receiving from others credible notice of his brother’s acquiescence in the late revolution, Henry on 15 June forwarded his own submission to the new government (ib. vii. 684). Before receiving this letter parliament on 7 June had ordered him to deliver up the government of Ireland and return to England. Obeying their orders he reached England about the end of June, gave an account of his conduct there to the council of state on 6 July, and then retired to Cambridgeshire (Mercurius Politicus, 1659. pp. 560, 576, 583). For the remainder of his life Cromwell lived in obscurity. He lost, in consequence of the Restoration, lands in England to the value of 2,000l. a year, probably his share of the forfeited estates which had been conferred on his father (Calendar of State Papers, Dom. 1660, p. 519). With the pay he had received during his service in Ireland he had purchased an estate worth between six and seven hundred a year (Thurloe, vi. 773, vii. 15), which he succeeded in retaining. In his petition to Charles II for that object, Cromwell urged that his actions had been dictated by natural duty to his father, not by any malice against the king. He pleaded the merits of his government of Ireland, and the favour he had shown the royalists during the time of his power (Calendar of State Papers, Dom. 1660, p. 519). Clarendon, Ormonde, and many other royalists exerted their influence in his favour (O. Cromwell, Memoirs of O. Cromwell, p. 718; Thurloe, i.763; Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, p. 137, 2nd ed.) Accordingly the lands of Cromwell in Meuth and Connaught were confirmed to his trustees by a special proviso of the Act of Settlement (Collection of all the Statutes now in use in the Kingdom of Ireland, 1678, p. 588); but his family seems to have lost them in the next generation. They are said to have been illegally dispossessed by some of the Clanrickarde family, the ancient owners of the land bought by Henry Cromwell’s arrears (O. Cromwell, Memoirs of O. Cromwell, p. 725). During the latter years of his life Cromwell resided at Spinney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, which he purchased in 1661 (ib. p. 725). The king seems to have been satisfied of his peaceableness, for though more than once denounced by informers, he was never disquieted on that account. Noble collects several anecdotes of doubtful authority concerning the relations of Charles II and Cromwell. He died on 23 March 1073–4 in the forty-seventh year of his age, and was buried at Wicken Church in Cambridgeshire. His wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Francis Russell of Chippenham, whom he had married on 10 May 1653 (Faulkener, History of Kensington, p. 360), died on 7 April 1687. By her he left five sons and two daughters, the history of whose descendants is elaborately traced by Noble and Waylen (Noble, i. 218, ii. 403). His second son, Henry Cromwell, married Hannah Hewling, sister of the two Hewlings executed in 1686 for their share in Monmouth’s rebellion, and died in 1711, a major in Fielding’s regiment (Waylen, p. 33).
[Noble’s Memoirs of the Protectoral House of Cromwell, 1787; Waylen’s House of Cromwell and Story of Dunkirk; Thurloe State Papers (to this collection William Cromwell, the grandson of Henry Cromwell, contributed a great number of his grandfather’s letters); O. Cromwell’s Memoirs of the Protector, O. Cromwell, and his sons Richard and Henry, 1820; Cal. State Papers Dom.; Cromwelliana; Ludlow’s Memoirs, ed. 1751; Parliamentary, or Constitutional History of England, 1751–62; Nickolls’s Original Letters addressed to O. Cromwell, 1741; Carlyle’s Life of Cromwell.]
CROMWELL, OLIVER (1599–1658), the Protector, second son of Robert Cromwell and Elizabeth Steward, was born at Huntingdon on 25 April 1599, baptised on the 29th of the same month, and named Oliver after his uncle, Sir Oliver Cromwell of Hinchinbrook. His father was the second son of Sir Henry Cromwell of Hinchinbrook, and grandson of a certain Richard Williams, who rose to fortune by the protection of Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex, and adopted the name of his patron. Morgan Williams, the. father of Richard Williams, was a Welshman from Glamorganshire, who married Katherine, the elder sister of Thomas Cromwell, and appears in the records of the manor of Wimbledon as an ale-brewer and innkeeper residing at Putney (Phillips, The Cromwells of Putney; The Antiquary, ii. 164; Noble, House of Cromwell, i. 1, 82). In his letters Richard styles himself the ‘most bounden nephew’ of Thomas Cromwell. In the will of the latter he is styled ‘nephew’ (which may perhaps be taken to define the exact degree of relationship) and ‘cousin,’ which was probably used to express kinship by blood in general. Elizabeth Steward, the mother of Oliver, was the daughter of William Steward, whose family had for several generations farmed the tithes of the abbey of Ely. It has been asserted that these Stewards were a branch of the royal house of Scotland, but they can be traced no further than a family named Styward, and settled in Norfolk (Rye, The Steward Genealogy and Cromwell’s Royal Descent; The Genealogist, 1885, p. 34). The early life of Oliver Cromwell has been the subject of many fables, which have been carefully collected and sifted by Mr. Sanford
