Oliver Cromwell's Speech Dissolving the Rump Parliament, 1653

The Rump Parliament was the English Parliament after Colonel Thomas Pride commanded soldiers to purge the Long Parliament, on 6 December 1648, of those members hostile to the Grandees' intention to try King Charles I for high treason.

"Rump" normally means the hind end or backside of a mammal; its use meaning "remnant" was first recorded in the above context in English in 1649.

In 1653, after learning that Parliament was attempting to stay in session despite an agreement to dissolve, and having failed to come up with a working constitution, Cromwell's patience ran out. On 20 April he attended a sitting of Parliament and listened to one or two speeches. Then he stood up and harangued the members of the Rump.  This speech does not survive, but has often been paraphrased, for instance in the Book of Days: "You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!" He then declared "you are no Parliament" and called in a troop of soldiers, under the command of Major-General Thomas Harrison, ordering them to clear the chamber. According to Charles Dickens in A Child's History of England and Hilaire Belloc, he then turned to the Speaker's Mace, the symbol of parliamentary power, declared it a "fool's bauble", and ordered the troops "here, carry it away".  Cromwell's motives are uncertain, but may lie in his disapproval of Sir Henry Vane's scheme for a redistribution of constituencies that retained sitting members of Parliament and continued to fill vacancies with recruiter elections.

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