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‘The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued have thought fit to ordain and enact . . . that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly abolished —‘Act’ of the Long Parliament (March 19, 1649).

‘That the supreme legislative authority of the Commonwealth . . . shall be and reside in one person and the people assembled in Parliament.’—Instrument of Government, § 1 (December 16, 1653).

‘That your Highness will for the future be pleased to call Parliaments consisting of two Houses.’—Humble Petition and Advice, § 2 (May 25, 1657).

‘That the Government is and ought to be by King, Lords, and Commons.’—Resolution of Convention Parliament (May 1, 1660).

It has been shown in the preceding chapter that the English Parliament assumed almost from the first a bi-cameral form, and, except for eight years in the middle of the seventeenth century, it has retained that form ever since. The period of exception occurred, of course, in revolutionary days, but the results of the experiment of a uni-cameral legislature are not, on that account, the less pregnant with political instruction and suggestiveness. It is the purpose of the following pages to explain the circumstances under which the experiment was attempted, and to inquire whether, and if so how far, they were sufficient to invalidate any conclusions which we may be tempted to draw from its undeniable failure.

Reduced to a mere fraction of its original numbers by the drastic purge of Colonel Pride, the Long Parliament had set up a special Court of Justice to try Charles I. Under the sentence of this irregular tribunal the King had been sent to the scaffold on January 30, 1649. Six weeks later the same ‘Rump’ proceeded to pass an ‘Act’ declaring that the office of King was ‘unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people’, and that it should be forthwith abolished (March 17, 1649). This Act was immediately followed (March 19) by another which declared that ‘the Commons of England . . . finding by long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact . . . that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and hereby is wholly abolished and taken away; and that the Lords shall not from henceforth meet or sit in the said House, called the Lords’ House, or in any other house or place whatsoever, as a House of Lords; nor shall sit, vote, advise, adjudge, or determine of any matter or thing whatsoever, as a House of Lords in Parliament’. Further: provision was in the same ‘Act’ made that ‘such Lords as have demeaned themselves with honour, courage, and fidelity to the Commonwealth’ should be capable of election to the uni-cameral legislature. It is important to note that the ‘Act’ of March 19, 1649, having neither the sanction of the Crown nor of the House of Lords, had no more legal force than any other resolution of the House of Commons; as the work of a House of Commons from which the majority was excluded by force of arms, it had even less than the usual moral significance.

The rump of the Long Parliament having thus rid itself of the King and of the Second Chamber, proceeded to render itself independent of the electorate and to perpetuate its own power; to make itself, in a word, politically and legally sovereign. Under the Act of May 11, 1641,—an Act which had of course received the assent of the King and the House of Lords,—the Long Parliament could not be dissolved, prorogued, or adjourned except by Act of Parliament ‘passed for that purpose’. It is noticeable that the Act contained a further provision that ‘the House of Peers shall not at any time . . . during this present Parliament be adjourned unless it be by themselves or by their own order’. But, this notwithstanding, the Act was deemed to be still in force, and it did provide a certain measure of sanction for the impudent claim now put forward by the remnant of the House of Commons. On January 4, 1649, that House had resolved that ‘the Commons of England in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation’. Never, as Professor Firth says, was the House ‘less representative than at the moment when it passed this vote. By the expulsion of royalists and members during the war, and of Presbyterians in 1645, it had been, as Cromwell said, “winnowed and sifted and brought to a handfull.” When the Long Parliament met in November, 1640, it consisted of about 490 members; in January, 1649, those sitting or at liberty to sit were not more than ninety. Whole districts were unrepresented. . . . At no time between 1649 and 1653 was the Long Parliament entitled to say that it represented the people’.[17] Nevertheless the position it assumed had in it this element of strength: in the absence of a King, a House of Lords, and a written Constitution, there was absolutely no legal check upon its unlimited and irresponsible authority. ‘This,’ said Cromwell, addressing his second Parliament, ‘was the case of the people of England at that time, the Parliament assuming to itself the authority of the three Estates that were before. It had so assumed that authority that if any man had come and said, “What rules do you judge by?” it would have answered, “Why, we have none. We are supreme in legislature and judicature.”’ Supreme the Rump claimed to be; but it ignored the dominant factor in the situation—the new model army and its general, and it chose to forget that its usurped authority rested in fact upon the power of the sword. It was soon uncomfortably reminded of this fact. By 1652 there was a clamorous demand for a settlement of the kingdom. The enemies of the Commonwealth were now scattered: Cromwell had subjugated Ireland and Scotland; the fleet, organized by Vane and commanded by Blake, had swept Prince Rupert and the Royalists from the seas; while Cromwell himself had finally crushed their hopes at home by the ‘crowning mercy’ of Worcester (September 3, 1652). The victorious party had now leisure and opportunity to quarrel among themselves. Petitions poured in from the army praying for reforms—long delayed—in law and justice; for the establishment of a ‘gospel ministry’; above all, for a speedy dissolution of the existing Parliament. The officers were ready to employ force to effect the last object: but Cromwell was opposed to it and restrained his colleagues. During the autumn of 1651 a series of conferences as to the ‘settlement of the nation’ were held at Speaker Lenthall’s. The lawyers like St. John, Whitelocke, and Lenthall himself, already favoured a restoration of one of the late king’s sons; the officers wanted a republic; Cromwell cautiously expressed his opinion that ‘a settlement with somewhat of monarchical power in it would be very effectual’. Meanwhile the Rump pushed on their ‘Bill for a New Representation’. This Bill suggested that the New House should consist of 400 members, but it contained, in addition, the amazingly impudent proposals that the existing members were to retain their seats without re-election, and that they should have a veto upon all new members who should be elected not merely to the next but to all future parliaments. Against this the officers strongly protested; even Cromwell’s patience was exhausted: ‘You must go, the nation loathes your sitting.’ Later on, he gave his opinion of the ‘Perpetuation Bill’: ‘we should have had fine work then . . . a Parliament of four hundred men executing arbitrary government without intermission except some change of a part of them; one Parliament stepping into the seat of another, just left warm for them; the same day that the one left, the other was to leap in. . . . I thought and I think still, that this was a pitiful remedy.’ On April 20, 1653, the Rump was expelled. ‘So far as I could discern when they were dissolved, there was not so much as the barking of a dog or any general and visible repining at it.’

