ABSTRACT
On 20 April 1653 the purged remnant of the Parliament which had first sat in November 1641 was dispersed. The first commonwealth government which had replaced the monarchy was brought to an abrupt end when the commander of the army, Oliver Cromwell, and a handful of soldiers entered Westminster and expelled the MPs. For some months Parliament with slow deliberation had been constructing the framework for a new Parliament to replace itself. It had decided the date of its own demise: 3 November 1653, thirteen years since the Long Parliament had first assembled. The slowness in setting the terms of the new elections frustrated the army. Cromwell held the army back from expelling Parliament until he too tired of the painful process.1 The Commonwealth itself continued for another eight months during which a nominated assembly called the Little or Barebone’s Parliament met.2 When this assembly, the first at Westminster to incorporate MPs from Ireland and Scotland, dissolved itself the Commonwealth ended. The dissolution on 12 December was engineered by radical MPs from the army angered by Parliament’s failure to deal effectively with army finances and the war with the Dutch which had begun in May 1652. The coup was well prepared and the MPs had a new constitution to hand. The Instrument of Government was largely the work of General John Lambert, and based in part on the work of the rump of the Long Parliament, but also on the 1647 Heads of the Proposals and even the Leveller’s Agreement of the People. It established the Protectorate. From 15 December, when the constitution was accepted, the Republic of the four nations was governed by a lord protector and a Council of State assisted by elected parliaments. On 16 December Oliver Cromwell was appointed lord protector, a title given in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to caretaker managers of the kingdom during the minority or other enforced absence of the monarch. This strangely temporary sounding title was, Gerald Aylmer suspects, a prelude to the offer of the crown to the office’s incumbent.
