Rump Parliament

“ You should give place to better men! You are no Parliament!" came from him in harsh and broken exclamations. "Call them in," he said, briefly, to Harrison.
At the word of command a troop of some thirty musketeers marched into the chamber. Grim fellows they were, dogs of war,—the men of the Rump could not face this argument; it was force arrayed against law,—or what called itself law,—wrong against wrong, for neither army nor Parliament truly represented the people, though just then the army seemed its most rightful representative. ”

“ Sometimes they wax eloquent, hoping that ‘justice may come down like a mighty stream, free for the poorest to resort unto, too strong for the richest to divert.’ The Rump parliament meanwhile, not, we may fairly suppose, considering its previous inaction, without pressure from Cromwell, showed great activity in appointing committees to consider grievances, and in pressing resolutions, which if carried out would have made English law more cheap, and English land more free, than it has ever been since. ”

“ What pinch of representative virtue, for the England, Scotland, and Ireland of May 1659, or even for the non-Royalist portions of their populations, was there in the Restored Rump? Many of them had not been in contact with their original constituencies for ten years or more; those who had gone back to their original constituencies, or to others, for election to the Protectorate Parliaments, or to any of them, had by that fact treated the rights of the Long Parliament, in its integrity or in its last stump, as lapsed and defunct, and had appealed to the community afresh. ”

“ After his death, and the deposition of his son Richard, the Rump Parliament was restored by Lambert and other officers of the army, on May 7, 1659, in number about forty-two, the excluded members not being permitted to sit. ”

“ The future of the constitutional Parliament, therefore, it seems to me, is a perpetual Whig Rump, which will yield to pressure when mere political reforms are attempted to be got out of it, but will be quite immovable towards any real change in social and economical matters ”

“ If the Parliament be thought well dissolved, as not complying fully to grant Liberty of Conscience, and the necessary consequence thereof, the Removal of a forced Maintenance from Ministers [Milton's own sole dissatisfaction with the Restored Rump] , then must the Army forthwith choose a Council of State, whereof as many to be of the Parliament as are undoubtedly affected to these two conditions proposed. ”

“ Now, my notion is, that every great measure can have only one real importance, by throwing weight into the scale of one or other of the two great Parliamentary parties. Do what you will,—agitate, write, speak, pamphleteer, and libel,—but all resolves itself to some question of a harm to one side and good to the other, the country the while being wonderfully little the better or the worse for all the legislation. We used to have a Constitution in England: we have now only got a Parliament, and to be anything in the nation a man must make himself felt there! ”

“ Speaking at a political meeting two days after the dissolution, Lord John Russell said that the electors in the approaching struggle were called on not merely to select the best men to defend their rights and interests, but also to give a plain answer to the question, put to the constituencies by the King in dissolving Parliament, Do you approve, aye or no, of the principle of Reform in the representation? ”

“ The greatest reform ever effected by peaceful means [80] in the history of any government was that of the parliamentary reform of Great Britain, by which the rotten boroughs were disfranchised, populous towns admitted to representation, the elective franchise extended, the House of Commons purified, and made the predominant branch—the master branch of the British government. And how was that great reform effected? By a few desultory exertions in the parliament itself? No, but by forty years of continued exertion, and by incessant appeals to the people themselves. ”

“ The opportunity which parliament affords to the young, the bustling, and the ambitious, of canvassing public, measures, is one of those salutary counterpoises which our constitution affords against the weight of the Executive Power. The Opposition in Britain is a sort of public body, which, in the practice at least of our government, is perfectly known and established. The province of this ex-official body, when it acts in a manner salutary to the state, is to watch with jealousy over the conduct of administration ”

“ Well then, the whole problem of people who want reform is, to bring enough political pressure to bear upon the government to lead them to initiate, to draft a bill, and introduce it in the first instance, into the House of Commons, force it through the House of Commons, press it through the House of Lords, and finally land it safely, having passed through the shoals and rapids of the parliamentary river, safely on the statute book as an Act of Parliament. ”

“ He saw that if either Crown or Parliament must go down, better for England that it should be the crown. He saw also, that the vital principle in Parliament lay in the House of Commons. If the King refused to act with them, it should be treated as an abdication, and Parliament must act without him, and if the Lords obstructed reform, then they must be told that the Commons must act alone, rather than let the Kingdom perish. ”

“ On the next affair, though of very little importance, seven tedious days were wasted in the House of Commons, besides a Debate in the Lords. Like other fuel for Opposition, the subject, when it had once passed into a Bill, was never remembered more. Every topic is treated in Parliament as if the liberty and fate of the country depended upon it: and even this solemnity, often vented on trifles, has its use. The certainty of discussion keeps Administration in awe, and preserves awake the attention of the representatives of the people. ”

“ I consider the reform of Parliament, by an application to Parliament, as proposed by the Society, to be a worn-out hackneyed subject, about which the nation is tired, and the parties are deceiving each other. It is not a subject that is cognizable before Parliament, because no Government has a right to alter itself, either in whole or in part. The right, and the exercise of that right, appertains to the nation only, and the proper means is by a national convention, elected for the purpose, by all the people. ”

“ Wherever the Sovereign, the Peers spiritual and temporal, and the Representatives freely chosen by the constituent bodies of the realm were met together, there was the essence of a Parliament. Such a Parliament was now in being; and what could be more absurd than to dissolve it at a conjuncture when every hour was precious, when numerous important subjects required immediate legislation, and when dangers, only to be averted by the combined efforts of King, Lords, and Commons, menaced the State? A Jacobite indeed might consistently refuse to recognise the Convention as a Parliament. ”