In his estimate of the position and policy of the uni-cameral Rump Cromwell was undeniably right. It was in plain truth the ‘horridest arbitrariness that ever existed on earth’. It was held that the Rump had become a sort of residuary legatee of all the powers previously possessed by either House. ‘Whatsoever authority was in the Houses of Lords and Commons the same is united in this Parliament.’ Such was the theory held by Lord Chief Justice Glyn. In particular the judicial power of the House of Lords was held to be vested in the Rump, while Major-General Goffe went so far as to assure his fellow members ‘that the ecclesiastical jurisdiction by which the Bishops once punished blasphemy had since the abolition of the bishops devolved also upon the House.’[18] The union of executive, legislative, and judicial authority more than justified Cromwell’s famous description. No man’s person or property was safe. It was a repetition of all the arbitrary tribunals of the régime of Thorough rolled into one. Hence ‘the liberties and interests and lives of people not judged by any certain known Laws and Power, but by an arbitrary Power . . . by an arbitrary Power I say: to make men’s estates liable to confiscation, and their persons to imprisonment—sometimes by laws made after the fact committed; often by the Parliament’s assuming to itself to give judgment both in capital and criminal things, which in former times was not known to exercise such a judicature’.[19]

That Cromwell did not overstate the case against the arbitrary behaviour of a House of Commons, acting without a sense of immediate responsibility to the nation, and unchecked by any external authority, has lately been proved in detail by the researches of Professor Firth. But the story is not yet complete.

To the ‘Rump’ there succeeded the Puritan Convention, popularly known as the ‘Barebones’ Parliament’. This device did not work, and in December, 1653, a Committee of Officers, assisted by a few civilians, produced the exceedingly interesting draft constitution embodied in The Instrument of Government. This document provided, in the first place, for a drastic scheme of parliamentary reform, embracing both the revision of the franchise qualification and the redistribution of seats; parliaments were to be elected triennially, and to remain in session for not less than five months; Ireland and Scotland were, for the first time, to be represented at Westminster; but the two points which specially concern us were: (i) that the legislative power was vested in ‘one person and the people represented in parliament’, i.e. in a single chamber; and (ii) that the constitution itself was to be ‘rigid’, the Legislature having no power of amending it. The ‘single person’ was to have only a suspensive veto on Bills presented to him by Parliament. If within twenty days he had not given his consent, nor succeeded in inducing Parliament to withdraw the Bill, it became law, ‘provided such Bills contain nothing in them contrary to these presents’—in other words, provided they were not repugnant to the written Constitution.

