22, by a majority of 125 to twenty-nine, to refer the excluded to the Council itself for any farther satisfaction they wanted, and meanwhile "to proceed with the great affairs of the nation." The House, _without_ the excluded, it will be seen, was decidedly Oliverian in the main.

The excluded, or some of them, took their revenge by printing and distributing a Protest or Remonstrance addressed to the Nation, with the names of all the ninety-three attached, those of Hasilrig and Scott first.

It was a document of extreme vehemence, denouncing the Protector as an armed tyrant and all who had abetted him in his last act as capital enemies to the Commonwealth, and disowning beforehand, as null and void, all that the truncated Parliament might do.

Cromwell took no notice whatever of this Remonstrance.

By one more stroke of "arbitrariness," bolder than any before, but allowed, he might plead, by the Instrument of his Protectorate, he had fashioned for himself a Second Parliament, likely to be more to his mind than his First.[1] [Footnote 1: Commons Journals, Sept, 18-22, 1656; Whitlocke, IV.
274-280 (where the Remonstrance of the Excluded is given in full); Ludlow, 579-580.] So it proved.