CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The great captain of their salvation comes and saith Go Thy Ways, thou hast faithfully discharged thy duty; go now unto thy rest.
John Owen’s funeral sermon
A haze of unnatural calm hung over the English scene during the last six months of Oliver’s life. When Ormonde vanished precipitately from London in the spring of 1658, he bore with him the realization that the English-based Cavaliers would not stir unless prodded by the arrival of King Charles off the coast at the head of a large Spanish army. Despite the alliance, that phenomenon did not materialize. The Sealed Knot and the Royalists in general were further pilloried during the spring and summer of 1658 by a series of swift and punitive arrests. One observer was indeed of the opinion that although the Royalists were certainly meditating trouble, additional plots were also invented by the Government to keep the people loyal to the Protector. Whatever the truth of that observation, there were two salient facts about the situation which activists of both sides would ignore at their peril: first, that the Protectoral regime was now strongly entrenched in its hold on the people; second, that this hold depended on the survival of Oliver Cromwell himself at its head. On the latter point Henry Cromwell wrote unhappily to Thurloe during the summer: ‘Have you any settlement?’ he enquired. ‘Does not your peace depend upon his Highness’ life, and upon his peculiar skills and faculty and personal interest in the army as now modelled and commanded? I say beneath the immediate hand of God (if I know anything of the affairs of England) there is no other reason why we are not in blood at this day.’1 Nevertheless, so long as the Royalist challenge was held under at home, and remained disorganized abroad, it was still unlikely that blood would flow in England. In the last months of his life Cromwell was like a great warship riding at anchor outside a harbour seething with lesser vessels. His mere presence made it unlikely that anyone would succeed in escaping his unconquerable control.
It was true that money troubles might cause general perturbation among the men who could not solve them, the City financiers who were disinclined to grant loans, and the people who disliked taxes. Oliver’s health also continued to be the subject of the most sinister rumours – that he suffered from insomnia and had to be dosed with opium which left him in a half-dead state for many hours; that he kept to his room and had only eaten one meal with his family in eight days, in contrast to his previous uxorious record. It was more reliably reported that he suffered from vertigo and giddiness described as ‘migraine’ and had swooned twice in one day. He also sent for a chirurgeon called Boone to look at the painful ‘impostume’ or abscess on his back. Once again it was Henry Cromwell who said of his father: ‘I wish he were equally distant from both his childhoods.’ Yet even the Army proved surprisingly tractable after the outburst of the dissolution: a vast banquet given by Oliver two days later at which the wine flowed particularly freely quieted down opposition, which, in any case, like that of the Royalists, lacked direction. Some rearrangements in the organization of the Army itself also contributed to calm. On 12 March, the City, in the shape of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, were given the benefit of a long discourse from their Protector on the subject of ‘the new designs of the old enemy Charles Stuart’, which included details of Ormonde’s expedition, and the news that Charles’s fleet was waiting in Flanders, only needing a dark night to slip by their own ships.2 At the tale of these horrors, the City dutifully responded with an address replete with loyal protestations.
The institution of a new High Court of Justice to cope with trials for treason, and which, like the court that had tried King Charles i, was to consist of commissioners acting the combined parts of judges and jury, showed how inadequate the forces of opposition could be when faced with the determination of the Protector and Council. The commission for erecting it, in accordance with previous requests of Parliament as long ago as August 1653, had been passed by an Act of September 1656. Now in April one hundred and forty commissioners were named, of whom seventeen were to be a quorum. The Venetian Ambassador reported general fears that Royalists and Catholics would suffer anew, yet the Protector, he said, was frightened that ‘some spark may remain undiscovered which may suddenly burst into a flame’. The judges were predictably hostile to such a development, but the Protector merely observed to Lord Chief Justice Glyn that lawyers were ever ‘full of quirks’. Glyn replied coldly that it could hardly have been otherwise when soldiers drew up the Act.3 Nevertheless the Protector got his way and the first court was instituted in May, and provided with a list of those to be tried for treason by the Council. Oliver had now been Protector for over four years, chief man in England for more than eight; he had survived attempted assassination, rebellion, sickness itself; for all the combined threats of all three, was it really possible to envisage a time when the great ship might founder and go down? Even the Royalists began to fear neurotically within themselves that the Protector was immortal, while his supporters believing in the principles of God’s election would have put it another way: Oliver Cromwell would be spared so long as there was God’s work to be done. Another outcome was unthinkable.
Much of the last period of the Protector’s life was spent in contemplating the fruits of his foreign policy, and enjoying its glories, expensive triumphs as these might prove to be. In the Baltic the Peace of Roskilde of February 1658 showed signs of producing the tranquillity considered essential to English trade. In Europe his new imperial position was underlined by the question of his intervention even in the election of the new Holy Roman Emperor. But the Anglo-French treaty of March 1657 had provided for more than mere diplomatic support in its projected assaults on the Spanish Netherlands: six thousand English soldiers, paid for by France, were to fight under French command in an effort to secure the three coastal towns of Mardyck, Gravelines and Dunkirk (of which the first and the last were to be ceded to England after capture), and the English fleet was to be brought into joint action. By August 1657 ordinances of the Council were providing for the transport of quantities of redcoats – fast becoming the trademark of the English Army – across the Channel. There was much care as well as personal interest in the preparations for this first expedition against Mardyck: had the former Lord-General perhaps learned his lesson from the fiasco of the Western Design? Cromwell himself was concerned with details of supplies such as coal, palisades, wood, candles, as well as the presence of masons and carpenters from England to erect quarters for the troops. Oliver’s orders on the subject were all ‘so strict and quick’, or at least in the view of Captain John Taylor from Chatham. And during the course of the expedition itself he continued to bombard Ambassador Bordeaux with questions concerning the welfare of his troops, impatient at lack of news.4
Even so, there were still some failings: the absence of small boats meant that the soldiers had to wade ashore with their provisions, and General Sir John Reynolds and Lieutenant-Colonel White were drowned on their way on Goodwin Sands, their bodies poignantly identified by a gold ornamented rapier in the rigging of the wrecked ship, and the letters of White’s wife. The winter which had so incommoded Cromwell in his attempt to dissolve Parliament with despatch was not less severe on the Continent; the heavy ordnance had to be dragged over the ice at Mardyck. Although the exercise itself, under the great French Marshal Turenne, was a success and Mardyck was prised from the Spanish grasp, the delays in the further prosecution of the campaign thereafter caused much discontent in the Protector’s breast. At the same time the English soldiers now quartered in Mardyck discovered it to be an exceptionally insalubrious spot for their national health, the Ambassador Lockhart spending much of his time caring for the sick there, having to provide all types of remedies from cups of bouillon to more hospital beds. The Continental mentality was towards siege warfare – an English commander wrote home the caustic comment that fighting was not much the fashion in those parts – and the English soldiers suffered accordingly.5 It was not in fact until the May of 1658 that Turenne put into effect the joint operation to assail Dunkirk.
