“Ye have no more religion than my horse!”
On the 20th April 1653, Cromwell dismissed the Rump Parliament and locked the doors of the Commons. Before doing so, he angrily berated the MPs, marching up and down the chamber in a bate. The apocryphal report of his diatribe, written some good 70 years later, goes like this:
It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt for all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage… Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your god; which of you have not bartered your conscience for bribes?… Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; ye were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, and are yourselves gone… In the name of God, go!
And there are variations of the same. But we love it because it is such a great piece of rhetoric: powerful, insulting and amusing. More than this, one can apply it to the Commons at virtually any point in history since.
There is a good article on the accuracy of both the quote and accounts of the dissolution here.
I am not sure whether this part of his speech was correct: “Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation”. It wasn’t the Parliament’s fault that it had been decimated in numbers and gutted of its effectiveness.
Who knows if he even said it, but paraphrasing, that was firmly implied if he did not use the actual words, one suspects. This version excludes his referring to the mace as nothing but a bauble, which is mentioned in other accounts.
Thanks for the link – am a long-time reader of this blog so it’s nice to see my name in lights!