You have sat too long for any good you have been doing

A parliament does not always fall to its enemies. Sometimes it falls to one of its own, a man who has sat on its benches and ridden under its colours, who walks in one morning in a plain coat and decides that the body which made him will not outlast the hour.

THE GENTLEMAN OF HUNTINGDON

Oliver Cromwell was born at Huntingdon on the twenty-fifth of April 1599, son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward, schooled at the grammar school in the town and at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. He sat for Huntingdon in 1628, for Cambridge from 1640, and learned soldiering late, in his forties, on the fields of Marston Moor and Naseby. By 1650 he was Lord General of the Commonwealth armies. After the king's head fell on the scaffold at Whitehall in January 1649, no man in England stood higher in the new republic, and none was watched with more attention by the army that had made it.

The Rump was the residue of what had been the Long Parliament: fifty-three Members left after Colonel Pride's file of musketeers stood at the door of the Chamber in December 1648 and turned away those who would not vote the trial of Charles Stuart. For four years the Rump had governed and promised: reform of the law, reform of the church, a free election, a new representative for the commonwealth. The reforms had not come. The election had not been called. The Members had voted themselves committees, fees, sequestered lands. The army, which had not been paid, watched, and waited, and grew cold.

THE MORNING OF THE TWENTIETH OF APRIL

The morning is bright, the spring light heavy through the east windows of St Stephen's Chapel where the Commons sit. He has come down from Whitehall on foot, with a file of about thirty musketeers under Colonel Charles Worsley left waiting in the lobby. He wears a plain black coat over the buff-coat of a field officer, not the parliamentary cloth that would be proper to the bench. The Members notice; they do not interrupt their business.

On the table lies the Bill of a New Representative. He has read it, line by line, with Lambert and Harrison at Whitehall the night before. The Bill is, in plain reading, the self-perpetuation Bill. By a clause inserted in the past fortnight by Sir Henry Vane and Henry Marten, the sitting Members are to keep their seats in the new parliament without the bother of a return to the country. The Rump intends, this morning, to settle itself in office for as long as it pleases God and the lawyers.

He sits down on a back bench, and for about ten minutes he says nothing. The clerk reads. The Members lean and confer. Vane the younger speaks, smooth and able as he always was.

THE BACK BENCH

He listens, and as he listens he weighs. The Bill on the table is the self-perpetuation. If it passes this morning the country is asked to ratify fifty-three men as the permanent government of England, and the army's grievance, two years in the building, becomes a grievance no further negotiation can compose. The army will move on the Rump within the month. He knows his colonels; he knows what Pride did in December 1648 and what Harrison would do tomorrow if no one held his hand. Their move will be the rougher for waiting.

If he rises now, by his own authority and not the army-council's warrant, the precedent set this morning is that the Lord General is the decisive authority in the republic. In plain constitutional reading it is the precedent of a sword laid across the table of the House. He has spent four years arguing that the cause of God in England is not a sword. And yet the cause, as he reads the Bill from where he sits, is now between two swords, his own and Harrison's, and only the gentler of the two has any care left for the civil form. He had written to the Speaker after Dunbar that he hoped the Members would not own us by our name but by our works. The works of the Rump are the Bill on the table.

Vane is still speaking. The vote is being moved. He leans across to Major-General Thomas Harrison on the bench beside him and says quietly, by Bulstrode Whitelocke's Memorials of the English Affairs, that this is the time; I must do it. Harrison answers that the work is great and dangerous; he answers that he is resolved.

IN THE NAME OF GOD, GO

He stands up at about twenty minutes to ten. He takes off his hat. He addresses the Chamber in the prophetic voice his troopers knew at Putney and not the politic voice his fellow Members knew in committee. He speaks for some ten minutes. He accuses the Members, by Whitelocke who sat four benches in front of him as Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal, of injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, ungodliness, scandalous lives. He names them one by one. He puts on his hat and walks into the middle of the floor.

He says, as the peroration: you have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

He stamps his foot. The door opens and Colonel Worsley brings in the musketeers. The Speaker, William Lenthall, who twelve years before had refused to deliver up the Five Members to Charles I in this same Chamber, refuses now to leave the chair. Take him down, Cromwell says. Two of the musketeers take him by the arm and bring him down. The Members stand, white-faced, and are escorted out by the soldiers, each to the door.

The Mace lies on the table where the clerk has left it, the gilt and the jewels and the cross at the head of it, the one object by which a meeting of Members becomes a sitting of the House. He looks at it. What shall we do with this bauble? he says, by Whitelocke. Take it away. A musketeer lifts it from the table and carries it out. By about ten o'clock the Chamber is empty. The Rump Parliament, which has been the legitimate parliament of the English Commonwealth since the sixth of December 1648, has ceased to be.

LENTHALL ON THE STAIR

The Speaker, walking out under the soldiers' hands, was the man who in January 1642 had answered Charles I from this same chair that he had neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me. The phrase had founded the modern privilege of the Commons; the chair was its altar. He had said it to a king who had come with armed men to seize five of his Members. He was being put out of it now by another man who had come with armed men, a man who had once stood among those whose privilege he had defended. He walked out without speaking. There was nothing in the precedent he had made twelve years earlier to fit the morning he was living through.

THE PROTECTORATE

Cromwell called the Nominated Parliament, the Barebones, on the fourth of July: some hundred and forty godly men summoned by name to sit in the place of those he had put out. They sat for six months and dissolved themselves in December. On the sixteenth of December 1653 the Instrument of Government was sealed, and he was installed at Westminster Hall as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, ruling with a Council of State and a triennial Parliament. He held the office four years and nine months. He died at Whitehall on the third of September 1658, fifty-nine years old, of malaria and the complications that followed. His son Richard held the Protectorate nine months. In May 1660 Charles II came back across the Channel to a country that had remembered, in the meantime, what a parliament without a king and a king without a parliament both cost.

THE BAUBLE

On the thirtieth of January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, his body was exhumed from the vault in the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, taken to Tyburn, hanged in chains from morning until evening, and beheaded. The body was buried in a pit at the foot of the gallows. The head went on a spike at the south end of Westminster Hall and stayed there until a storm in 1685 brought it down. It passed through private hands for two and a half centuries, was authenticated by Karl Pearson's forensic study at University College London in 1934, and was buried at last beneath the ante-chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on the twenty-fifth of March 1960, in an unmarked spot the masters of the college keep to themselves.

A parliament does not always fall to its enemies. The Mace that Cromwell called a bauble was carried out of the Chamber that morning and was, in time, carried back in. It sits on the table of the House of Commons every sitting day, and by the convention of the modern parliament the House is not in session while it is off the table. The precedent that the Mace makes the sitting, and that the sitting ends when the Mace is taken away, is the precedent of the twentieth of April 1653.

THE MACE ON THE TABLE

The gilt and the jewels and the small cross at the head of it: the bauble, on the table, every sitting day.