At the same time, Cromwell’s own warmth for the French was noticeable in two directions. His connexion with the Ambassador in London had blossomed into such a warm admiration for the perceptive Frenchman that in the previous December he had written a personal letter in his own hand (although the handwriting was by now extraordinarily shaky) to Cardinal Mazarin recommending Bordeaux as President of the Parlement de Paris. This piece of benevolent interference from a foreign head of State proved not unnaturally of some embarrassment to Bordeaux, who was obliged to explain it away to Mazarin along the lines of his own extreme contentment with the present incumbent of the post. Bordeaux did however feel able to add that after having received such help, such advantageous opinions of his own worth, and such a powerful recommendation, he could hardly be blamed if he had acquired some new ambitions for his own future …6
In May, the reverse of the coin was seen when Oliver’s son-inlaw of six months, the able and charming Fauconberg, was sent on a mission of goodwill to France. He was armed with many introductions to the King and to the Cardinal, although the Protector added with a certain sweetness on the subject of Fauconberg’s personal attractions that he was a person ‘who, unless we deceive ourselves, carries his own recommendations about him, wherever he goes’. Bordeaux also took great trouble to explain in advance to the French Court the courtesies which should be shown to the young emissary, in view not only of his position within the Cromwellian family, but also the trust which the Protector placed in him. As for Fauconberg’s suite, it would be found to be splendid in appearance, he wrote, the only trouble being that no member of the ancient nobility of England could be found to form part of it. The reason, he hastened to add, was not political, but due to the fact that the French Court was now encamped in northern France campaigning; the English nobles feared the discomforts that they might be obliged to suffer in consequence. Whatever the credentials of his suite, Mazarin found Fauconberg most agreeable: a ‘fort honnête seigneur’ he wrote from Calais.7 The Protector in turn expressed himself delighted at the news of Fauconberg’s genial reception. The love feast was completed when Oliver extended a reciprocal invitation for a French mission of equal weight to come to London in July, composed of the Cardinal’s nephew, Monsieur Mancini, and Louis XIV’s chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, the Duc de Crequi.
In the meantime the great joint victory of the battle of 4 June, known afterwards as the Dunes, marked the culmination of the Anglo-French operation to seize Dunkirk. Turenne had laid siege to the town in May, only to be threatened by a large Spanish force coming to its relief, an army incidentally which included both Charles II’s brother, James Duke of York, and Cromwell’s erstwhile hero, Condé. The Spaniards fell on the besiegers through the sandy coastal hillocks of the dunes, with admirable effect; but while their left under Condé did well, the great Turenne in the centre hurled them back, and demolished their right. The day ended in a rout, and Dunkirk itself surrendered shortly after. It was significant that the French and English soldiers were now reported as on much more amicable terms, the French horse described as ‘very loving and civil’, and the English behaving themselves with sufficient aplomb to gain general applause from the grandees of the French Army. The beginnings of a spirit of amity, or at any rate live-and-let-live, could be discerned, not always prevalent among historical allies, even those who were not divided sharply by religion as were these representatives of France and England.
Military appreciation was one thing; but to Ambassador Lockhart fell a more critical task, in the shape of the reorganization of Dunkirk itself under English command, in accordance with the terms of the treaty. Cromwell now had his Continental stronghold, his jumping-off place; but it was undeniably a complication that its inhabitants were in the main Catholics. The Protector himself had shown a broad-minded attitude to notorious French weaknesses of character earlier when discussing the alliance in a speech: ‘They have seen the sun a little,’ he observed, ‘we have great lights.’ Thus the French must be expected to be more pleasure-loving. But administration could prove to be a different matter when the English who were used only to a minority Catholic population, their religion officially proscribed and subject to heavy penalties, were confronted by a plethora of these supposed heretics within Dunkirk. Lockhart himself behaved with admirable – and under the circumstances sensible – tolerance. In a spirited speech to the inhabitants of Dunkirk, he referred to the Protector as ‘a man of a vast comprehensive soul’ who ‘sought the good of all his subjects, though he was not of their religion, yet he had good thoughts and good will for all that believed in God and to be saved by Christ Jesus …’ It was true that the Papists in England were ‘pressed hard’ but that was because their religion was against the laws of England and against his own will: ‘they [the Catholics of Dunkirk] not being under that law, he would protect them in their profession’.8
Lockhart tried to prevent the English soldiers behaving badly in the Catholic churches, where they were inclined to pillage; they also indulged in other pieces of less materially damaging but equally insensitive behaviour such as when an English soldier lit his pipe from the candles on the altar, with the priest there busy saying Mass. According to a pamphlet published in Brussels holy statues were knocked down and the arms of Oliver Cromwell put up in their place. But Lockhart reprimanded the soldiers: if they entered a Catholic church to satisfy their curiosity (and one can imagine how such men might regard with bated breath the open practice of a religion which they had been trained since childhood to regard as a secret rite close to that of Anti-Christ) they must still take care not to disturb others at what ‘they imagined to be their devotions’. He did not employ the sole church in the town for Protestant services. After all, wrote Lockhart, ‘the giver of toleration’ always showed himself innately superior to ‘that which is tolerated’. On a less pious level, Lockhart observed to Cromwell: ‘As Rome was not built in a day, so it will not be pulled down.’9
For all the note of British condescension in his orders, Lockhart nevertheless showed sufficient application to the problem of Catholic tolerance for Oliver to worry at one point that the Catholics were being actually preferred at the expense of the Protestants. In August Lockhart granted the Jesuits the right to stay within Dunkirk, with exemption from the fighting, provided that they revealed to him any anti-English plots or conspiracies. This, if it violated the Jesuits’ oath of secrecy, was an action of common sense from the point of view of an English commander. But it was perhaps with a view to counteracting such dangerous Papist influences on innocent British soldiery that the chaplain Hugh Peter paid a personal visit to the new outpost in order to lecture the troops on their duty to God and to the Government. However Lockhart quickly found Peter something of a nuisance in the way he meddled with everyone else’s business; while in regard to the delicate question of good relations with Cardinal Mazarin, he became a positive pest. He insisted on visiting the subtle Cardinal on three or four occasions, on each of which Lockhart was obliged to stay in attendance throughout, lest Peter bore the Cardinal with his long speeches. It was true that Peter himself was having a most enjoyable time. But when he hinted that he would like to extend his visit, Lockhart was obliged to say quickly that England had even greater need of his services than Dunkirk.10
