in Chancery, for the first three Parliaments of the Protectorate, to report to the Council what persons had been returned, and empowered the Council to admit those duly qualified and to exclude others, and also that, by another clause in the same Instrument (Art.  XVII.), it was required that the persons elected should be “of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation.”  All which being undeniable, it was resolved by the House, after debate, Sept. 22, by a majority of 125 to twenty-nine, to refer the excluded to the Council itself for any farther satisfaction they wanted, and meanwhile “to proceed with the great affairs of the nation.”  The House, without the excluded, it will be seen, was decidedly Oliverian in the main.  The excluded, or some of them, took their revenge by printing and distributing a Protest or Remonstrance addressed to the Nation, with the names of all the ninety-three attached, those of Hasilrig and Scott first.  It was a document of extreme vehemence, denouncing the Protector as an armed tyrant and all who had abetted him in his last act as capital enemies to the Commonwealth, and disowning beforehand, as null and void, all that the truncated Parliament might do.  Cromwell took no notice whatever of this Remonstrance.  By one more stroke of “arbitrariness,” bolder than any before, but allowed, he might plead, by the Instrument of his Protectorate, he had fashioned for himself a Second Parliament, likely to be more to his mind than his First.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Commons Journals, Sept, 18-22, 1656; Whitlocke, IV. 274-280 (where the Remonstrance of the Excluded is given in full); Ludlow, 579-580.]

So it proved.  Some of the excluded having been admitted after all, and new elections having been made in cases where members had been returned by two or more constituencies, the House went on for the first five months (Sept. 1656-Feb. 1656-7) with a pretty steady working attendance of about 220 at the maximum—­which implies that, besides the excluded, there must have been a large number of absentees or very lax attenders.  During these five months a large amount of miscellaneous business was done, with occasional divisions, but no vital disagreement within the House, or between it and the Protector.  There was an Act for renouncing and disavowing Charles II, over again, and an Act for the safety of the Lord Protector’s person and government, both made law, by Cromwell’s assent, Oct. 27.  There was a vote of approbation of the war with Spain, with votes of means for carrying it on.  There were Bills, more formal than before, for adjusting and completing the incorporation of Scotland and Ireland with the Commonwealth.  There were Committees of all sorts for maturing these and other Bills.  Among the grand Committees was one for Religion.  There were votes of reward to various persons for past services.  The better observance of the Lord’s Day was one of the subjects of discussion.  Amid the minor or more private business