The Levellers were contemned, and condemned, by both King and Parliament. The King proceeded to condemn himself by raising a second civil war, and the Parliament, which had legislated itself into eternal life as early as 1641, was sent packing by the Lord-General Oliver Cromwell in April 1653. As the Lord-General himself put it on that celebrated occasion, ‘Not a dog barked’. From the day when he returned from his expeditions to subdue the Irish and the Scots, stained with the blood of Drogheda and crowned with the laurels of Dunbar and Worcester, to lay the subjugated realms at the feet of the Commons, it was unlikely that the Tudor country squire would go back to Huntingdon and plant the bergamot. He and his troopers were the sole effective power in the state. From the day when he turned out the Rump, as the remnant of the Long Parliament was called, he was acclaimed as ‘brave Oliver’, for the people of England were very like the man they acclaimed: they scarcely knew what they wanted, but they knew very well that they hated the selfish Presbyterian oligarchy which had come to dominate the Long Parliament, and which behaved not a whit less oppressively than the Laudian bishops or the priests of Rome.