ommanders, DEAN and MONK, fought him three whole days, took twenty-three
of his ships, shivered his broom to pieces, and settled his business.

Things were no sooner quiet again, than the army began to complain to the
Parliament that they were not governing the nation properly, and to hint
that they thought they could do it better themselves. Oliver, who had
now made up his mind to be the head of the state, or nothing at all,
supported them in this, and called a meeting of officers and his own
Parliamentary friends, at his lodgings in Whitehall, to consider the best
way of getting rid of the Parliament. It had now lasted just as many
years as the King's unbridled power had lasted, before it came into
existence. The end of the deliberation was, that Oliver went down to the
House in his usual plain black dress, with his usual grey worsted
stockings, but with an unusual party of soldiers behind him. These last
he left in the lobby, and then went in and sat down. Presently he got
up, made the Parliament a speech, told them that the Lord had done with
them, stamped his foot and said, 'You are no Parliament. Bring them in!
Bring them in!' At this signal the door flew open, and the soldiers
appeared. 'This is not honest,' said Sir Harry Vane, one of the members.
'Sir Harry Vane!' cried Cromwell; 'O, Sir Harry Vane! The Lord deliver
me from Sir Harry Vane!' Then he pointed out members one by one, and
said this man was a drunkard, and that man a dissipated fellow, and that
man a liar, and so on. Then he caused the Speaker to be walked out of
his chair, told the guard to clear the House, called the mace upon the
table--which is a sign that the House is sitting--'a fool's bauble,' and
said, 'here, carry it away!' Being obeyed in all these orders, he
quietly locked the door, put the key in his pocket, walked back to
Whitehall again, and told his friends, who were still assembled there,
what he had done.

They formed a new Council of State after this extraordinary proceeding,
and got a new Parliament together in their own way: which Oliver himself
opened in a sort of sermon, and which he said was the beginning of a
perfect heaven upon earth. In this Parliament there sat a well-known
leather-seller, who had taken the singular name of Praise God Barebones,
and from whom it was called, for a joke, Barebones's Parliament, though
its general name was the Little Parliament. As it soon appeared that it
was not going to put Ol