Bradshaw acted as President of the Council of State in 1651, and again in the year following. So far his success had been uninterrupted, and as the supreme magistrate his power and influence was second only to that of Cromwell himself. His authority was almost absolute. The amiable Evelyn, in his diary, records that he could not witness the burial of Dorislaus, “the villain,” as he writes, “who manag’d the trial against his sacred Majesty,” until “I got a passe from the rebell Bradshaw, then in great power;” and again, when he went to Paris with only “an antiquated passe, it being so difficult to procure one of the rebells without entering into oathes, which I never would do,” and he had to bribe the officials at Dover, he found “money to the searchers and officers was as authentiq as the hand and seale of Bradshawe himselfe,” “where,” he adds, “I had not so much as my trunk open’d.” The very rapidity with which Bradshaw had attained to power made him a formidable competitor with, if not indeed a dangerous rival to, the man in whose goodwill he had said it was his “desyred contentment” “to be reteyned and preserved;” and there can be little doubt that his boldness and unflinching adherence to the principles he had espoused brought about his own undoing, for it was not long before an incident occurred which for ever alienated Cromwell’s friendship from him. The occasion was one memorable in the annals of England—the dissolution of the Long Parliament, on the 20th April, 1653. Finding the action of the “Rump,” as it was called, inimical to his designs, Cromwell, who seems to have begun to think that government by a single person was desirable, went down to Westminster with a force of 300 men, broke up the House, expelled the members, and, pointing to the mace, directed Col. Worsley—Manchester’s first Parliamentary representative—to “take away that bauble,” which having been done, he ordered the doors to be locked, and then returned to his lodgings at Whitehall. And so, without a struggle or a groan, unpitied and unregretted, the Long Parliament, which for 12 years had under a variety of forms alternately defended and invaded the liberties of the nation, fell by the parricidal hands of its own children. Bradshaw, refusing to submit in silence to such a daring infringement of the liberties of Parliament, resolved upon taking his place as head of the Council of State the same afternoon, thinking, probably, that his presence might deter Cromwell from committing any further acts of violence; but the Lord General was not to be so easily diverted from his purpose. Taking Lambert and Major-General Harrison with him, he proceeded to the Council, and expelled its members in the same abrupt and arbitrary manner that he had dismissed the Commons. Addressing Bradshaw and those assembled with him, he said,—