Elizabeth and Dorothy Cromwell: Interreginas

Abstract

Elizabeth and Dorothy Cromwell occupied unprecedented—and unpreceded—positions in the Anglo-Scottish hierarchy: they were leading women in a state that had temporarily thrown off its monarchy. Married to the heads of the experimental protectorate that presided over Britain for a decade, their roles were neither governmental nor ceremonial or sovereign. It was their challenge to craft a place for themselves and the domestic aspects of their husbands’ lives that could complement the regime’s new set of values and its international agenda. And it is this chapter’s challenge to excavate their little-recorded lives from early obscurity and later from the broadsides and closet dramas that derided them. The ensuing story is familiar: these women’s biographies resonate with those of political women across the globe by way of the gendered criticism that they endured, and the double standard that has ensnared their posthumous reputation.

At 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve 1598, Princess Margaret was born to Queen Anna and King James VI of Scotland. Her father was pleased, for he already had a son and heir, and referred to her as “our dearest daughter.”¹ Anxious to celebrate, on 10 February, however, he decided that the royal baptism should be postponed until the spring due to the harsh winter. Of Margaret’s unfortunately brief existence, records survive that detail everything, from the weather at her birth to how much the embalmer was paid when she succumbed to illness at the age of two. Hers was a life well recorded.²

Sometime earlier in the same year, another future “highness” was born, south of the Anglo-Scottish border and into less lavish circumstances. There is no recorded date or place for the arrival of Elizabeth Bourchier, who was probably the first child or first daughter of James Bourchier, a wealthy merchant from Wiltshire, and his wife Frances Crane. Nor does any parish record her baptism. We can visit where she died, in Northamptonshire in 1665, and see the little grave that marks her resting place beside the Northborough church, but the stone appears unmarked: either it was never carved, or it faded with age. We can also browse pamphlets with harsh caricatures that proliferated during the decades of civil war—but what relation do these bear to the woman? Of her marriage, we can say with certainty that on 22 August 1620 at St Giles Cripplegate in London, she wed an undistinguished gentleman and Cambridge drop-out, a distant acquaintance of her family. What did Elizabeth think of her new husband, one Oliver Cromwell of Huntingdon, or of his politics? Very few clues remain. Indeed, it would be easier for a modern biographer to detail the brief and uneventful life of Princess Margaret than of the woman who survived England’s bloodiest conflict, married its most notorious ruler, and died in her bed at sixty-seven.

Elizabeth Cromwell, along with her successor and daughter-in-law Dorothy Cromwell (wife of Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son and successor), are in many ways unique for the problem that they pose to biographers. No other consort in this volume left behind so little documentation, and neither woman has been the subject of a modern biography. The historical position that they inhabited, too, was unprecedented. They are the only two consorts to non-royal English or Scottish heads of state, by-products of an experiment in republican government that remains a strange blip in an otherwise unbroken tradition of monarchy in the British Isles. In other ways, however, the remnants of these women’s lives are too familiar to us. Elizabeth’s treatment by history, in particular, resonates with those of other political women across the globe by way of the gendered criticism she endured, and the double standard that has ensnared her posthumous reputation. Broadsides, pamphlets, and biographies from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries deride her for being both lascivious and prudish, stingy and ostentatious, and, above all, plain.

The work of the modern biographer is to excavate Elizabeth and Dorothy from an unforgiving bedrock of anti-feminist history by searching for the scant pieces of their lives, but it is also to survey the forces in and after their time that have obfuscated these women. This chapter sets historical records against rumour, myth, and slander to consider what we know about Elizabeth and Dorothy Cromwell. It analyses their time at the heart of British politics, their precarious position during the Civil Wars and again after the Restoration, and the adversity that they faced even at the height of their husbands’ years in power.

Elizabeth

The first decade of the seventeenth century was a prosperous one for James Bourchier and his wife, Frances. A leather and fur merchant by trade, he was knighted during James VI & I’s coronation celebrations in London on 25 July 1603. In October 1610, he was granted a coat of arms. Bourchier and his growing family divided their time between various properties in Essex—often stopping at their manor house in Little Stambridge—and their town home in the London neighbourhood of Tower Hill. A daughter was baptised at a church near the former in 1607; six subsequent children’s births (and two deaths) are recorded in the London parish of All Hallows Barking.³ Years later, pamphlets would deride Bourchier’s first daughter, who was already five by the time he was knighted, for being “fitter for a Barn than a Palace,” but the truth is that it remains a mystery whether the future Protectress was born and raised in the countryside or in England’s largest city.⁴

