Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660
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demand was that the present Commons should provide for a succession of
parliaments in which the representatives of the people (‘the original of all just
power’) should have supreme authority to make laws, define the offices and
institutions of government, and call judges and ministers of state to account.
It coyly refrained from claiming for parliament similar power over the army;
indeed it demanded that no officer or soldier should be dismissed from the
service except by sentence of a court-martial. This would have deprived the
state of the essential power to remove members of the services who engaged
in political subversion. Religion was glossed over with a request that provi-
sion should be made for all sincere professors and that no tender conscience
should be oppressed, thus evading the really divisive questions of the limits of
toleration and the upkeep, if any, of a national parochial ministry. The peti-
tion was cunningly contrived to appeal to all the Protectorate’s opponents
except the royalists and the rigid Fifth Monarchy men, but it contained no
practical solutions to the political problems of the present.
6
When the repub-
lican politicians did recover the power for which they lusted seventeen
months later, their enjoyment of it was to be short indeed.
Cromwell decided that there was so much potential mischief in this petition
that he must prevent if from coming before parliament. On the day it was to
be presented he made his way hurriedly to the Lords’ House without telling
any of his councillors—not even Thurloe—what he intended. He had meant
to go by water, but the Thames was partly ice-bound, so he took the nearest
hackney coach. Once at the Palace of Westminster, he sent for the judges
from their courts in Westminster Hall and dispatched Black Rod to summon
the Commons. Fiennes and Fleetwood, hearing of his unheralded arrival,
came to ask him what his purpose was, and were astonished to hear that it
was to dissolve parliament. Fleetwood begged him to think hard about it first,
for it was a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a milksop,’ Cromwell
replied; ‘by the living God I will dissolve the House.’
7
Haselrig tried to per-
suade the Commons to ignore Black Rod, but after keeping him waiting some
time while they discussed his summons they obeyed it. Cromwell’s speech
that put an end to their sitting was fairly brief and powerfully reproachful. He
had expected that when he framed his government to a constitution proposed
by them, and agreed with them after long negotiation, the country might have
enjoyed the peace and settlement that had so long been striven for. Instead,
disaffected members had been working to overturn the settlement that par-
liament itself had authored, and ‘designing a commonwealth that some trib-
une of the people might be the man that might rule all’. This was ‘but the
688 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
6
The petition was published by its anonymous author in March, as A True Copy of a Petition
. . . intended to have been delivered to the late Parliament (British Library, E 936(5)). Strangely,
it has never been reprinted since 1659.
7
Abbott, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, IV, 728.
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playing of the King of Scots’s game’; and the worst of it had been their
‘endeavours . . . to pervert the army whilst you have been sitting, yea and to
draw the army to the state of a question, a commonwealth, a common-
wealth.’ His closing words were ‘I do dissolve this parliament. Let God judge
between you and me’; to which some of the members responded ‘Amen’.
8
The dissolution led to much premature rejoicing among both royalists and
commonwealthsmen, who misread it as the act of a desperate man facing
defeat. But Cromwell knew what he was doing, and actually strengthened his
position by nipping the republican design in the bud. Much had changed since
the outgoing parliament had been elected under the shadow of the major-
generals, and there was good reason to hope that a new one, chosen under the
terms of a parliamentary constitution, would endorse it and act co-operative-
ly under it, as the next parliament indeed did. Cromwell’s one real worry was
about the temper of the army, or rather that of a small minority within it; he
had inspected the night watch at Whitehall in person for some days before the
dissolution. Two days after it he summoned all the officers in and about Lon-
don, some two hundred or so, and addressed them for about two hours,
explaining how providence had brought him to his present unsought place
and why he had felt obliged to dissolve the parliament. The officers applauded
him, and pledged themselves anew ‘to stand and fall, live and die with my
Lord Protector’. He toasted them; they drank to him, and the occasion
became convivial as bottle after bottle was drained.
9
The only centre of real
disaffection in the army in England was Cromwell’s own regiment of horse.
He cannot have had much personal contact with it in the past five years, and
Monck had long regarded its effective commander, Major William Packer, as
a dangerous trouble-maker and the source of its discontents. Packer was an
extreme Baptist of the type that vexed Henry in Ireland, and he had brought
many officers and men of his kind into the regiment; three of his troop com-
manders were new. Cromwell argued with him and his troop captains over
several days, trying to satisfy their objections, but finding them unmovable in
their rigid republicanism he cashiered all six of them.