At home the most striking feature of the London scene also involved Fauconberg, but in a less favourable light: of the list of conspirators named to be tried by the new High Court of Justice for anti-Government plotting, the chief conspirator was John Mordaunt and two of the most prominent were Dr Hewett, that Anglican clergyman rumoured to have married Fauconberg and Mary six months before, and Sir Henry Slingsby, who was actually Fauconberg’s uncle by marriage, having married a Miss Belasyse. Hewett, ‘born a gentleman and bred a scholar’, had been attracting great crowds preaching since the war at the church of St Gregory. The conspiracy in which they were both involved had hardly amounted to a serious threat against the regime, in view of the fact that Thurloe had once more been able to penetrate it by a double agent, and forty prisoners had been taken without difficulty. But Slingsby was an example of that type of Royalist to whom progressive if apathetic loyalty to the powers-that-were was an unthinkable course. He was an interesting if melancholy character, described as being of ‘very few words’. Having fought gallantly for the King during the war, he then played a part in the Penruddock rising and spent a spell in prison. When he finally took the decision to abandon his position of retirement once more, on this occasion it was with the full realization of the possible dreadful consequences to himself: as he told his son in A Father’s Legacy, written on the eve of his execution, he had prepared himself for death in advance by making his own coffin his perpetual ‘companion’.11
Both Hewett and Slingsby protested against the illegalities of the High Court of Justice, much as King Charles had done, dwelling on their lack of counsel, and the fact that the commissioners acted as both judge and jury. But it was with no shame that the President of the court confirmed the issue to Dr Hewett, telling him ‘this is the Grand Jury, the Petty Jury, and your Judge’. Slingsby in addition took a stand upon the fact that he could not be judged guilty of treason under a law to which he had not assented: he had been a prisoner in 1656 when it was passed. ‘I am (my lord) of an opinion (though you may account it a Paradox),’ he exclaimed, ‘that I cannot trespass against your laws, because I did not submit to them.’ It was in vain that the President appealed to Slingsby to regard the manifold providences which surely proved the rightness of Cromwell’s rule: what would have become of the whole Protestant interest if Charles Stuart had returned? The notorious Popery of the Stuart family would have threatened them anew with the prospect of civil war. But Slingsby refused to be convinced, exhibiting a fanatical loyalty to the principle of the monarchy which was in exact reverse to the cautious loyalty to the acting Government which so many were showing.
Slingsby and Hewett being condemned to death (although Mordaunt was acquitted), many efforts were made on their behalf to save them. They were spared the hideous fate of disembowelment which was the traditional punishment for treason, an amelioration which was said to have taken place at the instance of Bettie Claypole. According to Clarendon, Mary also pleaded for Hewett. In addition the Fauconbergs exercised complicated wiles to try and save Slingsby: they even asked Bordeaux if Cardinal Mazarin would not intervene on his behalf.12 But for all the lobbyings of Cromwell’s family to the Protector, Hewett and Slingsby were finally beheaded. It was not to be tolerated that the surface of the Government’s control should be cracked with impunity: the scaffold speeches of the unfortunate pair were torn up, and were not printed except in malicious and garbled versions. After this example, however, the work of the new High Court somewhat waned away. Several men arraigned were acquitted, for lack of evidence, possibly with Government connivance, and when the list had been dealt with, the High Court itself was adjourned from July until November.
It was a season of portents, except not everyone was in a position to interpret them correctly. When a ship was launched called the Richard, the horses drawing Richard Cromwell’s coach, which also contained his father, ran away and tore it to pieces. No one was hurt, except the Protector’s accident-prone son, who received some nasty wounds. On 5 June a young whale was sighted in the Thames near Greenwich and killed, ‘many porpoises being seen to rise that day above the bridge’. The event was produced by a storm and sea as cold as winter: ‘after a horrid groan’ the whale ran on shore and died. John Evelyn who inspected it marvelled at its dimensions; it was nearly sixty foot long with a mouth so wide that several men could have stood up in it; its skin he said was black ‘like coach leather’. Although after Oliver’s death, the death of the whale, ‘the fall of a Leviathan’, was seen clearly to indicate the impending death of a great man, as celebrated in verse by Dryden, it must be recorded that the contemporary reaction was somewhat different. Even Carrington thought the captivity and death of the whale, the King of the Sea, signified that Cromwell was himself absolute master of ‘that terrible element’.13 In general it was supposed at the time that one Leviathan was merely coming to do homage to another – Oliver Cromwell.
So the last summer wound on. On 10 July Oliver went down to Hampton Court for a period of refreshment accompanied by his Council. Thereafter it was decided in principle that the Council should meet on Tuesdays in London and on Thursdays in the country. There was after all little to keep him in London, the return visit of Mancini and the Duc de Crequi having been successfully accomplished under the skilful management of Fauconberg. They lodged in Brooke House, Holborn, from which vantage point they issued out either for a gracious reception from the Protector standing under the cloth of State (at which they paid many flowery French compliments to all members of the Cromwell family, Oliver downwards), or to enjoy such English delights as hunting near Hampton Court. The Master of Ceremonies was requested by Cromwell to visit the distinguished emissaries every day to make sure that everything was to their liking. It was all voted a great success, even if Fauconberg professed himself privately afterwards as absolutely exhausted, having had no time to himself even to write a letter, dancing attendance ‘both nights as well as days’ upon the ‘Monsieurs’.14
But there was a blight on the family spirits for all this gracious dalliance and despite the fact that the Fauconbergs as a couple continued to shine. Half Royalist, half Cromwellian as they were they created exactly the right conciliatory impression that Mary’s father must have hoped to achieve by the alliance in the first place, and in July they went on a triumphal tour of the Fauconbergs’ native North. Nevertheless death was beginning to stalk Oliver’s intimate circle and to bring some of its most loved members into its sights. Thurloe, the minister Oliver was said to have loved before all others, had been gravely ill in the spring although now recovered. His old friend of thirty years, the Earl of Warwick, died shortly after the institution of the new second chamber that he refused to grace. In June baby Oliver Claypole, the youngest of Bettie’s little family, died at the age of a year. Above all, Bettie was seriously and painfully ill; and it was that illness, thought by some to have been exacerbated by the death of Hewett at her father’s hands but surely in truth more affected by the untimely loss of her child, which was now beginning to obsess the little community at Hampton Court.
