_Commonwealth_--_Abolition of the monarchy, and of the house of lords._--The death of Charles the First was pressed forward rather through personal hatred and superstition, than out of any notion of its necessity to secure a republican administration. That party was still so weak, that the Commons came more slowly, and with more difference of judgment than might be expected, to an absolute renunciation of monarchy. They voted indeed that the people are, under God, the original of all just power; and that whatever is enacted by the Commons in parliament hath the force of law, although the consent and concurrence of the king or House of Peers be not had thereto; terms manifestly not exclusive of the nominal continuance of the two latter. They altered the public style from the king's name to that of the parliament, and gave other indications of their intentions; but the vote for the abolition of monarchy did not pass till the seventh of February, after a debate, according to Whitelock, but without a division. None of that clamorous fanaticism showed itself, which, within recent memory, produced, from a far more numerous assembly, an instantaneous decision against monarchy. Wise men might easily perceive that the regal power was only suspended through the force of circumstances, not abrogated by any real change in public opinion. The House of Lords, still less able than the Crown to withstand the inroads of democracy, fell by a vote of the Commons at the same time. It had continued during the whole progress of the war to keep up as much dignity as the state of affairs would permit; tenacious of small privileges, and offering much temporary opposition in higher matters, though always receding in the end from a contention wherein it could not be successful. The Commons, in return, gave them respectful language, and discountenanced the rude innovators who talked against the rights of the peerage. They voted, on occasion of some rumours, that they held themselves obliged, by the fundamental laws of the kingdom and their covenant, to preserve the peerage with the rights and privileges belonging to the House of Peers, equally with their own.[387] Yet this was with a secret reserve that the Lords should be of the same mind as themselves. For, the upper house having resented some words dropped from Sir John Evelyn at a conference concerning the removal of the king to Warwick Castle, importing that the Commons might be compelled to act without them, the Commons vindicating their member as if his words did not bear that interpretation, yet added, in the same breath, a plain hint that it was not beyond their own views of what might be done; "hoping that their lordships did not intend by their inference upon the words, even in the sense they took the same, so to bind up this house to one way of proceeding as that in no case whatsoever, though never so extraordinary, though never so much importing the honour and interest of the kingdom, the Commons of