an
alive." They did not want, they said, to pull down the Protectorate;
they only objected to Thurloe's high-handed method for committing the
House to a foregone conclusion. But Thurloe beat. On Monday the 14th,
the question having been finally put "that it be part of this Bill to
recognise and declare his Highness Richard, Lord Protector, to be the
undoubted Lord Protector and Chief Magistrate," it was carried by 191
votes to 168 to retain the words "recognise and," and so to accept
Richard's accession as valid already. On a proposal to leave out the
word "undoubted" Thurloe did not think a division worth while, but
made the concession. He did oppose a resolution, suddenly brought
forward, to the effect that the vote just passed should not be
binding until the House should have settled the clauses farther
defining the powers of the Lord Protector; but that resolution,
having caught the fancy of the House, passed with his single dissent.
On the whole, he had succeeded in his first great battle with the
Republicans.--Nor was he less successful in the second. The
Protectorship having been voted, it was Thurloe's policy to push next
the question of the recognition of the Other House, whereas the
Republicans desired to avoid that question as long as possible, so as
to keep the Other House a mere nonentity, while the Commons
proceeded, as the substantial and sovereign House, to define the
powers of the Protector. On the 18th of February, the Republicans,
having challenged a settlement of this difference by moving that the
question of the negative voice of the Protector in passing laws
should have precedence of the question of the Other House, were
beaten overwhelmingly by 217 votes to 86; and then for more than a
month the question of the Other House was the all-engrossing one. It
involved other questions, some of them apparently independent. Thus,
on the 8th of March, the debate took a curiously significant turn.
Indignant at the very notion that there should be anything in England
calling itself "The House of Lords," the Republican speakers had
played on this supposed horror with every variety of sarcasm,
sneering at the existing "Other House," with its shabby equipment of
old colonels and other originally mean persons. If there was to be a
House of Lords, Hasilrig and others now said imprudently, why should
it not be a real one, why should not the old nobility, so many of
them honourable men, resume their places? "Why not