On the other hand, many members of Parliament protested that they would stand by him, that if he allowed the army to suppress Parliament, he would find it immediately his own master, and would be left without a friend. Ingoldsby, Goffe, and Whalley supported this view, and one of them offered to go and kill Lambert, who was the originator of all the mischief. Richard called a council to consider the proposition. Whitelock represented the danger of dissolving Parliament, and leaving himself at the mercy of the army; but Thurloe, Lord Broghill, Fiennes, and Wolseley declared there was no alternative, for if the army and Parliament came to strife, the Cavaliers would rise and bring in Charles. Richard reluctantly gave way, and on the 22nd of April he signed a commission empowering Fiennes, the Keeper of the Seal, to dissolve Parliament. Fiennes summoned the Commons to the Upper House by the Usher of the Black Rod, but they shut the door in the face of that officer, and refused to obey, adjourning themselves for three days. Fiennes, however, declared Parliament dissolved, the Commons having been duly summoned to witness it, and a proclamation was issued to that effect. The warning of Whitelock was at once verified; the moment that the Parliament ceased, all regard to Richard by the army ceased with it. From that moment he was deserted except by a small knot of officers--Goffe, Whalley, and Ingoldsby,--and he was as completely annihilated as Protector as if all parties had deposed him by assent and proclamation. The council of officers proceeded to take measures for the exercise of the supreme power. They placed guards to prevent the adjourned Commons from re-taking their seats at Westminster as they proposed, and by their own authority dismissed Ingoldsby, Goffe, Whalley, and the other officers who had adhered to Richard, from their commands in the army, and restored Lambert and all the others who had been cashiered by Oliver. Having thus restored the Republicanism of the army, they determined to recall the Rump, as a body which they believed they could command; and they accordingly issued an order for the reassembling of the House of Commons which Oliver had so unceremoniously dismissed on the 20th of April, 1653. At this call, Lenthall, the old Speaker of the Rump, with about forty or fifty members of the Rump, hastened the next day to Westminster, where Lambert kept guard with the troops, and after some discussion in the Painted Chamber, they went in a body to the House through two files of Lambert's soldiers, and took their places as a real Parliament. But their claim to this exclusive right was immediately disputed. The same day, the 7th of May, a large number of the members who had been excluded by Pride's purge, in 1648, of whom one hundred and ninety-four were still alive, and eighty of them residing in the capital, assembled in Westminster Hall, and sent up to the House a deputation