Poor Bettie’s sufferings already had a considerable history, all too explicable in view of the fact that the modern diagnosis of her ailment is cancer, either of the womb or stomach. At the time Dr Bate, Oliver’s physician, described her as suffering from ‘an inward imposthume of her loins’ which caused her great agony, while Heath described it as an ulcer of the intestines, which drove her specially frantic by the stopping of her menstrual terms; Clarendon confirmed that the doctors did not know how to treat it. Four years earlier she had been gravely ill, sufferings which had at least deepened her spiritually, for as she told Sir John Reynolds, she had seen ‘much of God in this late visitation’. Little Oliver, her fourth living child, had been born in June 1657, just after the Protectoral Investiture, and it seemed that experience had taken much out of her, for she was still much shaken by her ordeal at the time of her sisters’ weddings in November. By June of 1658, her only known letter, written in her own hand, apologizes pathetically to Henry’s wife for not having written more but ‘in earnest I have bin so extreme sickly of late that it has made me unfitt for anything’.15 She was now taken down to Hampton Court with her father to see if country air, or perhaps the medicinal waters of Tunbridge, which the Countess of Devonshire stated had done miraculous cures, especially with young children, would help her towards recovery. But the administering of the waters, if they were beneficial to the Protector, only caused poor Bettie additional agonies.
At Hampton Court Bettie had been given three rooms as nurseries for herself and her little family – Cromwell, Henry and Martha, who as the daughter of his favourite inherited the special love of her grandfather. One of these rooms had been occupied by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, one led to the tennis court, another had been part of the armoury; they were now pleasantly decorated with tapestry hangings of the story of Artimesia and Orlando, Persian and Turkey carpets, and chairs, couches and stools generally covered in sky-blue taffeta and embroidered in silk and gold. So the Protector had been able to enjoy the company of his grandchildren about him, together with Bettie’s own coveted presence. The closeness of this father and daughter relationship was poignantly attested by Marvell: how
… She with Smiles serene and Words discreet
His hidden Soul at ev’ry turn could meet …
Doubling that knot which Destiny had ty’d …
With her each day the pleasing Hours he shares,
And at her Aspect calms his growing Cares;
Or with a Grandsire’s joy her Children sees
Hanging about her neck or at his knees.
Even at this distance of time, it is easy to understand the charms of Bettie’s company. First she had a sweet forthcoming nature, a natural warmth which enabled her to combine ‘the elevation of mind, and dignity of deportment, of one born of royal stem’, as one contemporary put it, ‘with all the affability and goodness of the more humble’. In short she acted ‘the part of a princess very naturally’. At the same time this grace and vivacity was evidently accompanied by an attractive streak of compassion applied not only to her nearest and dearest but to the stricken in general.
Perhaps it was those pains she had had to bear intermittently from an early age (even now she was only twenty-nine) which had deepened her from a somewhat wilful young girl whose predilection for ‘carnal vanities’ had disturbed her father to one who would identify herself more widely with the suffering lot of humanity. There had been earlier stories too of her haughtiness to women of lesser rank, so that perhaps her head had been a little turned by her youthful importance. Marvell commented on how ‘with riper years her virtue grew’ and in 1659, in his biography of her father, Carrington wrote lyrically of her desire for intercession. ‘How many of the royalist prisoners got she not freed? How many did she not save from death whom the laws had condemned? … She employed her prayers even with tears to spare such men whose ill fortune had designed them to suffer.’* So the Protector, able to refuse her nothing, would find ‘his sword falling out of his hand, his arms only served to lift her up from those knees on which she had cast herself to wipe off her tears and to embrace her’. The same picture was built up, if more informally, by Toland in his life of Harrington, where he described her as effecting the release of Sir John Southcote, guilty of visiting his ladylove unlawfully, by going to her father ‘in a huff’.17 Bettie, the petted favourite of Oliver’s Court, was one of those happy beings in whom the possession of influence brought out not arrogance but a desire to succour and assist the needy. It was hardly surprising that after her death this golden girl received favourable obituaries from friend and enemy alike.
But now Oliver her father was about to be subjected to that terrible corollary to any great loving relationship – the prospect of the loved one’s sufferings, with ever hanging over him the dreaded shadow of her ultimate loss. The July of 1658 was hot and dry, in contrast to the piercing cold of the winter. Throughout the month the unfortunate girl twisted in anguish with her pains, unable to gain any relief at the hands of the desperate and helpless doctors. ‘The truth is, it’s believed the physicians do not understand their case,’ Fleetwood told Henry in Ireland, although with the benefit of modern knowledge one can realize that there was by now little chance of Bettie surviving the onslaughts of the cancer which was slowly killing her.18 Around her, prayers were sent up. Above all, Oliver was determined to give her his own personal care and watch (although he himself was failing). Surely the great strength he had once had could sustain his child now! Marvell gives an unforgettable picture of the heroism of the dying girl, trying to stifle her pains so as not to alarm her father, while the father in turn tried to hide his own anguish so as not to hurt her further:
She lest He grieve hides what She can her pains
And He to lessen Hers his Sorrow feigns …
But it was all useless. Father and daughter knew each other too well for concealment. And the vain effort at suppression only left them both further exhausted and hopeless:
Yet both perceiv’d, yet both concealed their Skills,
And, so diminishing, increast their ills …
By the beginning of August Bettie was desperately sick. Often Oliver watched all night. The course of her illness cast a total gloom over Council as well as Court, and official business became reduced to a minimum. When the Dutch Ambassador Nieupoort made a State visit to London at the end of July, Marvell was deputed to entertain him in Oliver’s absence. He offered him ‘a public reception with barges and coaches’ such as was normally given on such occasions. But Nieupoort tactfully refused, knowing the whole Court to be in heavy distress for ‘the mortal distemper of lady Claypole’. In the end, he had a meeting in private with the Protector, who came up from Hampton Court briefly the next day, apologizing for his preoccupation with his personal affairs. It was hardly likely that Bettie could survive long, if the fact was apparent to all around her save the Protector.
