as 150 or 180 members in all, the formerly excluded and the old sitters together, seem to have been in the House, thus sworn, about the time when the forty-three were assembled in the adjacent Other House.  The Commons had then resumed business, on their own account, as met after regular adjournment.  They had appointed a Mr. John Smythe to be their Clerk, in lieu of Mr. Henry Scobell, now made general “Clerk of the Parliament” and transferred to the Other House, and they had fixed that day week as a day of prayer for divine assistance, when the Usher of the Black Rod appeared to summon them to meet his Highness in the Other House.  Arranging that the Sergeant-at-Arms should carry the mace with him, and stand by the Speaker with the mace at his shoulder through the whole interview with his Highness, the House obeyed the summons.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals, Jan. 20, 1657-8, et seq.; Ludlow, 596-597; List of the 43 who sat in the Upper House in pamphlet of 1659 already cited, called A Second Narrative, &c.]

Cromwell’s speech to the two Houses (Speech XVI.) opened significantly with the words “My Lords, and Gentlemen of the House of Commons.”  It was a very quiet speech, somewhat slowly and heavily delivered, with “peace” for the key-word.  He represented the nation as now in such a nourishing state, especially in the possession of a settled and efficient Public Ministry of the Gospel, and at the same time of ample religious liberty for all, that nothing more was needed than oblivion of past differences, and a hearty co-operation of the two Houses with each other, and with himself.  Apologizing for being too ill to discourse more at length, he asked Lord Commissioner Fiennes to do so for him.  The speech of Fiennes was essentially a continuation in the same strain, but with a gorgeousness and variety of metaphor, Biblical and poetical, in description of the new era of peace and its duties, utterly beyond the bounds of usual Parliamentary oratory even then, and to which Cromwell and the rest, with all their experience of metaphor from the pulpit, must have listened with astonishment.  “Jacob, speaking to his son Joseph, said I had not thought to have seen thy face, and lo!  God hath showed me thy seed, also: meaning his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.  And may not many amongst us well say some years hence We had not thought to have seen a Chief Magistrate again among us, and lo!  God hath shown us a Chief Magistrate in his Two Houses of Parliament? Now may the good God make them like Ephraim and Manasseh, that the Three Nations may be blessed in them, saying God made thee like these Two Houses of Parliament, which two, like Leah and Rachel, did build the House of God! May you do worthily in Ephrata, and be famous in Bethlehem!” There was more of the same kind, including a comparison of the new constitution of the Petition and Advice to the perfected eduction of the orderly universe out of chaos.  It was the speech of a Puritan Jean Paul.[1]