10
His firm action made a considerable stir, but it had the desired effect. At
Monck’s prompting, the regiments and garrisons in Scotland sent him
addresses of loyalty. All the more senior officers around London met in
Whitehall on 24 March to hear Fleetwood introduce a collective address,
which was read twice and laid open to discussion. There was none; everyone
present signed it on the spot, and four days later, after it had been circulated,
Fleetwood presented it to Cromwell with a roll of 224 officers’ signatures. It
specifically affirmed their commitment to the Petition and Advice, as well as
Unfinished Business 689
8
Ibid., pp. 731–2; Firth, Last Years, II, 41.
9
Firth, Last Years, II, pp. 44–5.
10
Firth & Rait, Regimental History, I, 70–4.
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 689
their fidelity to Cromwell. A very full declaration from the army in Ireland
was not long in following. Predictably it met with more discussion, but only
a dozen men, some of them private soldiers and only one ranking as high as
major, dissented from it. As for popular reactions, London took the dissolu-
tion calmly, apart from some radical sectaries. The City corporation made no
official response until Cromwell sent for the Lord Mayor and aldermen and
informed them of the advanced state of royalist preparations. Ormond, he
revealed, had been in their midst for three weeks and had only just returned
to the continent. This produced not only a loyal address, warmly supporting
the Petition and Advice, but a substantial reinforcement and reorganization
of the City’s militia.
Cromwell certainly had the measure of his opponents now, partly of course
because of the force he could dispose of, but partly too because his regime
commanded respect in quarters where it had earlier been opposed. The Fifth
Monarchists had already been made aware in the spring of 1657 that they
stood no chance of overthrowing him by force, and his refusal of the crown
took some more wind out of their sails. After he dissolved parliament they
published fresh incitements to resist him, aiming them particularly at the
army, but they found little response and they were promptly dealt with.
Venner was already in the Tower; Rogers, Courtney, Portman, and (soon
after) Feake were sent to join him there, but Rogers and Feake were released
in April, and only Portman was held for a whole year. When the Baptists of
the West Country held a conference at Dorchester in May 1658, some senior
Fifth Monarchists including Carew urged that their two groups should
combine, but Kiffin and others vigorously opposed the proposal and it was
rejected.
11
Moderate sectaries recognized how well off they were with the
toleration that in practice they enjoyed.
The royalist threat was punctured even more comprehensively than in
1655. Vice-Admiral Lawson with twelve frigates blockaded Ostend from
27 February, arriving just in time to engage the Dutch transports that Spain
had hired to carry the troops assembled in Flanders for the invasion of Eng-
land. He captured three of them and drove two more ashore. Three weeks
later the royalists called off the whole enterprise, at least for the current year,
for they saw no chance of securing an English port, as the treaty had stipulat-
ed. But the government did not drop its vigilance, and it arrested a number of
important suspects, including three members of the Sealed Knot, during late
March and April. One Sussex royalist, Anthony Stapley, whom Cromwell
examined in person, gave way under interrogation and confessed all he knew.
Quite soon Thurloe uncovered most of what mattered about the whole con-
spiracy, and in May, on the council’s advice, the second and last High Court
690 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
11
Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, pp. 120–1.
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of Justice of the Protectorate was convened to try its chief actors. It is symp-
tomatic of the strengthening constitutional spirit of the time that only about
50 of the 140-odd commissioners appointed to constitute the court consent-
ed to act, and that all the judges of the regular courts declined, holding that
the prisoners should be tried by a jury. But Cromwell was evidently not pre-
pared to risk the acquittal of proven conspirators, and this High Court was
scrupulous in requiring proof of guilt.
Chief of the accused were a Yorkshire knight, Sir Henry Slingsby, who was
rather unpleasantly ensnared into treasonable activity in order to uncover his
fellow-plotters; Dr John Hewitt, an Anglican clergyman; and John Mor-
daunt, a son of the Earl of Peterborough, and fast becoming the most active
and effective royalist agent in England. Slingsby and Hewitt were convicted
and beheaded, but Mordaunt was spared by the casting vote of the president
because the evidence against him was not found to be conclusive. Three other
prisoners, engaged in the Sussex plot and betrayed by Stapley (who saved his
neck thereby), were tried separately; one had his case dropped, another was
acquitted, the third was convicted but reprieved. While these trials were
pending, a break-away faction of plotters in London decided bravely but
madly to go it alone and raise the City on 15 May. The government was well
informed of their plan and pounced just as they were going into action, tak-
ing forty or fifty prisoners before a blow was struck. Seven ringleaders were
tried by the High Court of Justice; six of them were found guilty but three
were reprieved at the foot of the gallows, and only three were hanged, drawn,
and quartered—a very rare example of the application of the traditional pun-
ishment of treason in Cromwellian England.