The Instrument represented an honest attempt to regain the path of constitutional decorum, to clothe the military dictatorship with the form of law. But it met with the usual fate reserved for attempts to square the circle, to reconcile irreconcilables. The ‘single chamber’ when once elected showed no disposition to accept the ‘fundamentals’ of the Instrument. Despite the angry admonitions of the Protector it insisted upon questioning the ‘authority by which it sat’; regarding itself, in fine, as not merely a legislative but a constituent assembly. As a result, the Protector dismissed it at the first legal opportunity (January 22, 1655). ‘The people,’ he declared, ‘will prefer their safety to their passions, and their real security to forms, when necessity calls for support.’ For the next eighteen months England was delivered over to the entirely arbitrary rule of the major-generals. But as the year 1656 advanced the Protector needed money for the Spanish war, and in September a Second Parliament assembled. Great efforts had been made to secure the election of the well-affected, but even so it was found necessary to exclude as many as one hundred irreconcilables.

This renewed ‘sifting and winnowing’ did not solve the difficulty. There were in truth only two genuine alternatives: ‘government by consent’ or government by the sword. The ‘honest republicans’, like Ludlow, wanted the former. ‘What would you have?’ asked Cromwell of Ludlow. ‘That which we fought for,’ replied the colonel, ‘that the nation might be governed by its own consent.’ ‘I am as much for government by consent as any man,’ said the Protector, ‘but where shall we find that consent?’

The question denotes the practical statesman as against the doctrinaire. Government ‘by consent’ could mean only a freely elected Parliament with constituent powers. Such a Parliament meant a Stuart restoration. And Cromwell knew it. Nevertheless he was almost pathetically anxious to keep the sword out of sight, and arrive, if by any means possible, at a constitutional settlement. ‘It is time to come to a settlement and to lay aside arbitrary proceedings so unacceptable to the nation.’ The lawyers, the merchants, and the middle party generally were of one mind with the Protector, and early in the year 1657 a demand arose from many quarters for a revision of the Constitution. Alderman Sir Christopher Pack, one of the members for the City of London, was put up to propose revision—a Second Chamber and increased power for the Protector, who was to be ‘something like a king’. By the end of March the demand took practical shape in the Humble Petition and Advice. The Protector was to be transformed into a king, with the right to nominate a successor; Parliament was once more to be bi-cameral; the ‘other House’ was to consist of not more than seventy and not less than forty members, nominated for life by ‘his Highness’, and approved by ‘this’ House; the Commons were again to secure control over their own elections, and none duly elected were to be excluded; the Council of State was to be known henceforth as the Privy Council; a permanent revenue was to be secured to the king, and there was to be toleration for all: ‘so that this liberty be not extended to Popery or Prelacy or to the countenancing such who publish horrible blasphemies or practice or hold for licentiousness or profaneness under the profession of Christ.’ In a word, the old Constitution, so far as the circumstances of the moment would allow, was to be restored.

Cromwell was well pleased with the scheme, and, had his officers permitted, would have accepted it in its entirety. ‘The things provided in the Petition,’ he declared, ‘do secure the liberties of the people of God so as they never before had them.’ But on one point the leading officers and the ‘honest republicans’ were alike immovable: they would have no king. They were backed in their opposition by the extremer Puritan sects. ‘We cannot but spread before your Highness our deep resentment of and heart bleedings for, the fearful apostasy which is endeavoured by some to be fastened upon you . . . by persuading you to assume that office which was one declared and engaged against by the Parliament . . . as unnecessary, burdensome and destructive to the safety and liberty of the people.’[20] So ran an address from nineteen Anabaptist ministers in London. Cromwell himself was in two minds. His reason assented to the Humble Petition, but policy required that he should not break with the masters of the sword. The extremists prevailed, and after five weeks of discussion and hesitation, Cromwell refused the offer of the crown.

The proposal for a revived Second Chamber was, on the contrary, carried with an unexpected degree of unanimity. The Protector pressed it strongly upon the officers. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘that unless you have some such thing as a balance we cannot be safe. Either you will encroach upon our civil liberties by excluding such as are elected to serve in Parliament—next time for aught I know you may exclude four hundred—or they will encroach upon our religious liberty. By the proceedings of this Parliament you see they stand in need of a check or balancing power, for the case of James Naylor might happen to be your case. By the same law and reason they punished Naylor they might punish an Independent or Anabaptist. By their judicial power they fall upon life and member, and doth the Instrument enable me to control it? This Instrument of Government will not do your work.’[21]