Years later, long after her own death and that of her father, a law-suit between an apothecary named Phelps, who delivered all medicines to the Protectoral household, and Bettie’s widower John Claypole, on the subject of medicines still unpaid for, showed the amount of potions which had been tried in hope and discarded in despair. Then she was granted that little respite which sometimes comes to the dying. She rallied slightly. It was at this point that the Quaker George Fox tried to comfort the sick woman and sent her an improving dissertation, beginning: ‘Friend, be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts …’ Once turned in her own mind to God, then would Bettie receive God’s strength and power ‘to allay all blustering storms and tempests’. She was said to be strengthened by this message. Indeed in general Bettie’s spiritual conduct was above reproach, beginning with the self-abnegation which she had shown in trying to spare her father the extreme display of her sufferings. It was Carrington who wrote fittingly of her ‘Amazonian’ endurance of her trials.19
The release of Bettie by death came finally in the early hours of the morning of 6 August. Her father collapsed completely. By the date of her funeral, four days later, he was still in a state of sufficient prostration to be watched over by his wife and Mary Fauconberg, neither of whom was thus able to attend (although Richard Cromwell and Fauconberg himself were present). The part of chief mourner at the funeral was played by Cromwell’s sister, Robina Wilkins. The ceremony itself had a strange Arthurian quality about it. It took place at night in Westminster Abbey and beforehand the body of the dead girl was borne solemnly by barge from Hampton Court, through the late twilight of the August evening. A flotilla of boats, filled with silent courtiers, accompanied it on its mournful journey down the Thames. The barge reached Westminster Stairs at eleven o’clock, where the body was carried to the Painted Chamber, and there rested an hour on ‘a stately hearse’. At midnight the procession wound on to the Abbey, and there the last rites were performed in the Henry VII Chapel; Bettie’s coffin was subsequently interred there, to join those of her grandmother, one of her aunts, and other dignitaries of the Commonwealth. Alone of them all however, Bettie was not disturbed in the crueller climate of the Restoration: her resting-place had vanished, and was not discovered until 1725, when workmen making alterations in the chapel for the installations of the Knights of Bath came upon it.*20 The dean of the day had the silver plate marking her coffin which they had removed replaced, and so Bettie Claypole, alone of Cromwell’s family, continues to lie in state in Westminster Abbey. It was as though the great love that the Lord Protector had borne for her in life still exercised its watchful care after her death.
Oliver never recovered from Bettie’s death. It was a fact recognized by his contemporaries, from Marvell who spoke of ‘the dear Image gone’ and so ‘the Mirror broke’, to Richard Cromwell who chose another comparison of a mighty tree threatened with extinction in describing the days following his sister’s decease: ‘It is one thing to have the greatest bough lopt off, but when the axe is laid to the root then there is no hope remaining; such was our real fear.’ Carrington carried the comparison of the tree further, and in doing so laid his finger on the especial tormenting grief of the parent who lives to bury his own child, because it is against nature for the old to mourn the young. ‘Even as branches of Trees being cut and lopped in an ill season, do first draw away sap from the tree … In like manner, during the declining age of his late Highness,’ he wrote, ‘it was an ill season, in which men usually do as it were reap all their consolation from the youth and vigour of their children’ that he should thus be deprived and weakened.21
Subsequently Oliver had the Bible read much aloud to him, including that great passage from the fourth chapter of St Paul to the Philippians, which he described as having saved him so long ago when the death of Robert, his first-born, had gone like a dagger to his heart.22 ‘Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where, and in all things, I am instructed, both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ When the reading was over, he repeated the words of the Scriptures again to himself from memory, dwelling particularly on the thirteenth verse: ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.’ But then for a moment he would protest against his sorrows, comparing himself to Paul: how much the weaker creature of the two he was: ‘You have learnt this, and attained to this measure of grace, but what shall I do? Ah poor creature, it is a hard lesson for me to take out, I find it so!’ But then again his faith would begin to work, and as he praised Paul’s submission to the divine will, he too would begin to find new sustenance in himself. He would talk thus to himself: ‘He that was Paul’s Christ is my Christ too …’ And so the old man in his loss gradually drew comfort and support from the thought of ‘the well of salvation’ and Christ’s ‘covenant of Grace’.
Although the Protector had picked up physically from his prostration by 17 August sufficiently to go about his affairs at Hampton Court, and even to ride in the park, the change in his demeanour struck those who had not seen him for some time.* 23 George Fox, like a holy harbinger of doom, went down to Hampton Court again hoping to reason with him on religious matters and saw Oliver attended by his lifeguards. ‘And I saw and felt a waft of death go forth against him,’ he wrote, ‘that he looked like a dead man.’ Fox was not able to have one of his contentious conversations with the Protector on this occasion; and when he went back to Hampton Court the next day to desire an audience, he was told that the great man was once more unwell. Yet for all these weaknesses and his own tribulations, Cromwell at this period neither suffered from a death-wish, nor expected himself to die. It was comfort and support to enable him to carry on in the service of God which he sought, not the ultimate peace of the grave. The modern idea of merciful oblivion, or even the more religious notion of a speedy celestial reunion with his dead child, was not one which such a sincere adherent to the precepts of Calvin could permit himself. The hour of death for each mortal was indicated by God and God alone. Just as Calvin had written in his Institutes that no medicine could avert the hour of death once established, equally the burden of existence could only be laid aside when God himself decided that the task designed for that individual was accomplished. If the providences were studied, those invaluable signs, there was certainly little in the political situation in England in the high summer of 1658 to indicate that such a time had come for the Lord Protector.
For one thing, although it had been agreed by Parliament that Oliver should nominate his successor, the name he had chosen (if indeed he had chosen one, which was uncertain) had not been made public. The whole matter of who – or what – might follow after his death was thus clouded with doubt. In the meantime the talk of an impending coronation had not been altogether stilled by the rejection of the previous year: there had been a resurgence of such rumours in November 1657 at the time of the ‘little wenches’ ’ palatial weddings. After the dissolution of Parliament in February, it was inevitable that gossip should drift that way again. In May, for example, it was said that two velvet caps, purple and crimson respectively, were being made up at the behest of the Master of the Wardrobe; they were of the type ‘worn only by princes’, and must surely be interpreted as a sign that some sort of royal change was meditated. During August, reported Bordeaux, there was renewed talk of Cromwell’s assuming the crown, made appreciably easier for him after the great victories in Flanders. At the same time there was also talk of a new Parliament – an expedient which, as has been seen, would have been made virtually unavoidable by the need for money had Cromwell lived. And Thurloe, discussing the meeting of the Council in mid-July on the subject of the succession, said that while the majority had voted that it did not matter whether this turned out to be hereditary or elective, the minority had afterwards insisted on adding that it was ‘desirable’ to have it continued elective. ‘I fear,’ wrote Thurloe to Henry Cromwell, ‘the word desirable will be made necessary, if it ever come upon the trial.’24 It was evident that the hard core of opposition to the plan of coronation had in no way yielded their objections.
