What then stepped in to take its place?
A small body, effectively about eighty strong at the utmost, having no pretence of representing the community at that time, or of being anything else than the casual surviving rag of a Parliament of 500, the members of which had been elected at various times, and irregularly, between 1640 and 1649.
Nay, it was not even the surviving rag of that Parliament itself, but the rag of a stump to which that Parliament had been already reduced in 1649 by prior military hacking and carving.

What pinch of representative virtue, for the England, Scotland, and Ireland of May 1659, or even for the non-Royalist portions of their populations, was there in the Restored Rump?
Many of them had not been in contact with their original constituencies for ten years or more; those who had gone back to their original constituencies, or to others, for election to the Protectorate Parliaments, or to any of them, had by that fact treated the rights of the Long Parliament, in its integrity or in its last stump, as lapsed and defunct, and had appealed to the community afresh.

When that appeal had gone against them, when the last and fullest Parliament had represented it as the will of the people that the Protectoral system should be continued, was it not odd that about forty of the defeated minority of that Parliament, without consulting their constituencies, should associate themselves with a number of others, then quite astray from any constituencies, and with no other title than that of being Old Rumpers too, and this for the purpose of instituting the very form of Government just ascertained to be unpopular?
It was odd _theoretically_; for, though there were then Republicans--Milton for one--who had adopted the principle (essentially Cromwell's too) that the government of States cannot and ought not to go by mere multitudinous suffrage, but may be dictated and compelled by the proper few, the Rumpers did not profess to be Republicans of this sort.

The supremacy of the People through a Single Representative House was the deepest theoretical tenet of most of the men who had now met to oppose the will of the People as declared in the fullest Representative House within memory.
But, though odd theoretically, the contradiction is of a kind common enough in History.

The ultra-Republicans of the Restored Rump, whose very definition of the right Republican system was that there ought to be nothing in it _a priori_ whatever, were yet believers in the indefeasible and _a priori_ authority of that Republican system itself.