negative voice over them? The first thing which the commons did on meeting, was to claim the powers of the new instrument, and admit the most violent of the excluded members, for none were to be excluded except the rebellious 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 the most 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.
Richard Cromwell. From an authentic Portrait
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;
