er, and, once
met, it could not be prorogued or dissolved for five months. Laws could
not be made nor taxes imposed but by its authority, and after the lapse
of twenty days the statutes it passed became laws, even though the
Protector's assent was refused to them. The new Constitution was
undoubtedly popular; and the promise of a real Parliament in a few
months covered the want of any legal character in the new rule. The
Government was generally accepted as a provisional one, which could only
acquire legal authority from the ratification of its acts in the coming
session; and the desire to settle it on such a Parliamentary basis was
universal among the members of the new Assembly which met in September
1654 at Westminster.

[Sidenote: The Parliament of 1654.]

Few Parliaments have ever been more memorable, or more truly
representative of the English people, than the Parliament of 1654. It
was the first Parliament in our history where members from Scotland and
Ireland sate side by side with those from England, as they sit in the
Parliament of to-day. The members for rotten boroughs and
pocket-boroughs had disappeared. In spite of the exclusion of Royalists
and Catholics from the polling-booths, and the arbitrary erasure of the
names of a few ultra-republican members by the Council, the House had a
better title to the name of a "free Parliament" than any which had sat
before. The freedom with which the electors had exercised their right of
voting was seen indeed in the large number of Presbyterian members who
were returned, and in the reappearance of Haselrig and Bradshaw, with
many members of the Long Parliament, side by side with Lord Herbert and
the older Sir Harry Vane. The first business of the House was clearly
to consider the question of government; and Haselrig, with the fiercer
republicans, at once denied the legal existence of either Council or
Protector, on the ground that the Long Parliament had never been
dissolved. Such an argument however told as much against the Parliament
in which they sate as against the administration itself, and the bulk of
the Assembly contented themselves with declining to recognize the
Constitution or Protectorate as of more than provisional validity. They
proceeded at once to settle the government on a Parliamentary basis. The
"Instrument" was taken as the groundwork of the new Constitution, and
carried clause by clause. That Cromwell should retain his rule as
Protector was unani