Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/344

330 as he was forced past him, exclaimed, "This is not honest; yea, it is against morality and common honesty." "O, Sir Harry Vane! Sir Harry Vane!" exclaimed Cromwell, "the Lord deliver me from Sir Harry Vane!" Thus he saw the house cleared, no one daring to raise a hand against him, though, says Whitelock, "many wore swords, and would sometimes brag high." When all were forth, Cromwell looked the door, and put the key in his pocket. He then returned to Whitehall, and told the council of officers, who yet remained sitting, what he had done.

Cromwell addressing the Parliament.

"When I went to the house," he said, "I did not think to do this, but perceiving the spirit of the Lord strong upon me, I resolved no longer to consider flesh and blood."

Such was the manner in which the last vestige of representative government was swept away by Cromwell. Charles I. roused the fiery indignation of parliament, and of all England, as a violator of the privileges of parliament, by entering the house to seize four members who had offended him. Cromwell, who had been one of the first to resist and to avenge this deed, now marched in his soldiers and turned out the whole parliament, about fifty members, with impunity. "They went away so quietly," said Cromwell, "that not a dog barked at their going." Such is the difference betwixt a private man with a victorious army at his back, and one who, though with the name of a king, has lost a nation's confidence by his want of moral honesty. The act of Cromwell was the death of all constitutional life whatever, it was in opposition to all parties but the army; yet no man dared assume the attitude of a patriot, the military Dictatorship was accomplished.

Cromwell's whole excuse was necessity; that without his seizure of the supreme power, the commonwealth could not exist. It ceased to exist by his very deed, and if he saved the faint form of a republic, it was only for five years. As we have seen the great example to the nations of the responsibility of kings, we have now to see an equally significant one of the impossibility of maintaining long any form of government that is not based on the mature opinion and attachment of the people. Republicanism was not the faith of England in the seventeenth century, and therefore neither the despotism of Charles could create a republic with any permanence in it, nor the strenuous grasp of Cromwell maintain it beyond the term of his own existence.

On the afternoon of this celebrated coup-d'etat, Cromwell proceeded to Derby House, accompanied by Harrison and Lambert, where the council was still sitting, and thus addressed the members:—"Gentlemen, if you are here met as private persons, you shall not be disturbed; but if as a council of state, this is no place for you; and since you cannot but know what was done at the house this morning, so take notice that the parliament is dissolved." Bradshaw, who was presiding, said that they knew, and that all England would soon know; but that if he thought that the parliament was dissolved, he was mistaken, "for that no power under Heaven could dissolve them, except themselves. Therefore take you notice of that." Sir Arthur