The case against a uni-cameral legislature was never put with more telling effect. ‘By the proceedings of this Parliament you see they stand in need of a check or balancing power.’ The appeal to recent experience was irresistible. More horrid arbitrariness had never been displayed by any government. The lawyers were especially emphatic in their demand for some bulwark against the caprice and tyranny of a single elected chamber. ‘The other House,’ said Thurloe, ‘is to be called by writ, in the nature of the Lords’ House; but is not to consist of the old Lords, but of such as have never been against the Parliament, but are to be men fearing God and of good conversation, and such as his Highness shall be fully satisfied in, both as to their interest, affection and integrity to the good cause. And we judge here that this House thus constituted will be a great security and bulwark to the honest interest, and to the good people that have been engaged therein; and will not be so uncertain as the House of Commons, which depends upon the election of the people. Those that sit in the other House are to be for life, and as any die his place is to be filled up with the consent of the House itself, and not otherwise; so that if that House be but made good at first, it is likely to continue so for ever, as far as man can provide.’[22] The preference of the lawyers for a bi-cameral legislature is, however, only according to expectation. They frankly favoured a return as speedy as possible to the old order, if not to the old dynasty. More remarkable is the acquiescence of the soldiers. But they too had come to realize both the inconvenience—to use no harsher term—caused by the sovereignty of a single chamber, and the insufficiency of paper restrictions imposed by the Instrument of Government. A freely elected House of Commons meant the restoration of the ‘King of the Scots’. ‘On reflection, therefore, they were not sorry,’ as Professor Firth pertinently remarks, ‘to see a sort of Senate established as a check to the popularly elected Lower House, thinking that it would serve to maintain the principles for which they had fought against the reactionary tendencies of the nation in general. They were so much convinced of this that in 1659 the necessity of “a select Senate” became one of the chief planks in the political platform of the army.’[23]

On May 8 Cromwell communicated to the House his final decision not to ‘undertake the government with the title of King’. After much debate the Petition was amended in accordance with the Protector’s views, and in its amended form was definitely accepted on May 25. On June 26 Cromwell was installed with solemn pomp as Protector, and on January 29, 1658, he met his remodelled Parliament for the first time.

According to the terms of the Petition, the ‘other House’ was to consist of not more than seventy and not less than forty members, ‘being such as shall be nominated by your Highness and approved by this House.’ But after much debate the approval of ‘this’ House was waived and the Protector was authorized to summon whom he would. The task of selection was no easy one, but Cromwell took enormous pains to perform it faithfully. ‘The difficulty proves great,’ wrote Thurloe, ‘between those who are fit, and not willing to serve, and those who are willing and expect it, and are not fit.’ At last sixty-three names were selected and writs were issued, according to the ancient form, bidding them, ‘all Excuses being set aside,’ to be ‘personally present at Westminster . . . there to treat, confer and give your Advice with us, and with the Great Men and Nobles’. Of the sixty-three summoned, only forty-two responded; among them being Richard, son of the Protector,[24] his three sons-in-law, Fauconberg, Claypole, and Fleetwood, and his brothers-in-law, Desborough and John Jones. Of the seven English Peers summoned, only two consented to serve, one being Cromwell’s son-in-law, Lord Fauconberg, the other Lord Eure, a peer of no standing or repute. Lord Say, staunch Puritan though he was, refused to countenance any Second Chamber save the real House of Lords. ‘The chiefest remedy and prop to uphold this frame and building and keep it standing and steady is (and experience hath showed it to be) the Peers of England, and their powers and privileges in the House of Lords; they have been at the beam keeping both scales, King and people, in an even posture, without encroachments one upon the other to the hurt and damage of both. Long experience hath made it manifest that they have preserved the just rights and liberties of the people against the tyrannical usurpation of kings; and have also as steps and stairs upheld the Crown from falling upon the floor, by the insolency of the multitude, from the throne of government.’ That being so he thought it unworthy that any ancient peer of England should so far play the traitor to his House and order as to be ‘made a party, and indeed a stalking-horse and vizard, to the design of this nominated Chamber’.[25] His sons John and Nathaniel Fiennes had no such scruples, and obeyed the Protector’s summons. The latter indeed was one of the most enthusiastic apologists for the ‘other House’.

