoemaker, and Pride, who had been a drayman. Amongst the members appeared a considerable number of the officers of the army, and the chief Ministers of State. These included the Protector's two sons, Richard and Henry Cromwell, Fiennes, Keeper of the Great Seal, Lisle, Fleetwood, Monk, Whalley, Whitelock, Barkstead, Pride, Hewson, Goffe, Sir Christopher Pack, alderman of London, General Claypole, St. John, and other old friends of the Protector, besides the lords already mentioned. As they had been called by writs, which were copies of the royal writs used on such occasions, the members immediately assumed that it made them peers, and gave them a title to hereditary rank. They were addressed by Cromwell in his opening speech as "My Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons." His speech was very short, for he complained of indisposition, the truth being, that the life of excitement, struggle, and incessant care for twenty years had undermined his iron frame, and he was breaking down; but he congratulated them on the internal peace attained, warned them of danger from without, and exhorted them to unity and earnestness for the public good. Fiennes, after the Protector's retirement, addressed them in a much longer speech on the condition of the nation.

But all hopes of this nondescript Parliament were vain. The Other House no sooner met apart than they began inquiring into their privileges, and, assuming that they were not merely the Other House, but the Upper House, sent a message, after the fashion of the ancient peers by the judges, to desire a conference with the Commons on the subject of a fast. The Commons, however, who were by the new Instrument made judges of the Other House, being authorised to approve or disapprove of it, showed that they meant the Other House to be not an Upper House, but a lower House than themselves. They claimed to be the representatives of the people; but who, they asked, had made the Other House a House of Peers, who had given them an authority and a negative voice over them? The first thing which the Commons did was to claim the powers of the new Instrument, and admit the most violent of the excluded members, for none were to be shut out except rebels or Papists. Haselrig, who had been appointed one of the Other House, refused to sit in it; but having been elected to the Commons, he appeared there, and demanded his oath. Francis Bacon, the Clerk of the House, replied that he dared not give it him; but Haselrig insisted, and being supported by his party, he at length obtained his oath, and took his seat. It was then soon seen that the efficient Government members were gone to the Other House, and Haselrig, Scott, Robinson, and the most fiery members of the Republican section now carried things their own way, and commenced a course of vehement opposition. Scott ripped up the whole history of the House of Lords during the struggle of the Commonwealth. He said—"The Lords would not join in the trial of the king. We called the king to our bar, and arraigned him. He was for his obstinacy and guilt condemned and executed, and so let all the enemies of God perish! The House of Commons had a good conscience in it. Upon this the Lords' House adjourned, and never met again; and it was hoped the people of England should never again have a negative upon them." But the hostility of this party was not to the Other House merely, it was to the Protectorate itself, which it declaimed against, and not only in the House, but out of it, setting on foot petitions for the abolition of the Protectorate by the Commons. Whitelock remarks that this course boded the speedy dissolution of the House. Cromwell summoned both Houses to Whitehall January 25th, only five days after their meeting, and in a long and powerful speech remonstrated with the Commons on their frantic proceedings. He took a wide view of the condition of Europe, of the peace and Protestantism of England, and asked them what were their hopes, if, by their decision, they brought back the dissolute and bigoted Court which they had dismissed. He declared that the man who could contemplate the restoration of such a state of things must have the heart of a Cain; that he would make England the scene of a bloodier civil war than they had had before. He prayed, therefore, that whoever should seek to break the peace, God Almighty might root that man out of the nation; and he believed that the wrath of God would prosecute such a man to his grave, if not to hell.