12
The total failure of these designs put an end to serious royalist conspiracy
for as long as the Protectorate lasted. Repeated frustration did at least make
some of the activists overcome their reluctance to seek an alliance with the
former political presbyterians, and among their chief targets were Manches-
ter, Sir William Waller, Robert Harley, and Fairfax, whose daughter had
married the second Duke of Buckingham in September 1657. But whatever
guarded civilities were exchanged they made very little progress, and Man-
chester, Waller, and Fairfax held back from anything that can be called con-
spiracy. Most presbyterians remained unwilling to support a restoration
except on terms similar to those of the Treaty of Newport, which true royal-
ists found quite unacceptable. The situation would change radically when
Richard Cromwell was overthrown, but the Protectorate, while it lasted,
accorded better with presbyterian political values than a Stuart restoration
effected by force of arms (especially Spanish arms), and hence likely to be
unconditional.
Unfinished Business 691
12
Firth, Last Years, II, 76–82; Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy, ch. 10, esp. pp. 226–9.
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 691
How well the constitutional settlement might have bedded down if
Cromwell had had even a year or two more of full vigour is a matter for
conjecture, but declining health took an increasing toll of him during 1658.
It had been his practice through most of his rule to attend a majority of coun-
cil meetings, but of the seventy-four held between January and his death he
was present at only nineteen. Fatigue and worry sometimes told on him,
especially since the dissolution had left his government with steadily
mounting debt and his soldiers’ and seamen’s pay perilously in arrears. The
fatal cancer of his favourite daughter Elizabeth Claypole—she died on
6 August—grieved him deeply. But to picture him (as some have done) as a
broken man, or losing his grip on affairs, is seriously to overstate the case. He
continued to take a keen interest in foreign policy, especially in the progress
of the Flanders campaign, and he frequently dealt with foreign diplomats in
person.
The French alliance needed to be renewed in March, having initially been
given a year to run. Lockhart drove a hard bargain with Mazarin, not with-
out seriously offending him, but he secured his commitment to a joint oper-
ation against Dunkirk by land and sea between 20 April and 10 May. After
the port had been handed over to England, the English fleet engaged in its
capture would be at France’s disposal for the siege of Gravelines. Mazarin
had good cause to complain, however, that England was extremely slow to
bring her troops in Flanders up to strength, despite urgent pleas from Lock-
hart to Thurloe. Nevertheless Turenne did lay siege to Dunkirk on 15 May
with a combined army of at least 25,000, supported by an English fleet of over
twenty warships. The English troops, which had attracted some resentment,
mainly through their quarrelsomeness, redeemed themselves by fighting like
heroes in the siege operations, which cost them quite heavy casualties.
On the Spanish side Don Juan was slow to respond because he took the
siege of Dunkirk to be a feint to cover an attack on cities and forts inland, but
once convinced that it was the prime objective he concentrated the whole
Army of Flanders, about 14,000 strong, on relieving it. Turenne had no inten-
tion of waiting passively for an attack on his siege lines, so leaving about
6,000 men to guard them he marched out the rest of the army and drew it up
in battle order, facing the strong position that Don Juan had taken up among
the sand-hills. British troops fought on both sides in the Battle of the Dunes,
which was fought on 4 June. Don Juan had an English, a Scottish, and three
Irish regiments, all fighting as professionals in his Army of Flanders, as well
as the Duke of York and his life guard. Turenne’s force included seven
English regiments, numbering between 4,000 and 5,000 men, and they were
ranged against Spanish veterans, the toughest opposition on the field. Their
courage impressed both French and Spanish commanders, but they had a
hard fight, scrambling up steep sand-hills on hands and knees under fire, and
692 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
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out of about 400 killed in Turenne’s army they accounted for almost half. But
few of the old Spanish infantry that they fought escaped death or capture, and
the Anglo-French victory was total; Don Juan lost about 1,000 men killed
and 4,000 taken prisoners.
