Among the most revolutionary aspects of parliamentary history during the Protectorate was the Instrument of Government's empowering of the council to scrutinise election returns and to exclude any members whom it deemed to fail certain political, religious, and moral criteria. As we shall see, these qualifications were defined sufficiently vaguely – for example, members had to be ‘of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation’ – as to leave wide open the possibility of very extensive use and even abuse. In the event, somewhere between seven and eleven members of the first Protectorate Parliament were excluded before it met, and perhaps another fifty to eighty absented themselves rather than take the Recognition that Cromwell imposed as a condition of re-entering the House on 12 September 1654. The exclusions that preceded the second Protectorate Parliament were on a far larger scale and removed just over a hundred elected members, while a further fifty or sixty promptly withdrew in protest. This chapter will examine these exclusions of members from the first two Protectorate Parliaments, where responsibility for them lay, and what their impact was on those Parliaments. It will also consider the fact that the second sitting of the second Protectorate Parliament (1658) and the third Protectorate Parliament (1659) saw no such exclusions, and will assess what implications this had for parliamentary proceedings during those sittings.