But the Protector had still to reckon with the bitter and pedantic republicans in the House of Commons. Sir Arthur Haslerig, who had refused a place in the ‘other’ House, was foremost among the querulous critics of the new constitutional experiment. The Protector insisted upon the critical condition of affairs at home and abroad; but to no exhortations would the Commons give heed. Once again they insisted on questioning ‘fundamentals’, and debating the powers, position, and title to be assigned to the ‘other’ House. A week of this ‘foolery’ sufficed to exhaust the Protector’s patience, and on February 4 he dissolved Parliament with some passion: ‘Let God be judge between you and me.’ ‘Amen,’ responded some of the irreconcilable republicans. Thus ended in confusion and failure the constitutional experiments of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

That Cromwell was genuinely anxious to restore the authority of the civil power and to re-establish parliamentary institutions can be doubted only by those who hold him to have been an actor and a hypocrite. That he signally failed is obvious; and it is worth while to pause for an instant in order to analyse the reasons for his failure.

To ascribe it entirely to the abolition of the monarchy and of the House of Lords would be uncandid, though it cannot be doubted that the absence of these balancing elements materially increased Cromwell’s difficulties. Nor can it be ascribed wholly to the personality or to the political convictions of Cromwell himself. It is true that Cromwell never gave any indication that he possessed special capacity for the task of constitutional reconstruction; it is truer still that he was unfitted alike by temperament and training for the rôle of a ‘constitutional’ ruler in the modern sense. He was quite as determined as Strafford or Charles I to retain in his own hands the control of the executive, and he refused to assign to any of his Parliaments anything more than a legislative authority to be exercised under the strait limitations of a written constitution. On the other hand, it is hardly matter for surprise that a Parliament which imagined that it had brought a Stuart sovereign to the dust should be reluctant to accept so limited a sphere of action and authority. The Protectorate Parliaments were clearly determined to exercise not merely legislative, but constituent powers; not only to make laws, but to revise and define the Constitution itself. The claim, though reasonable enough in theory, was inconvenient and inopportune. If the sword was ever to be sheathed; if civil government was ever to be restored, it was absolutely necessary, as Cromwell pointed out with homely good sense, to start somewhere; to agree on certain preliminary fundamentals. Parliament refused to see the necessity, and insisted upon throwing the whole Constitution into the melting pot on each successive occasion. Thus, the point at issue was precisely what it had been under the Stuart Kings: Where does Sovereignty reside? Does it reside in a Constitution, or in Parliament, or in the People? It is difficult to maintain that there was much moral authority behind either of the written Constitutions—the Instrument of Government or the Petition and Advice. On the other hand, to admit the sovereignty of the people in any genuine and effective sense—to summon a constituent assembly freely elected by the constituencies—would have been, beyond all question, to pave the way for a Stuart restoration. Must Sovereignty, then, be vested in a Parliament, either uni-cameral or bi-cameral, elected on a notoriously restricted franchise and with manifest disregard for ‘popular’ rights? The dilemma was in fact complete, the problem insoluble. The more so since it was impossible to avow the naked truth that the real sovereignty in England during the interregnum was vested neither in People, nor in Parliament, nor in paper Constitutions, but in the sword. Cromwell’s authority, anxious as he was to ignore or disguise the fact, rested upon the fidelity of his unconquerable ironsides. His parliamentary experiments, though undertaken in all good faith, were in consequence foredoomed to failure. The failure is, however, unusually instructive. It is a striking illustration of the truths, too often neglected by Englishmen, that parliamentary government is not for all peoples, nor for all times; that it postulates certain conditions; that its success depends on presuppositions by no means invariably fulfilled; that, if it is to work smoothly there must be a tolerable measure of agreement upon ‘fundamentals’; that on ‘circumstantials’ men and parties may indulge in wide difference of opinion; but that on general principles of government they must be in accord. Further, and finally, it would seem to suggest the conclusion that parliamentary institutions, at any rate in England, are workable only with a legislature genuinely bi-cameral in structure, and under the ægis of a constitutional but hereditary monarchy.

For ten years the English people submitted sullenly, but in the main silently, to a military autocracy thinly disguised under the veil of a parliamentary Commonwealth, or a Protectorate limited by a written Constitution. On the death of the great Protector, himself the leader and general of an irresistible army, the sword and the robe at once came into sharp and open conflict. Richard Cromwell, powerless either to control or to reconcile, was contemptuously pushed aside, and after a short period of confusion, the people got the opportunity—the first they had enjoyed since 1640,—of giving expression to their true political sentiment. It is supremely significant that the Convention Parliament affirmed, with its first breath, that ‘The Government is and ought to be, by King, Lords, and Commons’. The experiment of a sovereign uni-cameral Parliament stood confessed, a hopeless and irremediable failure.