Dunkirk capitulated ten days after the battle, and the nineteen-year-old
Louis XIV, who had accompanied his army throughout the campaign,
entered the town in state next day. He wrote a letter of congratulation to
Cromwell in his own hand, and he himself handed the keys of Dunkirk to
Lockhart, but he personally shared the widespread French resentment at the
delivery of so valuable a place to the English. There was a considerable party
in France that deplored her alliance with the heretical regicide republic, but
Mazarin held firm to it, and the four English regiments which were not
assigned to garrisoning Dunkirk and Mardyke did good service under
Turenne during the rest of the campaigning season. Indeed Mazarin sounded
Lockhart informally late in July about extending the league, and suggested
that Ostend might be the reward for a larger-scale English participation. It
was an unlikely possibility, however, given the Protectorate’s financial prob-
lems, and Cromwell’s death put an end to it.
Whether Dunkirk would ever have been worth the £70,000 or so a year
that it cost to garrison, over and above what could be raised locally, is debat-
able, but its acquisition should not be glibly dismissed as the product of a
Tudor hangover. It put paid to any possibility of using the Spanish Nether-
lands as a launching-pad for a royalist invasion, and Thurloe rightly
described it as ‘a bridle to the Dutch’. It was a blessing to English merchant
shipping that Dunkirk was no longer a nest for privateers. Lockhart, now
made its governor, had no doubts about it value: ‘It is not only an excellent
outwork for the defence of England, but a sally-port by which his Highness
may advantageously sally forth upon his enemies, as often as he shall see
occasion for it.’
13
Possession of Dunkirk set the seal upon the success of the
English army on both land and sea, and very significantly raised the Protect-
orate’s status among the European powers. No one appreciated this better
than Clarendon, writing of Cromwell many years after the Restoration: ‘But
his greatness at home was but a shadow of the glory he had abroad. It was
hard to discover which feared him most, France, Spain, or the Low Countries,
where his friendship was current at the value he put upon it.’
14
Samuel Pepys,
commenting in 1667 on the recent disaster in which a Dutch fleet
had sailed right up the Thames estuary and the Medway and destroyed many
of England’s proudest men-of-war as they lay at anchor in Chatham,
remarked. ‘It is strange how . . . everybody doth nowadays reflect upon him
Unfinished Business 693
13
Thurloe State Papers, VI, 853, quoted in Firth, Last Years, II, 218.
14
Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, VI, 94 (Book XV, § 152).
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 693
[Cromwell] and commend him, so brave things he did and made all the
neighbour princes fear him.’
15
Cromwell scrupulously honoured his treaty obligations to the catholic
inhabitants of Dunkirk, and most of the burghers (priests and religious orders
apart) seem to have been more content under English than under Spanish
overlordship. But he himself hoped that his foothold on the continent would
advance the protestant interest in western Europe, envisaging that converts
and settlers in and around Dunkirk would spread their faith in the Low Coun-
tries, and give encouragement to the Huguenots in France.
Such hopes were over-optimistic, and passed into limbo when the restored
Charles II promptly sold Dunkirk back to France. But Cromwell’s enhanced
prestige increased the diplomatic influence that he could wield in the north-
ern war—never in a dominating role, of course, but still to an extent that the
belligerents had to take notice of. Charles X transformed the situation by two
sensational marches across the ice in January and early February of 1658,
which brought Copenhagen under the immediate threat of his army and
forced the Danish king to sue for peace. Frederick III sent urgently for help to
Philip Meadowe, Cromwell’s envoy to his court, and Meadowe in collabor-
ation with the French ambassador did all he could to moderate Charles’s
demands, which at first included the whole of Norway and the island of
Zeeland. That would have given Sweden both shores of the Sound, with
power to dictate access to the vital sources of naval stores in the Baltic. By the
Treaty of Roskilde Charles had to be content with acquiring the southern
provinces of modern Sweden that had hitherto been Danish, but the opposite
shore remained Denmark’s. The part that Meadowe played in negotiating the
terms earned him the respect of both kings and the sincere gratitude of
Frederick.
