_Unheirlike heir_; Richard Cromwell has received double measure of that
censure which the world's judgment too readily gives to unsuccess,
finding favour neither from Royalists nor Cromwellians. Macaulay, with
more justice, remarks, 'That he was a good man he evinced by proofs more
satisfactory than deep groans or long sermons, by humility and suavity
when he was at the height of human greatness, and by cheerful resignation
under cruel wrongs and misfortunes.' . . . 'He did nothing amiss during
his short administration.'
His fall may be traced to several causes: to the fact that the puritan
party proper, who supported him, the 'sober men' mentioned by Baxter
'that called his father no better than a traitorous hypocrite,' had not
power to resist the fanatic cabal of army chiefs: to the necessity he was
under of protecting some justly-odious confederates of Oliver: his own
want of ability or energy to govern,--a point fully recognized during
Oliver's supremacy; and to his own honourable decision not to 'have a
drop of blood shed on his poor account.' Yet there is ample evidence to
show that Richard, had he chosen, might have made a struggle to retain
the throne,--sufficient, at least, to have thus deluged the kingdom.
Richard's life was passed in great quiet after 1660: Charles II,
according to Clarendon, with a wise and humorous lenity, not thinking it
'necessary to inquire after a man so long forgotten.' His letters reveal
a man of affectionate and honest disposition; he uses the Puritan
phraseology of the day without leaving a sense of nausea in the reader's
mind. At Hursley he was buried at a good old age in 1712.