Gentlemen, if you are met here as private persons, you shall not be disturbed; but if as a Council of State, this is no place for you; and, since you cannot but know what was done at the House in the morning, so take notice that the Parliament is dissolved. To which Bradshaw replied,— Sir, we have heard what you did at the House in the morning, and before many hours all England will hear. But, sir, you are mistaken to think that Parliament is dissolved, for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore, take you notice of that. The President’s spirited reply cost him Cromwell’s friendship, who, though he continued to treat him with the outward manifestations of respect, ever afterwards regarded him with feelings of distrust. Exasperated though he was, Cromwell must have felt the justice of the rebuke, for in a conference afterwards with his brother-in-law, Desborough, he remarked that his work in clearing the House was not complete until he had got rid of the Council of State, which, he said, “I did in spite of the objection of honest Bradshaw, the President.” The Republican leaders, indignant at the forcible expulsion of the Rump Parliament, denounced it as an illegal act, which undoubtedly it was, but Cromwell was not the man to be bound by the ordinary laws of constitutional liberty. The miserable remnant of the Parliament, it must be admitted, had become a reproach; it had become supreme through similar unconstitutional violence, and was itself violating its own contract in refusing to vote its own dissolution. The spirit manifested by Bradshaw has been likened to that of an ancient Roman; but whether in the resistance he offered he was influenced by purely patriotic and disinterested motives may be very well questioned, for it must not be forgotten that he had looked with complacency on the illegal and high-handed proceeding which had laid the Parliament at the feet of the army, when that sharp medicine, “Pride’s Purge,” was administered—an act of daring violence by virtue of which alone he held his office and had acquired his wealth.