The sergeants with their maces, the heralds in gold and scarlet, proclaimed, at Old Exchange, at Palace Yard, and in other places, Oliver Cromwell Lord-Protector, with the same dignity, and ceremony, and shouting as Charles Stewart had been proclaimed King. So a change so tremendous was accomplished with such little outward difference.
The new ruler had given his oath of fidelity to the new Constitution (an instrument drawn up in four days by the officers, with Lambert at their head) and had received the great seal and sword of State. By the afternoon all was over, and the man who little more than ten years ago had been a gentleman farmer, with no experience save that of the routine of a country estate, with no more knowledge of God and man than he could learn from his one Book, with no power, influence, or wealth at all, was now sole ruler, dictator, and symbol of one of the greatest nations in Europe and foremost champion of the Reformed Religion....
Elisabeth Claypole (Lady Elisabeth now) slept that next spring in Whitehall; the first night she lay on a bed with blue satin curtains brought by Henriette Marie from France, and not sold with the King's other effects by reason of the fine workmanship of the needlework on them.
A mirror once used by the Queen was in the room too, her fleurs-de-lis were embroidered in the hangings, and the whole chamber was still redolent of the perfumes she had kept in the caskets and cupboards. Elisabeth, who had less than any of her family the stern belief in fatalism, which was the central doctrine of their austere and heroic creed, and less blind reliance on the justice of the Puritan cause, felt a faint horror and a regretful remorse at lying among these splendours when the woman to whom they had belonged (to whom they still belonged, Elisabeth thought) dwelt in poverty and loneliness, unfortunate as Queen and wife.
That first night she dreamt dismal things, and woke up in the dark, oppressed with confused remembrances of the excitement of the day.
And with other remembrances, more awful; often had she heard an account of the execution of the King and listened with horrified and reluctant ears.
Now, as she sat up in the great bed, shivering in the winter night, she pictured, all too clearly, the late King as he had been described to her—the slender figure in the pale blue silk vest, with the George on the breast, and the hair gathered up under a white satin cap.
She thought that she saw him glimmer across the dark, looking down at his feet—he wore the wide shoes with silk roses, which had gone out of fashion since his death—and then at her, smiling bitterly.
He came, without moving his limbs, gliding to the bed, passed it, rose up a man's height from the floor, and disappeared in a shaft of shaking light.