Parliament who were in the same general predicament of “Secluded Members”—­to wit, the 143 excluded by Pride’s Purge and seventy more who had been excluded at various times before for Royalist contumacy.  Finding the doors open, three of these unwelcome visitors went in, of whom two came out again and were not re-admitted, but one remained.  That one was William Prynne.  He sat like a ghoul among the Rumpers.  No persuasion on earth could induce him to leave.  Hasilrig stormed at him, and Vane coaxed him; but there he sat, and there he would sit!  He was a member of the Long Parliament, and no other Parliament was or could be rightfully in existence but that; if they turned him out, it should only be by carrying him out by his feet and shoulders!  Unwilling to resort to that method, those present got rid of the intruder by postponing their meeting to a later hour, and taking care that, when Prynne reappeared, he should be turned back.  The House that day passed an order that none should sit in it but genuine Rumpers, appointing a committee to ascertain who these were and to report on dubious cases; and the order was affixed to the doors outside.  For a day or two Prynne and others still haunted the lobbies; but at length they desisted, Prynne taking his revenge by at once printing The Republicans’ and Others’ spurious Old Cause briefly and truly anatomized, and then One Sheet, or, if you will, a Winding Sheet, for the Good Old Cause.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Guizot, I. 138-141; Commons Journals, May 9, 1659; Catalogue of Thomason Pamphlets.  The first of the two named pamphlets of Prynne appeared, with his name in full, May 13; the second, “by W.P.,” May 30.—­Prynne continued, in subsequent pamphlets, to attack the Rumpers for the wrong done to him and the other secluded members in still debarring them from their seats.  One was entitled A True and Perfect Narrative of what was done, spoken, by and between Mr. Prynne, the old and newly-forcibly late Secluded Members, the Army Officers, and those now sitting both in the Commons Lobby, House, and elsewhere, on Saturday and Monday last (the 7 and 9 of this instant May).  Though so entitled, it did not appear till June 13.  It contained this passage against the Bumpers:—­“Themselves in divers of their printed Declarations, and their instruments in sundry books (as JOHN GOODWIN, MARKHAM NEEDHAM, MELTON, and others), justified, maintained, the very highest, worst, treasonablest, execrablest, of all Popish, Jesuitical, Unchristian, tenets, practices, treasons, as the murthering of Christian Protestant Kings.”  This is a sample at once of Prynne’s style and of his accuracy.  He does not take the trouble to know the names of the persons he writes about, but plods, on like a rhinoceros in blinkers.]