234	Oliver Cromwell	[1649
War had made necessary. The Council of State was neither a senate nor a cabinet; it possessed no power either to balance or to control the Parliament, but was only an annually elected committee, to which the Parliament had entrusted executive and administrative duties. Of the forty-one persons composing it, all but ten were members of the Parliament itself.
Thus the Long Parliament possessed an authority which no political assembly in England has ever possessed before or since. Its power of legislation was unlimited. It exercised the executive power indirectly through the Council, and directly through its own resolutions. By interference with private suits, and by the appointment of committees with quasi-judicial functions, it also exercised the judicial power. Its sovereignty was undivided and uncontrolled.
"This was the case of the people of England at that time," said Cromwell, eight years later, " the Parliament assuming to itself the authority of the three estates that were before. Jt had so assumed that authority that if any man had come and said, * What rules do you judge by ?' it would have answered, ' Why, we have none. We are supreme in legislature and judicature/ "
What made this authority still more burdensome was that there was no prospect of its ever ending. Instead of sitting for about seven months in the year, as Parliaments do now, it sat all the year round, never taking more than three or four days' holiday. Moreover, by the Act of May n, 1641, it could not be adjourned, prorogued, or dissolved,