The website of the parish of Stambridge claims that in her teenage years, Elizabeth met and fell in love with Oliver Cromwell on his frequent stops into the Bourchier’s home at Little Stambridge, where he liked to visit her brother, Richard.⁵ The story is plausible because the Cromwells had many connections with Essex society, but it is not corroborated by any evidence. A likelier and less romantic history sets the two families on the course of marriage negotiations after Elizabeth’s maternal aunt wed Oliver’s paternal uncle. Alternatively, the union might have been arranged by Oliver’s paternal aunt Joan Barrington, who had connections with the Bourchiers and often played matchmaker for her extended family. The Bourchiers were known to be wealthy landowners, and Oliver was struggling for capital after his father’s death in 1617. Robert Cromwell had left the family a not-unsubstantial income, but Oliver had several sisters to provide dowries for and a long-lived mother to look after.⁶ Perhaps he was also already eyeing a political career, which would bring with it its own expenses. In 1620, the Bourchiers and the Cromwells agreed to a £1500 dowry, and on 22 August, Elizabeth, aged 22, and Oliver, aged 21, were married in the beautiful medieval church of St Giles, Cripplegate.⁷ The event occasioned the first legal record to which Oliver Cromwell was party: three days after the wedding, he signed a bond providing for Elizabeth’s rights to “that parsonage-house of Hartford with all the glebe lands and tythes”—that is, the profit from the lands associated with the parsonage.⁸

Whatever the reason for their union, Oliver and Elizabeth’s relationship was seemingly a satisfactory match, perhaps even based on mutual love. In 1648, Oliver received a steep offer for Dorothy Maijor’s hand in marriage to his son, Richard, and he wrote to a friend that he “desired to be advised by my Wife” about how to proceed.⁹ In December 1650, Elizabeth wrote to Oliver, who was campaigning in Scotland, that “truly my lif is but half a lif in your abseinse.”¹⁰ After the Protectorate had fallen and the monarchy was reinstated, pamphlets enumerated the many perceived shortcomings of Elizabeth Cromwell—but they rarely included infidelity: even Samuel Pepys, insatiable gossip that he was, mentions the widowed Protectress just once to comment on a rumour about a courtship between her daughter and her chaplain.¹¹ In the first eight years of Oliver and Elizabeth’s marriage, Elizabeth bore seven children, six of whom survived infancy. The couple had nine children in total, and Oliver was devoted to both his sons and his daughters.¹² The family lived with Oliver’s mother, also named Elizabeth, at Huntingdon until 1631. But the Cromwellian star did not rise steadily, and after representing Huntingdon in Charles I’s third parliament (which sat between March 1628 and March 1629), Oliver recused himself from public affairs for the next decade and moved his family to nearby St Ives, where they became tenant farmers.

Of the 1630s, the twentieth-century biographer William Abbott writes, “Oliver Cromwell seemed destined to the oblivion which had since enfolded his fellows in school and college; to sink into the mass of country gentlemen with no more trace of his existence than their common lot of useful lives reveals.”¹³ Elizabeth left no clues as to how this temporary dip in fortunes affected her. There is also no indication of what she thought of—or how much she shared in—Oliver’s intense religious conversion during this period. Records connect him to the Arminian tradition within the Church of England in the 1620s, but by the 1630s he was enmeshed in a network of puritan preachers and scholars.¹⁴

A reversal of fortunes came when, through somewhat shady legal manoeuvring, Oliver managed to inherit leases on tithes in the town of Ely, Cambridgeshire, and the family moved to a stately manor house in 1636.¹⁵ Here, Elizabeth presided over the large kitchen that still faces the abutting church’s graveyard. She sent her eldest boys, including Richard, to Felsted, in Essex—the school that her own brothers had attended in their youth. During her children’s years at Felsted, it was governed by the prominent puritan thinker and anti-Laudian Martin Holbeach. In Ely, her last two children, Mary and Frances, were born in 1637 and 1638. Here, too, we can imagine her standing in the intimate wood-panelled parlour in 1639, when messengers brought the news of her eldest son’s death from illness while he was away at school.

In 1640, after an eleven-year hiatus and amid rising tensions both on the continent and at home, Charles I called a new parliament. Through his religious connections, Oliver Cromwell secured election as an MP for Cambridge.¹⁶ In the sessions that precipitated war with the King, he made little impact. Yet, this changed when Charles raised his standard against parliament in August 1642. It was Cromwell that led a force to Cambridge and secured the university’s plate and valuables before the King could seize them.¹⁷ He received an “inexplicably” quick promotion to colonel in the army and then, over the next ten years, achieved one of the most decorated military careers in British history.¹⁸

