This was an anomaly in itself, nay an illegality; and there had been a hot-headed attempt of some of the younger Peers to remove it by bursting into the House of Lords at the same time that the secluded members took their seats in the Commons.  Monk’s soldiers had, by instructions, prevented that; and, with the full consent of all the older and wiser peers at hand, the management of the crisis had been left to the one reconstituted House.  The anomaly, however, had been a subject of serious discussion in that House.  On the one hand, they could not pass a vote for the restitution of the House of Peers without trenching on that very question of the future form of Government which they had resolved not to meddle with.  On the other hand, absolute silence on the matter was impossible.  How could the present single House, for example, even if its other acts were held valid, venture on, an Act for the dissolution of that Long Parliament whose peculiar privilege, wrung from Charles I. in May 1641, was that it should never be dissolved except by its own consent, i.e. by the joint-consent of the two component Houses?  Yet this was the very thing—­that had to be done before way could be made for the coming Parliament.  The course actually taken was perhaps the only one that the circumstances permitted.  When the House, at their last sitting, on Friday, March 16, did pass the Act dissolving itself and-calling the new Parliament, it incorporated with the Act a proviso in these words:  “Provided always, and be it declared, that the single actings of this House, enforced by the pressing necessities of the present times, are not intended in the least to infringe, much less take away, the ancient native right which the House of Peers, consisting of those Lords who did engage in the cause of the Parliament against the forces raised in the name of the late King, and so continued until 1648, had and have to be a part of the Parliament of England.”  Here again there was not positive prejudgment so much as the removal of an obstacle.—­It did seem, however, as if the House would not separate without passing the bounds it had prescribed for itself.  It had already been debated in whose name the writs for the new Parliament should issue?  “In King Charles’s” had been the answer of the undaunted Prynne.  He had been overruled, and the arrangement was that the writs should issue, as under a Commonwealth, “in the name of the Keepers of the Liberties of England.”  At the last sitting of the House, just as the vote for the dissolution was being put, the Presbyterian Mr. Crewe, provoked by some Republican utterance of Scott, moved that the House, before dissolving, should testify its abhorrence of the murder of the late King by a resolution disclaiming all hand in that affair.  The untimely proposal caused a great excitement, various members starting up to protest that they at least had never concurred in the horrid act, while others, who had been King’s judges or regicides, betrayed