And let God be judge between you and me!"[1] [Footnote 1: Commons Journals of dates; and Carlyle, III.

348-353.] Thus, after a second session of only sixteen days, the Second Parliament of the Protectorate was at an end.

Cromwell's explanation of his reasons for dissolving it is perfectly accurate.

Through the first session the Parliament, as a Single House Parliament, had, by the exclusion of about ninety of those returned to it, been a thoroughly Oliverian body, and its chief work had been a reconstitution of the Protectorate on a definite basis; but through the second session this Parliament, though nominally the same, had been split into two Houses, the House of Lords wholly Oliverian, but the House of Commons, by the loss of a number of its former members and the readmission of the excluded, turned into an Anti-Oliverian conclave.

Fourteen folio pages of the _Commons Journals_ are the only remaining formal records of the short and unfortunate Session.