As for Oliver’s own view, that too was still too undefined and protean at the moment of his last illness for any definite conclusion to be drawn. He told Thurloe in mid-July apropos the Council’s vote that since he could get no proper advice from those he expected to give it to him, he would ‘take his own resolutions’. He could no longer be satisfied to sit still and ‘make himself guilty of the loss of all the honest party, and of the nation itself’. Thurloe, who had of course hoped for the monarchy in the previous year, interpreted this reply optimistically. He told Henry Cromwell that he had long wished for the Protector to proceed according to his own satisfaction ‘and not so much consider others, who truly are to be indulged in everything but where the being of the nation is concerned’. Nevertheless it was a long haul for Cromwell between such explosive sentiments to his confidant, and the actual assumption of the crown. This would still, so it seemed, have to take place in the teeth of his oldest supporters. The problems he would always experience in bringing himself to take such a step had already been amply demonstrated by the events of spring 1657. No one knew better than Thurloe the prolonged state of doubt which could prevail in the mind of the Protector: while he consoled himself that it was ‘good for a man both to hope and wait for the salvation of God … and I trust, he will at last show his highness a right way’, there was no absolute proof that the decision of May 1657 would in the end have been reversed.25 So that the most that can be said with certainty of the prospects for a monarchical settlement had Cromwell lived was that it was still within the bounds of possibility – and still hedged with difficulties.
The strange thing was that nothing was done about the succession during the brief period of Oliver’s recovery after his first bout of illness. It was all the odder because the detailed correspondence of Thurloe to Henry Cromwell throughout this period mirrors the day-to-day joys and anxieties that beset the Court, much as he had once regaled him with the suspenseful story of the kingship. And Thurloe had bemoaned the ‘great alarum’ which Oliver’s sickness had caused them, ‘being in the posture we are now in’, that is to say, with nothing definite planned for the future. Fleetwood confirmed that ‘these late providences hath much retarded our publicke resolutions’. Since recently all work had been held up in the simple sorrow of Oliver’s illness, there had been no progress at all in what Thurloe to Henry termed ‘our business’. Now, said Thurloe, God had given them a further space ‘and the Lord give us hearts to make good use of it’.26 Nevertheless the Council did not act. It was as though, reassured once more by his rallying, his comrades still could not believe that Oliver Cromwell would actually die.
It may however have been during this period of recovery that Oliver himself sent from Hampton Court to Whitehall to obtain a certain sealed paper, in which he was said to have named his successor. The emissary despatched was his valet John Barrington. But the paper was never found, in spite of the palace being searched ‘very narrowly’.27 Nor did Oliver ever enlighten those around him as to the name which had been written therein. For this reason, it has sometimes been suggested that of his sons he named the more manly Henry as opposed to the douce and ineffectual Richard. The tone of Thurloe’s correspondence to Henry, not only the reference to ‘our business’ but other ambiguous phrases, is certainly susceptible of the interpretation that he at least believed Henry to be his father’s secret choice, so long as the death was not sudden enough to work to the absent Henry’s disadvantage. But Thurloe, while a most reliable guide to the Protector’s intimate conversations and day-to-day actions, was not always correct in his guesswork about the hidden workings of his mind, as witness his confident but false prediction concerning the kingship. He was also personally close to Henry, and could as well as any contemporary estimate his natural advantages of character over those of his brother; perhaps the wish was father to the thought.
Since the only other detail known about this vanished document is that the Protector had drawn it up shortly before the Investiture, the odds must in fact be heavily in favour of his having named Richard his elder son. This was after all the period when he deliberately drew Richard into prominence, made him Chancellor of Oxford, and generally attempted to mould him into a less retiring, more exciting image. He did not at the same time attempt to send for Henry from Ireland. In family matters, Oliver Cromwell was a conservative man. What was more, he knew the dislike of many of the Army officers for Henry. It is unlikely that he would have deliberately preferred the younger to the elder son without revealing the fact, and preparing the world for it well in advance. In the same way, had he been seized with a secret preference for a truly nominated successor, possibly outside his own immediate blood relations, such as Fleetwood, as Heath afterwards suggested,* 28 it is unthinkable that he would not have shared the secret with the man in question before his death. Yet Fleetwood never asserted this. Enigmatic as Oliver was in many ways, he had no desire to wreck by a surprise solution after his death the peace of a country he had tried so long to secure during his life. His public silence should therefore be seen more truly in the context of his own conviction that the time had not come for him to die, than of some complicated private conspiracy.
As it fell out, on the night of 17 August however Oliver was stricken down again with severe pains in his bowels and back; he could not sleep. Fleetwood at least hoped that they would all derive some spiritual benefit from such a development: ‘Oh! that we might in some proportion have suitable effects from such a dispensation,’ he wrote. In the meantime the illness showed no sign of abating. It was decided to bring the Protector back from Hampton Court to Whitehall. On 24 August the news that Thurloe had to pass on to Henry was grim indeed: on the Friday as well as the Saturday Oliver had fallen into what he called fits, long and rather sharp. There was general consternation, and Thurloe ended the letter with a hastily added footnote: ‘PS His Highness is just now entering into his fitt. I beseech the Lord to be favourable to him in it.’ But still Thurloe’s faith in his ultimate recovery was unshaken: ‘the doctors do not conceive there is any danger to his life’.29 It was a faith shared by Oliver himself: Fleetwood told Henry that the Protector had had some ‘very great discoveries of the Lord to him in his sickness, and hath had some assurances of his being restored’, although ‘I shall desire it may not go further than your own breast’. Indeed Fleetwood’s excited remarks, coupled with another mention of ‘a revelation’ given to the Protector during his illness and Thurloe’s unswerving optimism, suggest that it was Oliver as much as the doctors who was the purveyor of the general confidence which now animated his closest circle. And this confidence itself seems to have sprung from some interior certainty, some vision of survival, which the Protector believed had been granted to him. So that it was in no sense in dread, but rather buoyed up by earnest hopes, that the Court faced the ordeal of the coming days.
Were they in fact right, courtiers, doctors and Protector himself, to believe that his disease was not necessarily mortal? That depends of course on what interpretation is put on the medical evidence bequeathed to us from the seventeenth century concerning his illness, bearing in mind the well-known adage that no hundred per cent diagnosis can ever be made in the absence of the patient (and his corpse). Modern research has pointed out that Oliver, in common with large numbers of his contemporaries, must have suffered from malaria. Indeed it has been said that this disease attained its widest distribution in Europe in the seventeenth century, while it was still fairly common in England until 1840.* Although, brought up as he was on the edge of the marshes of the Fens, it would have been possible for Oliver to have acquired the disease in childhood, it seems more likely he first acquired it in the fetid swamps of Ireland during his campaign there (where he fell extremely ill). The so-called ‘tertian agues’ from which Oliver and others of the period suffered showed as their name indicated the characteristic three-day cycle of a malarial infection, since all the parasites injected by one mosquito bite would be at the same stage of development. Then followed the typical development of a malarial fit, with a cold stage, a hot stage and finally a sweating stage. But it is important to emphasize that this highly prevalent European malaria was not caused by the same bug which would prove so lethal to Europeans in Africa later. The European P. (Plasmodium) vivax, as opposed to the African P. falciparum, was rarely a killer. The main effect of prolonged attacks of P. vivax over a long period was to cause chronic anaemia, due to the parasite’s destruction of the haemoglobin contained in the red blood cells. Vigour and strength would decline. Nevertheless tertian malaria, while it obviously rendered the sufferer more susceptible to other diseases, rarely in itself was more than a contributory cause of death. Had it in fact been a killer on the African scale, much of the English and indeed European population would indeed have been wiped out.
