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

It is twenty past nine on the morning of Wednesday the twentieth of April 1653, in the Chamber of the House of Commons at the Palace of Westminster, in heavy spring light through the east windows. He is fifty-four years old. He is Oliver Cromwell, born at Huntingdon on the twenty-fifth of April 1599, son of Robert Cromwell the Huntingdonshire gentleman and Elizabeth Steward, schooled at the Huntingdon Grammar School and Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, Member of Parliament for Huntingdon 1628–29 and for Cambridge from 1640, Lord General of the Commonwealth armies since 1650, the senior political figure of the English Republic since the execution of Charles I in January 1649.

He has, in the previous fortnight, been in direct conflict with the Rump Parliament (the fifty-three MPs who have remained as the legitimate body after the December 1648 Pride's Purge removed the Presbyterian-and-Independent moderate majority who would not vote for the trial of the king) over the question of when the parliament will dissolve itself and call new elections, and over the question of the legal-religious-and-electoral reforms the Rump has been promising and failing to enact since 1649.

He sits on the back bench of the Chamber for about ten minutes after walking in, in his plain black militia coat over the buff buff-coat (he is in field-officer's dress, not the parliamentary cloth he would normally wear in the Chamber). The Members continue with the morning's business: the reading of the Bill of Renewal of Parliament, which has, by the previous fortnight's debate, been re-drafted by the Rump leadership (Sir Henry Vane the younger, Henry Marten, Thomas Scot) to provide that the existing Members retain their seats in the new parliament without re-election.

He thinks: the Bill on the table is the self-perpetuation Bill. The Bill, in plain reading, sets the existing Rump Members in the next parliament without re-election. The Rump is, by the Bill, asking the country to ratify the fifty-three Members as the permanent legitimate government.

He thinks: the army's instruction for the past two years has been that the Rump must dissolve and call new free elections, and that the new parliament must enact the legal-and-religious reforms the Rump has been promising. The Rump has, in the past four years, enacted almost none of the reforms.

He thinks: the country cannot, in political reality, accept the self-perpetuation. If I let the Bill pass this morning, the army has the political-grievance that no further negotiation can settle. The army will move on the Rump within the month. The army's move on the Rump will be, by the army-council standing precedent of 1648, more violent than what I am about to do this morning.

He thinks: if I dismiss the Rump this morning by my own authority, the precedent is that the Lord General is the decisive authority in the republic. The precedent is, in plain constitutional reading, the precedent of a military dictatorship, but the precedent saves the republican-Commonwealth form by handing it forward to the Barebones Parliament I will call in July and to the Protectorate the army-and-civilian-council will establish in December.

He thinks: I will dismiss the Rump this morning. I will dismiss the Rump on the speech the army-council and I drafted last evening. The speech is the accusation against the Members for the failures of the Rump on the legal-religious-and-electoral reform programme. The speech is, in intention, the public-record version of the army's grievance.

He stands up at twenty to ten. He addresses the Chamber. He speaks for about ten minutes. The speech is, by Bulstrode Whitelocke's eyewitness Memorials of the English Affairs of 1682 (Whitelocke was in the Chamber as the Lord Commissioner of the Great Seal and was sitting four benches in front of Cromwell), in the prophetic-Puritan voice of his Putney Debates phase and not the politic-parliamentary voice of his Bedchamber-of-Commons phase. The speech accuses the Members of injustice, delays of justice, self-interest, ungodliness, scandalous lives. The climax is 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 calls in the file of about thirty musketeers under his Colonel Charles Worsley, who have been waiting in the lobby outside. The musketeers come into the Chamber. The Speaker, William Lenthall, refuses to leave the chair. Cromwell, by Whitelocke, says to Lenthall: take him down. Two of the musketeers physically remove the Speaker from the chair. The Mace (the gilt-and-jewelled mace that is the symbol of parliamentary authority and that is, by parliamentary custom, the only object that distinguishes the legitimate sitting of the House from a ad-hoc meeting of the Members) is lying on the table-of-the-House. Cromwell, by Whitelocke, looks at the Mace and says to one of the musketeers: what shall we do with this bauble? Take it away.

The Mace is taken away. The fifty-three Members are physically escorted out of the Chamber by the musketeers. The Rump Parliament, which has been the legitimate parliament of the English Commonwealth since the forming of the Pride's Purge on the sixth of December 1648, ceases to exist at about ten o'clock on the morning of the twentieth of April 1653.

Cromwell called the Barebones (Nominated) Parliament of about a hundred and forty members on the fourth of July 1653; the Barebones sat for about six months and dissolved itself in December. The Instrument of Government of the sixteenth of December 1653 established the Protectorate, with Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, ruling jointly with a Council of State and a triennial Parliament. He held the office for the remaining four years and nine months of his life. He died at Whitehall Palace on the third of September 1658, fifty-nine years old, of malaria and septicaemia complications.

He was given a state funeral at Westminster Abbey on the twenty-third of November 1658 and was buried in a vault at the east end of the Henry VII Lady Chapel. His son Richard Cromwell succeeded him as Lord Protector and held the office for about nine months before the army's political collapse and the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660. On the thirtieth of January 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey by order of the Convention Parliament, taken to Tyburn, hanged in chains from the Tyburn gallows from the morning until the evening, and then beheaded. The body was buried in an unmarked pit at the foot of the gallows. The head was placed on a spike at the south end of Westminster Hall, where it remained until 1685 (when it was blown down in a storm). It passed through private collectors' hands for the two-and-a-half centuries that followed; was authenticated by Karl Pearson's forensic study at the Biometrika laboratory at University College London in 1934; and was finally buried, by the Cromwell family's private arrangement with the Sidney Sussex College Cambridge masters, in an unmarked spot beneath the chapel ante-chamber of the college on the twenty-fifth of March 1960. The Mace that Cromwell had called a bauble in 1653 is the same Mace that sits, in the modern House of Commons, on the table-of-the-House every sitting day. By the convention of the modern parliamentary practice, the Mace must be removed from the table for the House to cease to be in session; the 1653 ejection is the precedent on which the modern parliamentary convention is built.