Few extant clues offer us any insight into Elizabeth’s life during the long decade of the civil wars. Upon taking a seat in parliament, Cromwell may have had Elizabeth sit for a portrait, as the British Museum holds a medal bearing her profile with the year 1641 inscribed below the bust; it would, however, have made more sense for such a piece to be commissioned in the 1650s when Cromwell was Lord Protector.¹⁹ The bust on the coin is striking because of its presumable fidelity to the likeness of the sitter, unlike later Protectorate portraits that finessed Elizabeth’s beauty. It also demonstrates an appropriation of royal-like iconography: Elizabeth’s heavy chin and wide sallow cheeks droop below a Roman diadem, and around her neck is a pearl choker identical to that which Henrietta Maria was almost always depicted wearing (see Figure 19.2).²⁰

In 1644, Oliver made careful provisions for part of his salary to be directed to his family at Ely. The war was now in full swing across England, Ireland, and Scotland, and causalities hit close to home for the Cromwell family: their second son, Oliver, succumbed to smallpox while serving in the army, and the beloved son of Oliver Cromwell’s niece died at the battle of Marston Moor in 1646. The family was, however, still growing at this time. In 1646, while leading the New Model Army on campaigns through Devon and Cornwall, Oliver was active in arrangements for his two elder daughters’ marriages—Elizabeth to John Claypole in January and Bridget to Henry Ireton in June—and he settled his wife Elizabeth and his two youngest children into a home in London. Then, he and Elizabeth turned their domesticating efforts towards their eldest surviving son, Richard.

Dorothy

Like her future mother-in-law, Dorothy (née Maijor, or Mayor) was the eldest daughter of a well-off country gentleman who had recently climbed up from the lower merchant classes. Her grandfather, Sir John Maijor, was the son of a brewer but had amassed fortune and social standing enough to serve as mayor for Southampton. He sent his only son, Richard, to study for a BA in law at The Queen’s College, Oxford. Richard Maijor married Ann Kingswell on 9 May 1625 and their eldest child, Dorothy, was born in 1627, likely in Southampton. When Sir John died in 1629, he endowed a generous portion of his estate to charitable causes. In 1632, the family relocated to Dorset to live at Richard’s newly acquired manor house near Gillingham. Seven years later they moved back east, just north of Southampton in Hampshire, onto a 10,000-acre estate at Hursley that included Merdon Castle. Dorothy’s childhood is largely unrecorded, except that her father appears to have been a litigious man who took issue with Sir John’s bequests to hospitals and almshouses, and thus left an unflattering paper trail contesting his father’s will. In an era that witnessed the splintering of national loyalties, the family was not known to be either parliamentarian or royalist: Richard was briefly the County Sheriff for Hampshire in 1639 and a Justice of the Peace in 1641, but he seems to have distanced himself from the machinations of the civil wars during the later 1640s. He and Ann had only two children, both daughters, and as a result, Dorothy was co-heiress to the family fortune when her father began marriage negotiations with the Cromwells in 1648.²¹

In February 1648, Oliver Cromwell wrote to his Hampshire-based friend, Colonel Richard Norton, informing him that his son, Richard, was to visit Norton in pursuit of a courtship opportunity. Oliver mentioned that he had already had a “very great proposition” of marriage for Richard—“truly very far greater” than any potential liaison with the Maijors—but that the young lady involved was not so attractive. He describes Dorothy as having “an assurance of godliness; yet indeed fairness,” indicating his respect for her piety (a constant theme in Oliver’s later letters to his daughter-in-law) and perhaps also revealing that this was something of a love match for his son.²² Indeed, as the marriage discussions continued, numerous letters indicated Richard’s visits to––or at least desires to visit––Dorothy at her family home in Hursley.

Oliver may have misjudged the extent to which Richard Maijor could be a miserly negotiator. In March, he met with Maijor and was impressed by his “plainness and free-dealing”; but in April he wrote again to Colonel Norton that Maijor’s demands for Dorothy’s inheritance, should Richard predecease her, were unreasonable. In re-reading the correspondences, even from a distance of four hundred years, there is a greediness to both sides that obfuscates any romantic interest: Oliver ended this particular letter to Colonel Norton by indicating that Dorothy’s potential dowry was too great an opportunity to lose.²³ To Richard Maijor, Oliver stressed his son’s devotion to Dorothy, pushing for “a close of this business” quickly, “if God please to dispose the young ones’ hearts thereunto.”²⁴ But he also noted that were he to acquiesce to Maijor’s demands, he would be left with nothing with which to provide for his two youngest daughters.²⁵

The families finally reached an agreement in April 1649, and Dorothy and Richard were married on 1 May that same year at Hursley. The couple spent much of the next decade there, where Richard styled himself Lord of Merdon and lived in a manner that put the family into debt within two years; and together they had nine children, four of whom survived childhood.²⁶ Dorothy frequently corresponded with Oliver, though he complained several times that she did not write to him often enough.²⁷ He refers to her affectionately as “Doll” and often contrasts her constancy and devotion with that of his son. Early in her marriage to Richard; for instance, Oliver entreated Dorothy to “provoke [her] husband” to listen for the voice of God.²⁸ And in July 1650, Oliver wrote to her father that “I could chide both [Dorothy and Richard] for their neglects of me: I know my son is idle, but I had better thoughts of Doll.”²⁹ Some weeks later, again to Richard Maijor, he provided the longest description of her character that we have in writing:

