After the battle of Worcester, the authority of the Commonwealth was supreme throughout the British Islands. This authority as yet reposed, wholly in form, largely in substance, with the remnant of the Long Parliament. This remnant, derisively called the “rump,” differed as widely in power and capacity from the Parliament led by Pym and Hampden, as the Continental Congress that saw the outgoing of the Revolutionary War differed from that which saw its incoming. Defections and purgings, exclusions first of whole-hearted Episcopalian Royalists and then of half-hearted Presbyterian Royalists, had reduced it to being but the representative of a faction. It had submitted to the supremacy of the army by submitting to the exclusion of those members to whom the army objected. Then it had worked for some time hand in hand with the army; but, now that war was over, the Parliamentary representatives or the Independents feared more and more the supremacy of the military, or Cromwellian, wing of their party. It was the army, and not the Parliament, that had won the fight; that had killed one king, and driven another, his son, into exile; that had subdued Scotland and Ireland, and stamped out the last vestige of Royalist resistance in England. Yet it was the Parliament, and not the army, which in theory was to fall heir to the royal power. Moreover, Parliament, thanks to its past history, had become as little as the army the legal embodiment of the power of England; and what was more important, there was even less general acceptance of it as the proper representative of power, than there was general acceptance of the army. The army, even where hated, was feared and respected; the Parliament was beginning to excite no emotion save an angry contempt. There were men of honor, of note, and of ability still left in the Parliament; but its vital force was dying. Conscious of its own weakness before the people, the Parliament was most reluctant to face a dissolution; most eager to devise means by which its rule could be perpetuated. The army, no less conscious of the hostility felt for it by the Parliament, was just as determined that there should be a dissolution and an election of a new Parliament. In the approaching conflict the army had an immense advantage, for, while the Parliament was losing its grip upon the Independents, without in any way attracting strength from the Royalists, the great mass of the Independents still firmly regarded Cromwell as their especial champion. [Illustration: Obverse—arms of Cromwell. Reverse—representation of Oliver Cromwell on horseback. Seal of the Protectorate. From an impression in wax in the British Museum. ]