In the particular case of Oliver Cromwell, not only did he show symptoms of malarial attacks, but the remedies of the time for it were tried on him. A favourite was the Peruvian quina-quina or bark of the tree which had been shipped to Spain and found efficacious; although ironically enough the real healing bark cinchona (from which quinine is now made) was only discovered by mistake, substituting for the popular myroxlyon bark of the time when supplies ran short. Myroxlyon could cause fevers and delirium: nineteenth-century doctors suggested that Cromwell might even have died of it. However there is no proof that in this case it was applied in sufficient quantity. But as has been seen, the unfortunate man also suffered from a number of other diseases, more peculiar to himself, including the stone. From malaria, he had recovered previously and might have recovered again – as it was generally thought he would. But a severe case of septicaemia or blood-poisoning, set up by an infection of the kidneys and bladder caused by the stone, coming to a man weakened over many years, could be lethal; such urinary infections were of course particularly prevalent in an age without antibiotics.* In this connexion it is interesting that his first phase of illness of mid-August was compared directly to the ‘distempers’ he had had in Scotland in May 1651. On that occasion he had been first ill of the stone, and then a fortnight later tortured by five fits of fever. Now the stone, which had bothered him so much since then, was tormenting him again: it seemed more than a coincidence that he also fell into fevers, reminiscent of the effects of a severe poisoning in the blood. The Venetian Ambassador traced the progress of his disease in two letters of 20 and 27 August: gout, then the stone ‘from which at times he suffers extremely’, a hope of improvement and finally a lapse into a tertian fever. As the post-mortem showed, Cromwell’s spleen was suppurating with infection. Wrote Dr Bate: ‘though sound to the eye’ it was in fact ‘a mass of disease and filled with matter like the lees of oil’. It is possible of course that this was merely the termination of the malaria, but it is even more likely in view of the general benignity of the seventeenth-century malaria which Cromwell like many others learnt to live with that it was the infection caused by the wretched stone which ultimately caused his death.30 Indeed so rarely were these tertian agues fatal that Cromwell’s sudden collapse at the end even led to accusations of poison: Dr Bate (turned Royalist) was even supposed to have boasted in later years of having administered the poison himself.
So the Lord Protector continued to grapple manfully with the grasping fingers of his weakness. On Thursday, 26 August he was well enough to have dinner with Whitelocke. The Protector discoursed with him privately, said Whitelocke afterwards, about his ‘great businesses’. About this time he also had one last unpleasant interview with his former comrade and sometimes chief, Fairfax, on the subject of his daughter’s marriage to Buckingham; Fairfax was so infuriated at the idea of Buckingham’s arrest – he was now incarcerated in the Tower of London – that he flew into a passion in the course of their talk, cocked his hat and threw his cloak over his arm. It was not always prudent to treat the Protector thus, and his servants expected Fairfax to join his son-in-law in the Tower forthwith; but Oliver, either through exhaustion or policy, ‘was wiser in his passion’ and let him be.31 The next day, Friday, 27 August, Cromwell was once again subject to alternate hot and cold fits, of an exceptionally severe nature, followed by ‘a breathing sweat’. At last the doctors were beginning to worry whether he would continue to surmount such ordeals; even Thurloe showed signs of genuine worry about the future: ‘How we are all like to be left as to outward appearance, I need not mention,’ he told Henry, ‘I write of it with great perturbation, yea and perplexity of mind.’ The next day was set aside for prayer.
By the beginning of the following week, the news was dramatically worse: Oliver had hardly been conscious at all and the doctors could no longer hold out any hope. Yet Thurloe still clung desperately to the fact that the Lord had ‘as in some former occasions’ given the Protector a particular assurance ‘that he shall yet live to serve him’. How could he die when no successor was yet named? It was not Charles Stuart that Thurloe feared, his interest was not so great, nor his party so powerful in themselves – ‘but I fear our own divisions’. Thurloe also reported a fact, confirmed by letters of both Fauconberg and Fleetwood on the same date, that there was no successor named publicly. He did indeed on this very day attempt to press Oliver a little on the subject in his moments of consciousness, but according to his own version, the Protector’s illness ‘disenabled him to conclude it fully’. Fauconberg had a different story: Thurloe simply lacked the resolution to insist on the matter, fearing Oliver’s displeasure if he recovered.32 It was a remarkable tribute to the strength of will still exerted by the palpably dying man that his own assurances of recovery still counted for more with his devoted servant than all the divisions of the country which they were fast heading for on his death.
On the Tuesday, Fauconberg writing to Henry added a postscript to his letter: Z – his code for the Protector – was now beyond all possibility of recovery. Fauconberg hinted that he might support Henry’s claim to succeed, if he chose to make it, and Lockhart too could be brought to that way of thinking. The officers, on the other hand, representing that rival faction from the Cromwellian family, had had a long prayer-meeting on the day before, but it was not known what they had decided. In any case Fleetwood himself continued to stress Oliver’s ‘great assurances of his recovery, which I do think, hath much in it’.33
And Fleetwood was right. Oliver did not die. The fit passed as so many had done. On the Monday night, 30 August, the hot dry summer weather broke in a colossal storm, the like of which had not been known in the country for hundreds of years. Far away in the country a fifteen-year-old boy called Isaac Newton amused himself by jumping first with the storm and then against it to compute its force by the difference. So close was the tempest to the incidence of Oliver’s death that men afterwards transposed it for the two to coincide.
