it by bursting into the House of Lords at
the same time that the secluded members took their seats in the
Commons. Monk's soldiers had, by instructions, prevented that; and,
with the full consent of all the older and wiser peers at hand, the
management of the crisis had been left to the one reconstituted
House. The anomaly, however, had been a subject of serious discussion
in that House. On the one hand, they could not pass a vote for the
restitution of the House of Peers without trenching on that very
question of the future form of Government which they had resolved not
to meddle with. On the other hand, absolute silence on the matter was
impossible. How could the present single House, for example, even if
its other acts were held valid, venture on, an Act for the
dissolution of that Long Parliament whose peculiar privilege, wrung
from Charles I. in May 1641, was that it should never be dissolved
except by its own consent, i.e. by the joint-consent of the two
component Houses? Yet this was the very thing--that had to be done
before way could be made for the coming Parliament. The course
actually taken was perhaps the only one that the circumstances
permitted. When the House, at their last sitting, on Friday, March
16, did pass the Act dissolving itself and-calling the new
Parliament, it incorporated with the Act a proviso in these words:
"Provided always, and be it declared, that the single actings of this
House, enforced by the pressing necessities of the present times, are
not intended in the least to infringe, much less take away, the
ancient native right which the House of Peers, consisting of those
Lords who did engage in the cause of the Parliament against the
forces raised in the name of the late King, and so continued until
1648, had and have to be a part of the Parliament of England." Here
again there was not positive prejudgment so much as the removal of an
obstacle.--It did seem, however, as if the House would not separate
without passing the bounds it had prescribed for itself. It had
already been debated in whose name the writs for the new Parliament
should issue? "In King Charles's" had been the answer of the
undaunted Prynne. He had been overruled, and the arrangement was that
the writs should issue, as under a Commonwealth, "in the name of the
Keepers of the Liberties of England." At the last sitting of the
House, just as the vote for the dissolution was being put, the
Presbyterian Mr. Crewe, provoked