This long stretch of twenty months was to be another period of the government of the Commonwealth by the Lord Protector and the Council of State on their own responsibility and without a Parliament. In the circumstances in which the late Parliament had left them, without supplies and without a single concluded and authoritative enactment, they could only fall back on the original Instrument of the Protectorate, amending its defects by their own ingenuity as exigencies occurred, with a suggestion now and then snatched, for the sake of quasi-Parliamentary countenance, from the wreck of the late Constitutional Bill. Hence a character of "arbitrariness" in Cromwell's government throughout this period greater perhaps than in any other of his whole Protectorate. For that, however, he was prepared. At the first meeting of the Council after the Dissolution of Parliament (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 1654-5) there were present, I find, His Highness himself, and thirteen out of the eighteen Councillors, viz.: Lord President Lawrence, the Earl of Mulgrave, Viscount Lisle, Lambert, Desborough, Fiennes, Montague, Sydenham, Strickland, Sir Charles Wolseley, Skippon, Jones, and Rous; and it was then "ordered by his Highness and the Council that Friday next be set apart for their seeking of God, and that Mr. Lockyer, Mr. Caryl, Mr. Denn, and Mr. Sterry, be desired then to give their assistance." In entering on the new period of their Government, the Protector and the Council thought a day of special prayer very fitting.[1] [Footnote 1 Council Order Book of date.--Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, having shown Anti-Oliverian tendencies in the late Parliament, did not reappear in the Council after the Dissolution, and had virtually ceased to be a member. Colonel Mackworth had died Dec. 26, 1654. The three other members not present at the meeting of Jan. 23, 1664-5 were Fleetwood, Sir Gilbert Pickering, and Richard Mayor. Fleetwood was in Ireland; Pickering's absence was accidental, and he was in his place very regularly afterwards; Mayor did not attend steadily.]