Cromwell never altogether abandoned his dream of uniting the protestant
interest in Europe, but he showed an increasingly sophisticated awareness of
the realities of the diplomatic situation, and he used his influence on it respon-
sibly, with the object of limiting rather than extending war in northern
Europe. He chose his diplomats well. He sent George Downing to the Hague
to try and repair England’s relations with the United Provinces, which had
recently gone to war with Portugal, mainly because both countries laid claim
to Brazil. That war brought the Dutch closer to Spain, and the underhand aid
that they were giving to the Spaniards, coupled with England’s acquisition of
Dunkirk and the frequent seizure of English prizes by Dutch captains, made
Downing’s task as a negotiator difficult. But after many months he did secure
the restoration of some English ships that the Dutch East India Company had
impounded in Bantam, and he gradually established a relationship with
694 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
15
Diary of Samuel Pepys, VIII, 332 (sub 12 July, 1667).
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 694
Grand Pensionary de Witt. He managed to bring the latter into closer touch
with the Swedish envoy at the Hague, and won his personal agreement to a
proposal that Cromwell should arbitrate between the United Provinces and
Sweden over the vexed question of the Sound dues. Cromwell also took up
the cause of the protestants who were currently being persecuted in Poland
and Silesia, much as he had in the case of the Vaudois. In March he launched
an appeal for them in England which brought in £10,685.
He was steadily learning how little religious ideals had to do with the real-
ities of northern European politics. In February 1658 Frederick William,
Elector of Brandenburg, concluded an offensive league with Austria and
Poland, aimed primarily against Sweden, and designed (in a secret article) to
open the way to his own acquisition of Pomerania. There was no love lost
between the Calvinist Frederick William and the Lutheran Charles X, who
debarred Calvinists from holding office in his dominions. During the spring
Charles tried to draw England further into an offensive league against Austria
and Spain, but financial stringency would have ruled that out for Cromwell,
even if he had not seen that Charles’s main reason for threatening the Habs-
burgs was to deter Austria from ganging up with Poland, Brandenburg and
Denmark against him. Cromwell did send Jephson to Berlin in April, primar-
ily to promote if he could a better understanding between Brandenburg and
Sweden, but also (too late) to try to secure the Great Elector’s vote against the
election of Leopold as Emperor. He also sent Meadowe to East Prussia to
offer his mediation in the peace negotiations that then seemed imminent. It
cannot be said that these missions effected anything very significant, but the
very fact that they were received with respect testifies to England’s enhanced
standing in the counsels of Europe. Far more was achieved by the League of
the Rhine, which was master-minded by Mazarin and signed three weeks
before Cromwell died. It conjoined a powerful body of German princes with
the Kings of France and Sweden in a joint undertaking to maintain the terms
of the Peace of Westphalia and those under which Leopold had just been
elected Emperor. Effectively, it prevented the Emperor from taking Austria
into a war against France in alliance with Spain. Cromwell had no share in
negotiating the League of the Rhine, but against the opposition of the Span-
ish ambassador and the papal nuncio Mazarin had a clause inserted in the
treaty that extended its benefits to France’s allies. That meant that none of its
signatories could aid Spain against England, and if Cromwell had lived
Mazarin would surely have insisted that the Protectorate was included in the
Treaty of the Pyrenees.
It must have been a bitter disappointment to Cromwell to hear, as his life
was running out, that Charles X had broken the Treaty of Roskilde and laid
siege to Copenhagen. But Sir Charles Firth was for once mistaken in conclud-
ing that this spelt the ruin of the Protector’s policy in the Baltic, for France,
Unfinished Business 695
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 695
the United Provinces, and England together decided that the terms agreed at
Roskilde should be upheld, and so they essentially were when the Treaty of
Copenhagen was concluded in 1660; indeed its modifications actually
improved the balance of power in the Baltic.
16
By then Cromwell of course
was dead, and so, more recently, was Charles X, who left a successor less than
five years old. Cromwell, however, did live long enough to hear cheering news
from Jamaica, where the plantation was just beginning to prosper. Colonel
Edward Doyley, who took over as governor when Major-General Brayne
died in 1657, defeated an attempt by about 1,000 Spanish troops to recapture
the island that year, killing about 120 and losing only 4 of his own men. In
May and June 1658 his small but gallant garrison routed a considerably larg-
er invading force, which lost about 300 in action, not counting those who per-
ished after taking to the forest for refuge.
Cromwell’s health was collapsing during August. On a good day he could
still ride out and take the air in Hampton Court Park, and there around the
middle of the month George Fox accosted him at the head of his life guard.
