Editing The Protectorate (section)

==Background==
{{main|Commonwealth of England|English Council of State}}
Since 1649 until the Protectorate, England, Ireland and later Scotland had been governed as a [[republic]] by the [[English Council of State|Council of State]] and the [[Rump Parliament]]. The [[wikisource:An Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth|Act declaring England to be a Commonwealth]], which established England, together with "''all the Dominions and Territoryes thereunto belonging''", as a republic, had been passed on 19 May 1649, following the [[High Court of Justice for the trial of Charles I|trial]] and [[execution of Charles I]] in January of that year. All of Ireland came under the same governance after the successful [[Cromwellian conquest of Ireland]] with the appointment of a Parliamentary military governor in Dublin.

On 20 April 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, with the backing of the [[Grandee (New Model Army)|Grandee]]s in the [[Army Council (1647)|Army Council]], marched soldiers into the debating chamber and forcibly ended the Rump's session.

Within a month of the Rump's dismissal, Oliver Cromwell, on the advice of [[Thomas Harrison (soldier)|Thomas Harrison]] and with the support of other officers in the Army, sent a request to Congregational churches in every county to nominate those they considered fit to take part in the new government. On 4 July a Nominated Assembly, nicknamed the "Assembly of Saints" or [[Barebone's Parliament]]  after one of its members, took on the role of more traditional English Parliaments. However, it proved just as difficult for the Grandees to control and was in addition a subject of popular ridicule and so on 8 December, MPs who supported Cromwell engineered its end by passing a dissolution motion at a time of day at which the house usually had few members in attendance. Those who refused to recognise the motion were forcibly ejected by soldiers.

The collapse of the radical consensus that had spawned the Nominated Assembly led to the Grandees passing the [[Instrument of Government]] in the [[English Council of State|Council of State]], which paved the way for the Protectorate.