How Cromwell wished this act to be regarded, and how he regarded it himself, he showed plainly a few weeks afterwards, when some aldermen and sheriffs from town and country requested him to summon Parliament again. The King, he told them, was not beheaded because he was King, nor the House of Lords abolished because they were Lords; and in the same way Parliament was not dissolved because it was a Parliament, but all this had befallen them because they did not perform their trust. The acts he was speaking of were, he continued, the acts of the army. It was the army that had brought to pass the abolition of the Lords, the execution of the King, and had now dissolved Parliament. What power had it to do this? No other than that which victory gave them. The ruling idea in the army was the one so often mentioned, that God, by the victories which he had granted them, and the power which had thus been put into their hands, had made them responsible for the welfare of the country, and laid upon them the duty not to bear with anything that was contrary to the interest of the people of God.