Fox came to plead for his imprisoned fellow-Quakers, and Cromwell bade
him come to the palace next day. But, Fox writes, ‘I saw and felt a waft of
death go forth against him, and he looked like a dead man’.
17
Cromwell was
indeed too ill to see him the next day, and on 3 September, the anniversary of
his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, he died peacefully. He was conscious
on his deathbed of leaving much unfinished business, and it is tantalizing to
speculate on what course public affairs might have taken if he had had just a
little longer. There had been much debate in the council from February
onward on whether to summon a new parliament soon, and though Desbor-
ough and a few others were for relying on the sword and collecting money by
force, the consensus was that only a parliament could solve the government’s
mounting financial problems. It was proposed, though not yet formally
agreed, that the Commons should be elected by the traditional constituencies,
and that all the old peers who had been faithful to the parliamentary cause
should be summoned to the Other House alongside Cromwell’s nominees. In
June a council committee consisting of five officers and four civilians was
appointed to consider an agenda for the parliament, but by then it was too
late to get it elected before the harvest, and Cromwell’s fatal illness put it in
limbo. There seems little reason to suppose, however, that a parliament
assembled in the autumn of 1658 would have been less amenable and co-
operative than the one summoned by Richard Cromwell early in 1659.
It would probably have repeated its predecessor’s attempt to make
Cromwell king; indeed it was the talk of the town even in the spring of 1658
696 Cromwell’s Protectorate 1653–1658
16
Compare Firth, Last Years, II, 290 with Michael Roberts, ‘Cromwell and the Baltic’, in
Essays in Swedish History (1953).
17
Journal of George Fox, ed. J. L. Nickalls (1975), p. 350.
ch23-24.y8 27/9/02 12:08 PM Page 696
that a coronation was imminent. Bordeaux was sure of it, and other foreign
diplomats thought the same; Cromwell’s son-in-law Fauconberg believed
that only the timing was uncertain. Firth thought it probable that Cromwell
would have accepted the crown if he had lived, but presumptuous though it is
to differ from that great historian twice in one chapter it may be doubted.
There is no evidence that Oliver had overcome the patently sincere scruples
about the royal title that he had persistently expressed during 1657. More-
over he knew his army. Some but by no means all of the senior officers had
become reconciled to the prospect of kingship, but the disquiet that it would
have caused among those below field rank would probably have been serious;
the rift that was to develop under Richard between the senior commanders on
the one hand and the captains and subalterns on the other would have opened
up earlier, and perhaps even more damagingly.
One major piece of unfinished business when Cromwell’s life was ebbing
was the nomination of his successor, and it caused much anxiety, both as to
whom he would name (or had named?), and as to whether he would do it at
all. The evidence regarding his nomination of his elder son is confused and in
places contradictory, and controversy over its interpretation has been revived
in our own time.
18
As late as 30 August he had not confided his wishes to any-
one. Earlier in the month he told Thurloe that there was a sealed letter,
addressed to him, on his study table in Whitehall, in which he had named his
successor soon after the Petition and Advice empowered him to do so. The
letter could not be found, however, and he never told Thurloe whose name it
contained. After the Restoration, the story spread in varying guises that the
lost letter had nominated Fleetwood, and some modern scholars have credit-
ed it. It is conceivable that in the early years of the Protectorate Cromwell did
contemplate Fleetwood as his favoured successor, for he had a strong affec-
tion and regard for his son-in-law. But by 1657 Fleetwood had so fully
exposed his defects of leadership and lack of political judgement in Ireland
that it is simply not credible that Cromwell was still considering him as the
next Protector. Whatever happened to that letter in his Whitehall study, it can
surely have named no one but Richard, and the latter’s subsequent appoint-
ment to the privy council and to the command of a cavalry regiment point the
same way. What evidently happened during his last days was that on 30 August
he discussed the succession with four or five of his council, declaring his choice
of Richard, though as Thurloe reported to Henry ‘his illness disenabled him
to conclude it fully’. During the next two days he showed signs of recovering,
and perhaps even now he felt that his hold on the helm would remain firmer
Unfinished Business 697
18
I have discussed the evidence and conflicting interpretations of it in ‘Milton and Cromwell’,
in M. Lieb and J. T. Shawcross (eds.), Achievements of the Left Hand (Amherst, Mass., 1974),
pp. 200–8.
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