APPENDIX G 593 present Parliament." It appears, therefore, that Cromwell's " Lordlings " did at length obtain some sort of recognition from the House of Commons, although it came too late to save the situation. The same resolution contained a proviso " that it is not hereby intended to exclude such Peers as have been faithful to the Parliament from the Privilege of being duly summoned to be members of that House." If Richard Cromwell had adopted this suggestion, and if the Peers in question had accepted seats in the " Other House," their inclusion would undoubtedly have strengthened that moribund assembly, and might even have enabled Richard to defy the Wallingford House party who were already plotting his downfall. But it was not to be. On the 2 1st of April the Protector was induced by Fleetwood and Disbrowe (against the advice of Whitelocke and his other friends) to dissolve his first and only Parliament, and, on the following dav, " a Proclamation issued to declare it dissolved, which caused much trouble in the minds of many honest men; the Cavaliers and Republicans rejoiced This was the end of Cromwell's constitutional experiment, and the Cavaliers had good reason to rejoice. For within little more than a twelvemonth the Restoration was an accomplished fact, and the Peers of England had obtained a renewal of their charter for another 250 years. The problem which Oliver Cromwell failed to solve has more than an antiquarian interest for us to-day.C") Some of our greatest statesmen, during the last twenty years, have advocated the complete remodelling of our Constitution together with the reform of the House of Lords. We have been told that an hereditary Second Chamber is an anachronism in a democratic State. And now that Democracy has "arrived" it is evident that the work of restoration can no longer be postponed, if any portion of the original edifice is to be preserved. But although the necessity of some measure of reform is generally admitted, it is to be hoped that our modern Cromwells will remember the advice and take warning by the failure ot the great Protector. And it is no less important now than it was in the last days of the Commonwealth for the people of England to maintain the safeguards of their ancient Constitution, if they would not again be subjected to " the horridest arbitrariness that ever was exercised in the world," i.e. Single Chamber government. (") Whitelocke's Memorials, p. 677. () " Abortive though all these schemes were, they have more than a merely antiquarian interest. All sprang from the same feeling, and testify to its strength and permanence. Nearly twenty years of revolution had taught the practical politicians of the army that the government of a great nation could not safely be entrusted to the uncontrolled will of a single popular assembly; it was necessary, they held, that its omnipotence should be limited either by a written Constitution or a Second Chamber. This conviction was at once the explanation and the justification of Cromwell's constitutional experiment." (C. H. Firth's Cromwell and the House of Lords, p. 240). 75
