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362 one of them offered to go and kill Lambert, who was the originater of all the mischief. Richard called a council to consider the proposition: Whitelock represented the danger of dissolving the parliament, and leaving himself at the mercy of the army; but Thurloe, lord Broghill, Fiennes, and Wolseley declared there was no alternative, for if the army and parliament came to strife, the cavaliers would rise and bring in Charles. Richard reluctantly gave way, and on the 22nd of April he signed a commission empowering Fiennes, the keeper of the seal, to dissolve the parliament. Fiennes summoned the commons to the upper house by the usher of the black rod, but they shut the door in the face of that officer, and refused to obey, adjourning themselves for three days. Fiennes, however, declared the parliament dissolved, the commons having been duly summoned to witness it, and a proclamation was issued to that effect.

The warning of Whitelock was immediately verified; the moment that the parliament ceased, all regard to Richard by the army ceased with it. From that moment he was utterly deserted except by the small knot of officers—Goffe, Whalley, and Ingoldsby, and he was as completely annihilated as protector as if all parties had deposed him by assent and proclamation. The council of officers proceeded to take measures for the exercise of the supreme power. They placed guards to prevent the adjourned commons retaking their seats at Westminster as they proposed, and by their own authority dismissed Ingoldsby, Goffe, Whalley, and the other officers who had adhered to Richard, from their commands in the army, and restored Lambert and all the others who had been cashiered by Oliver. Having thus restored the republicanism of the army, they determined to recall the Rump, as a body that they believed they could command; and they accordingly issued an order for the reassembling of the house of commons which Oliver had so unceremoniously dismissed on the 20th of April, 1653. At this call, Lenthall, the old speaker of the Rump, with about forty or fifty members of the Rump, hastened the next day to Westminster, where Lambert kept guard with the troops, and after some discussion in the Painted Chamber, they went in a body to the house through two files of Lambert's soldiers, and took their places as a real parliament. But their claim to this exclusive right was immediately disputed. The same day, the 7th of May, a large number of the members who had been excluded by Pride's purge, in 1648, of whom one hundred and ninety-four were still alive, and eighty of them residing in the capital, assembled in Westminster Hall, and sent up to the house a deputation of fourteen, headed by Prynne, Annesley, and Sir George Booth, to demand equal liberty to sit; but as this would have overwhelmed them with a presbyterian majority, the doors were closed against them: they were kept back by the soldiers who filled the lobby, who were ironically called "the keepers of the liberties of England," and they were informed that no member could sit who had not already signed the engagement. On the 9th, however, Prynne made his way into the house, and kept his seat, spite of all efforts to dislodge him, till dinner time; but going out to dine, he found himself shut out on his return.

The Rump now proceeded to appoint a committee of safety, and then a council of state, which included Fairfax, Lambert, Desborough, Bradshaw, Fleetwood, Ashley Cooper, Haselrig, Vane, Ludlow, St. John, and Whitelock. Letters were received from Monk in Scotland, congratulating the Rump on their return to power, but hypocritically begging them to keep in mind the services of Cromwell and his family. Lockhart sent over from Flanders the tendered services of the regiments there, and was confirmed in his office of ambassador, and also was commissioned to attend a conference betwixt the ministers of France and Spain, to be held at Fuentarabia, whither Charles Stuart had also betaken himself. Montague sent in the adhesion of the fleet, and, what was still more consoling, Henry Cromwell, whose opposition in Ireland was much dreaded, resigned his office, and was permitted to retire into private life.

The Wallingford House party of officers alone created serious apprehension. They sent in a list of fifteen demands from their own creatures of the house, which were immediately taken into consideration, and the Rump successively voted, in compliance, that a form of government should be passed calculated to preserve the liberties of the people, and that it should contain no single person as protector, nor house of peers. That liberty of conscience should be allowed to all believers in the Scriptures who held the doctrine of the Trinity, except papists and prelatists. But one of these demands was for lands of inheritance to be settled on Richard Cromwell to the value of ten thousand pounds a year, and a pension on her highness, his mother, of ten thousand pounds a year. On this it was remarked, that Richard was still occupying Whitehall as if he were protector, and they made it conditional that he should remove thence. They proposed that if he retired voluntarily from the protectorate, they would grant him twenty-nine thousand pounds for the discharge of his debts, two thousand pounds for present necessities, and ten thousand pounds to him and his heirs. Richard cheerfully agreed, and retired, but his pension was never paid. After going to the continent for some time after the restoration, Richard returned and lived peaceably on his estate at Cheshunt, or at the old manor of Mardon, at Hursley, near Winchester, which he received with Dorothy Major, and there spent a jolly life in old English state till the term of eighty years. During his father's life, he is said in convivial hours to have drank the health of his father's landlord, Charles Stuart; and there he had a chest which contained all the addresses and congratulations, even the protestations of profound fidelity from all the corporations, congregations, and almost all the public men, and on this chest he would seat himself in his jocund hours, amongst his convivial friends, and boast that he was sitting on the lives and fortunes of most of the leading men of England. Henry Cromwell also passed his life as a quiet country gentleman on his estate of Swinney, near Sohan, in Cambridgeshire, till his death in 1674. His government of Ireland was, on his resigning, put into the hands of five commissioners, and the command of the army was given to Ludlow.

Charles and his party abroad, watching the continual bickerings of their enemies in England, put in motion all their machinery to create confusion, and to seize the opportunity of taking every possible means of procuring a revolt amongst them. Charles, to encourage his partisans, announced his intention of coming to England to head them.