Tossed in a furious hurricane
Did Oliver give up his reign
wrote Samuel Butler, and Heath even repeated ‘divers rumours’ that Oliver had actually been carried off on the wings of the storm. Altogether the storm took the imagination of people and poets alike, Edmund Waller writing of ‘storms as loud as his immortal fame’ and ‘trees uncut’ which fell ‘for his Funeral pile’. Ludlow, trying to reach London in his coach, found his way actually blocked by the wind, not only by the mighty oaks crashing in his path, but also because the tempest itself was too strong for his horses to draw against. But on the Tuesday Oliver had sufficiently recovered consciousness to enquire whether Ludlow had come to London to stir up the Army. There was even some talk of moving him from Whitehall to St James’s Palace, the air being fresher there, since it was not on the river.34
In the last days, as in so many hours throughout his life, Cromwell’s thoughts began to stray, sometimes ecstatically, sometimes fearfully, but ever humbly towards the religion of God’s Covenant with his Elect which had so long sustained him.* His talk indeed was now all of the Covenant, how there were once two, but put into a single Covenant before the foundation of the world. At one moment he repeated of it the solemn words ‘It is holy and true’ three times. And he spoke continually of how man could do nothing unaided, but God could do what he willed. Yet he took comfort from the fact that the Lord had filled him with assurances of his Pardon and Love ‘as much as my soul can hold’. Children, he said to those around him, ‘live like Christians and I leave you the Covenant to feed upon … Love not this world, I say unto you, it is not good that you should love the world.’ Yet he quoted also often from St John, that if anyone did sin ‘we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous’.
Did the fears that haunt the deathbeds of the great, where lesser men go grateful for their ease, come also to the bedside of the Lord Protector? There was a story that Oliver on one occasion turned anxiously to a minister and asked: ‘Tell me, is it possible to fall from Grace?’ The minister replied soothingly that no, it was not possible. At this the Protector relaxed once more and sighed: ‘I am safe, for I know that I was once in Grace.’ Such words might conjure up a terrible picture: a man whose whole faith depended on the vital notion of Grace which once bestowed would never be withdrawn was apparently wavering in his belief at this last and crucial moment. Yet it is credible that Cromwell did pose some such hesitating question, couched as it was in such a tentative form. No man is a total stranger to self-doubt, not even on his deathbed. Perhaps it was the failure of that mysterious revelation, that curious providence, whose nature remains unknown to us, giving Cromwell to believe he would be spared, which caused this momentary uncharacteristic aberration. Whatever the cause, it was only a temporary doubt. Cromwell in his last twenty-four hours showed no such uncertainties, only the humble confidence of salvation: or as he said himself, ‘Faith in the Covenant is my only support, yet if I believe not, He remains faithful.’ Although he was heard to cry out three times the words from the epistle to the Hebrews, ‘It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the Living God’, he also took much comfort from the words of St John on the message of Christ: ‘I think I am the poorest wretch that lives. But I love God or rather am beloved of God … Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent us propitiation for our sins. We love him because he first loved us.’
On Thursday, 2 September the Council at last galvanized itself to act concerning the succession, although the Independent ministers were still praying confidently in terms which presupposed the Protector’s recovery. Ludlow recorded the prayer of one such, Dr Goodwin: ‘Lord, we ask not for his life, for that we are sure of; but that he may serve thee better than ever before.’ But the doctors shook their heads over men who persisted in thanking God for the ‘undoubted pledges of his recovery’ instead of merely praying for it, and Ludlow said sardonically that the chaplains were trying to ‘impose on God’. It was a curious attitude of certainty which persisted in a fashion even after Cromwell’s death: at the fast held by the Cromwellian household thereafter, Goodwin informed God that he had deceived them. The Council finally showed themselves more realistic: late on the Thursday night, four or five of them gathered round the dying man’s bed and attempted to get him to name his successor. Fauconberg told Henry afterwards that at this point his father ‘declared my lord Richard his successor’. But the tradition that by now he was too comatose to speak is well-founded, repeated not only by Flecknoe in his biography printed the following year, but by Dr Bate who referred to ‘a drowsy fit’.36 The name of his son Richard was put to him by the Council. Still the Protector was incapable of answering. But the second time he heard the name of Richard, he did manage to give some sort of affirmative, either a nod or the whispered word ‘Yes’. So his earthly cares were shuffled off.
During the night of the Thursday Cromwell rallied once more a little. He was after all approaching the anniversary of his most auspicious day, that day once adorned by the crowning mercies of Dunbar and Worcester. Is it too extravagant to suppose that the titanic will of the Protector exerted itself once more to survive through the midnight hours into the day of the anniversary itself ? Even if the effort was largely unconscious, he was nevertheless well enough again in the small hours to talk again of religion, having, said Dr Bate who was in attendance, made his private will. He was especially full of holy expressions during the night before his death, said Harvey. ‘Truly God is good, indeed he is’ he would say ‘he will not—’ but now his speech failed him. Harvey understood that he intended to say: ‘he will not leave me’. Frequently in the midst of his pains, he would cry out that God was good. And it is to Harvey that we owe the tradition of his last moving prayer beginning ‘Lord, though I am but a miserable and wretched Creature, I am in Covenant with Thee through grace.’ Here again, as he had done to Harvey – ‘my work is done but God will be with his people’ – he spoke humbly of those he would leave behind, his subjects in all but name: ‘Thou hast made me, though very unworthy, a mean instrument to do them some good, and Thee service; and many of them have set too high a value upon me, though others wish and would be glad of my death; Lord, however Thou do dispose of me, continue and do good for them …’ In general, all through the night, wrote Harvey, he was extremely restless, speaking much to himself, and when he was offered something to drink, he murmured: ‘It is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone.’
Now it was the morning of Friday, 3 September. According to Bate, who was present, the Protector was still holding his ground even at this late stage; indeed, turning to one of his doctors, he asked him why he looked so sad. The doctor replied gravely that it was surely becoming to look sad when he had the weight of the Protector’s life upon him. ‘You Physicians think I shall die,’ said Oliver, and grasping the hand of his wife for strength, he went on firmly: ‘I tell you, I shall not die this hour; I am sure on’t … I speak the Words of Truth upon surer grounds than Galen or your Hippocrates furnish you with.’ But later still as he weakened he told them ‘Go on Cheerfully’; he urged them to banish sadness altogether, and treat his death as no more to them than that of a serving-man. As he was slipping into unconsciousness once more, he told them that his own faith was all in God.37 And it was not in fact till some hours later, about three o’clock in the afternoon said Mercurius Politicus (although Thurloe said four o’clock and Whitelocke two), that the last crisis came. As John Owen had once written of the death of the saints, the Elect of God, it came surely at ‘the appointed season’; then were the chosen dismissed from their Watch.38 ‘The great captain of their salvation comes and saith Go Thy Ways, thou hast faithfully discharged thy duty; go now unto thy rest … And be they never so excellent at the discharging of their duty, they shall not abide one moment beyond the bounds which He hath set for them, who saith to all his creatures, Thus far shalt thou go and no further.’ Even to Oliver Cromwell the Great Captain had come at last and at the appointed time. His Watch was over. He had gone on his ways. He was in his own sixtieth year, and the fifth year of his Protectoral rule over England.