Commonwealth. The Commonwealth took its origins from a vote by the Rump Parliament on 4 January 1649, four weeks after Pride's Purge, ‘That the people are, under God, the original of all just power’, and that they, the Commons, possessed supreme authority as the people's representatives. Two days later they set up the High Court of Justice which tried and sentenced Charles I. The abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords followed, and another brief Act on 19 May formally declared England to be a Commonwealth. From February, executive authority was vested in a Council of State, accountable to the Rump, elected annually by it, and drawn mainly from its own members. The army's general council of officers adopted and presented a written constitution called an Agreement of the People (the second such), after modifying parts of it; it provided for biennial single-chamber parliaments, elected on a broad franchise by radically reformed constituencies. But the Levellers, who were part-authors of the agreement and resented the officers' tampering with it, wrecked any chances of its acceptance by denouncing the Commonwealth as a new tyranny and raising a serious mutiny in the army. In face of this and other threats, including Scotland's proclamation of King Charles II, the Rump shelved the agreement and forgot its promises of early elections. Enlarged by many newly readmitted members who had held aloof from the act of regicide, it settled into a more prolonged and conservative regime than the army had ever envisaged. It fought shy of reforms that might add to the Commonwealth's already disturbing unpopularity and restricted religious toleration with a Blasphemy Act, though it repealed the laws which compelled attendance at parish worship.

The Commonwealth expanded to include Scotland and Ireland after the army's conquest of those countries. Its foreign policy became expansive too, and the Navigation Act of 1651, which challenged Dutch domination of the carrying trade, was one factor that led it into war with the United Provinces in 1652. This dismayed Cromwell, whose ideal was a united protestant interest in Europe. The Rump's materialist outlook and evident aversion to ‘a godly reformation’ brought it under increasing pressure from the army during 1652 to make way for a successor. Eventually it did introduce a bill for a new parliament to meet in November 1653, but its contents (which do not survive) left the army unsatisfied, and Cromwell in a rage expelled the Rump on 20 April. The brief experiment of a nominated assembly (‘Barebone's Parliament’, July–December 1653) ended in its own abdication, and on 16 December the Commonwealth gave way to the Cromwellian Protectorate.

It was briefly restored in May 1659, after a coup by the army against Richard Cromwell, but renewed quarrels between the officers and the Rumpers soon exposed the political bankruptcy of both. Republicanism had struck few roots in England, and General Monck was enthusiastically acclaimed when he opened the way to the Restoration by readmitting the members ‘secluded’ in Pride's Purge on 21 February 1660.

Austin Woolrych