E: p. 146
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.