“ A trifling Bill, that opened some inconsiderable advantages to a corps of men, with whom we live, traffic, converse, could alarm the whole nation—it did more: a cabal of Ministers, who had insulted their master with impunity, who had betrayed every ally and party with success, and who had crammed down every Bill that was calculated for their own power, yielded to transitory noise, and submitted to fight under the banners of prophecy, in order to carry a few more members in another Parliament. ”

“ The levellers propose to subvert the King and parliamentary constitution by a rank and unqualified democracy—the friends of its abuses propose to support the King and buy the Parliament, and in the end to overset both, by a rank and avowed corruption. ”

“ When the unhappy Parliament, struggling with its cruel embarrassments, not knowing how to dissolve itself with safety, had brought down on it the impatience, the distrust, the contempt of men—when he had allowed its members to reap the full harvest of a people's jealousies and suspicions—when at length they were on the point of extricating themselves by a bill determining the mode of electing a successor—then he interfered, and dissolved them! ”

“ But to give them local assemblies which have no real power, and which are doomed to sit by and be the impotent spectators of 380 their own and their constituents' ruin, by the burgh-directed measures of the Imperial Parliament, is to mock them with a shadow of constitutional privileges which, in this age of intelligence, will not long be borne. ”

“ We have a plan which, for its originality, should draw down upon us the gratitude of the nation. It is no other than this: to make all Members of Parliament, for once in their lives at least, useful. The masons, hired to build the new temples of Parliament, have struck. The hard-handed ingrates,—let them go! We propose that, during the prorogation at least, Members of Parliament, should, like beavers, build their own Houses. In a word, every member elected to a seat in Parliament should be compelled, like Robinson Crusoe, to make his own furniture before he could sit down upon it. ”

“ The power of dissolving Parliament is one which I think it desirable he should possess, even under the system by which his own tenure of office is secured to him for a fixed period. There ought not to be any possibility of that deadlock in politics which would ensue on a quarrel breaking out between a president and an assembly, neither of whom, during an interval which might amount to years, would have any legal means of ridding itself of the other. ”

“ At present, if the Commons decidedly oppose that policy, the Prime Minister, with his Cabinet, either resigns, and a new Cabinet is chosen, or the Minister appeals to the people for support, and the sovereign dissolves Parliament and orders a new parliamentary election, by which the nation decides the question. ”

“ It was not, the haughty Cavalier said, his wish that the Parliament should withhold from the crown the means of carrying on the government. But was there indeed a Parliament? Were there not on the benches many men who had, as all the world knew, no right to sit there, many men whose elections were tainted by corruption, many men forced by intimidation on reluctant voters, and many men returned by corporations which had no legal existence? ”

“ It is only in the legislature that direct and immediate influence can be exercised over the principles and policy of the government. Until it can find expression there, no cause and no party can be said to be within the range of practical politics. Any change forced upon the nation by powers extraneous to Parliament would, if possible at all, be revolution, and not reform. ”

“ The presence, in short, at Westminster of eighty-six gentlemen who do not respect the dignity or care for the efficiency of Parliament is absolutely fatal to the success of Parliamentary government, and to the character of Parliamentary statesmanship. We must, it is inferred, let the Parnellites have a Parliament of their own in Ireland, or else we shall soon cease to have any Parliament worth keeping in England. ”

“ Parliament itself had lost much of its credit with the people by reason of its indecisive measures. It had forfeited their confidence, nor could the recall of Pitt to the helm of state restore it to their favour, or rescue the sovereign from the dilemma in which he had placed himself. Intractable at all times, from the opposition he had met with, and from ill health, he had become so imperious, that, like an old Roman consul, he would fain have yoked the people, the cabinet, and the monarch to his chariot-wheels. ”

“ Forster has remarked; it was "House of Commons tact." Sir Robert Peel, Lord John Russell, and Disraeli each understood that art of "managing Parliament," which is probably of far greater value to a Prime Minister than either virtue or eloquence. Lord Rockingham, George Grenville, and Lord Bute—the last uttering his words with hesitation and at long intervals, causing Charles Townshend to liken them to "minute-guns"—each lacked that power of oratory for which another Premier, Lord Derby, the "Rupert of debate," was more famous than for any intellectual ability. ”

“ And to dissolve a Parliament which is universally allowed to have been one of the best Parliaments that ever sat, which had acted liberally and respectfully towards the Sovereign, and which enjoyed in the highest degree the favour of the people, only in order to stop a grave, temperate, and constitutional inquiry into the personal integrity of the first judge in the kingdom, would have been a measure more scandalous and absurd than any of those which were the ruin of the House of Stuart. ”

“ When we see men who call themselves patriots and friends of liberty attacking the House of Commons, to what, Sir, can you and I, who are really friends of liberty, impute such pursuits, but to interest and disappointed ambition! When we see, on one hand, the prerogative of the Crown excited against Parliament, and on the other, the King and Royal Family traduced and insulted in the most shameless manner, can we believe such a faction is animated by honesty or love of the constitution? ”

“ But an agent far more effective than popular agitation was preparing to bring the force of public opinion to bear directly on Parliament itself. We have seen how much of the corruption of the House of Commons sprang from the secrecy of Parliamentary proceedings, but this secrecy was the harder to preserve as the nation woke to a greater interest in its own affairs. ”

“ In doing this, it merely recognizes the fact that a certain person is the candidate of the party whose general policy commands its support. In reality, the only thing which Parliament decides is, which of two, or at most three, parties or bodies of men shall furnish the executive government: the opinion of the party itself decides which of its members is fittest to be placed at the head. According to the existing practice of the British Constitution, these things seem to be on as good a footing as they can be. ”