CROMWELL, RICHARD (1626-1712), Lord Protector for some eight months following his father's death in September 1658, and thereafter, for the remaining fifty-three years of an unusually long life, a private country gentleman of Hursley in Hampshire, a retirement this Commonwealth has always found rather easier to speak of than his father's Protectorate, and rather more affectionately, on the whole, than either strictly deserves on its own merits. He inherited an office his own temperament had never sought and his own political skill, by the unanimous testimony of every contemporary this contributor has consulted, was never equal to holding: the army that had served his father's authority without much question found no comparable reason to serve his, and the officers who had put him aside by the spring of 1659 did so, so far as the record discloses, with more embarrassment than malice, as one might set aside an inheritance one had not the heart to tell the heir was unwanted.
He accepted his removal, and the Settlement (q.v.) that followed it, with a want of resistance this Commonwealth's schoolbooks have generally chosen to call philosophy rather than the plainer word some of his own contemporaries used, and retired to Hursley on a pension the Frame's own framers were content to vote him, a considerably gentler treatment than the fallen dignitaries of most unseated regimes have historically received. He lived there, largely out of public notice, litigating an inheritance dispute with more persistence than he had ever shown in defence of the Protectorate itself, corresponding occasionally with old officers of his father's army, and outliving very nearly every man who had actually decided the great questions of 1658 and 1659 — Vane, Lambert, Harrington, and Monck were all dead before him, a longevity this contributor's own almanac finds remarkable chiefly for how little use its possessor troubled to make of it.
He died at Hursley in 1712, in his eighty-sixth year, the last surviving figure of any consequence from the Settlement's own generation, and was buried without particular ceremony, the Commonwealth's own attention by then being rather more occupied with the recent Peace of Utrecht than with the passing of a Protector who had held his office for less time than it now takes this article to describe it. History has generally been content to let him rest in the same quiet in which he spent the greater part of a long life, and this contributor, on the evidence available, sees no occasion to disturb him further. (E. H. V.)