I pray tell Doll I do not forget her nor her little brat. She writes very cunningly and complimentary to me; I expect a letter of plain dealing from her. She is too modest to tell me whether she breeds or no. I wish a blessing upon her and her husband.³⁰

If just one of Dorothy’s letters had survived, we might confirm what I suspect from the clues: she was an intelligent and learned woman, “cunning” in her language and courteous towards her father-in-law, but also conservative in her willingness to discuss her health or the prospect of more heirs for the Cromwell clan. Alas, nothing in her hand is known to survive.

Lowliness Majestic

In January 1649, Charles I was tried under an expanded definition of treason; he was found guilty and condemned to die. A Victorian tradition relates how, on the eve of the execution, Elizabeth approached her husband to beg for the life of the King,

exert[ing] all her influence to save his life, but without avail; for though Cromwell loved and honoured her, and placed great reliance upon her as a wife, he did not consider that she was capable of adjudicating upon such matters, and he was right, for it was her woman’s heart that spoke, the true feminine instinct of mercy.³¹

A painting from 1839 also imagines the scene: Oliver, dressed in rough trousers and work boots, with a plate of armour and an honorary sash across his chest, ignores his family gathered around him. Three of his children, Richard, Elizabeth Claypole, and Bridget, kneel at his feet; his favourite, Elizabeth, reaches for his arm. Behind a desk to the right is a clerk, poised with his pen, and Elizabeth Cromwell—hands clasped—sits beside him. She appears poised and modest, with a black bonnet covering her hair. She has been dressed in an old-fashioned style, with a ruff collar, which contrasts with her daughters’ lace gowns; but her face is open and earnest, her features small, and her eyes trained on her husband.³²

Omitting the fact that no contemporary evidence exists to corroborate this event, the story is likely fabricated. Cromwell may have consulted with Elizabeth on family and financial matters, as his letter quoted above indicates, but it seems unlikely that he ever seriously discussed politics with her. The three surviving letters that he wrote her while campaigning in Scotland dwell only on religion and social obligations;³³ and, after the Restoration, Elizabeth wrote in defence of herself to Charles II that she “never intermeddled with any of those public transactions which have been prejudicial to his late or present Majesty.”³⁴ Similarly, while Cromwell was England’s most recognizable Parliamentarian and commanded the loyalty of the New Model Army, he did not preside over Charles’s trial, and he was only one of fifty-nine men who signed the death warrant.

I include this Victorian vignette, however, because it is the only real attempt to locate the wife of the future Lord Protector on the day that her fortune—and that of the British Isles—changed course. Dorothy was still in the countryside with her husband, whom Oliver constantly worried was too idle, whereas Elizabeth was certainly in London. She had participated in at least one state event thus far, riding with Lady Fairfax in a coach as part of the New Model Army’s triumph in 1647, but whether she attended or discussed the Regicide with Oliver, we do not know.³⁵ This image of her begging clemency for the King ascribes a role for the Protectress that is in keeping with a classical motif popular in both the Stuart and Victorian eras. Like many of the consorts included in this volume, Elizabeth embodies the subservient and queenly “feminine instinct of mercy” that, perceiving immanent violence, temporarily superseded the patriarchal hierarchy under which she lived.³⁶ Such a transgression can be excused because it is the product of a “women’s heart,” and because it throws into relief the classical virtú of the republican man. Next to Elizabeth, Oliver is steadfast and “indefatigable ... cut[ting] his way nearer to the skies,” as Andrew Marvell put it.³⁷

Thus, the utility of this nineteenth-century story for modern-day biographers of Elizabeth Cromwell is not its factual accuracy, but rather its reminder that the obscurity of her life and the prominence of her position at a pivotal moment in British history gave rise to numerous interpretations of her, beginning in the mid-1640s and continuing for centuries after. This one, at least, constructs a political personhood for the Protectress, albeit a traditionally limited one. In 1653, the Council of Officers ratified the Instrument of Government, the first written constitution in the British Isles. The Instrument carved out a role for its new holder of executive power, the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, but no clause delineated a position for the Commonwealth’s first lady. Compared with medieval and early modern queens, Elizabeth, and later Dorothy, had a diminished role in the state: their careers, or lack thereof, may demonstrate that early modern republicanism and humanist ideas of citizenship, both of which led straight to Locke and modern liberalism, had no emancipatory effects upon women.³⁸ Indeed, evidence suggests it may have had the opposite effect.³⁹

Early modern English and Scottish monarchs invested heavily in domestic metaphors to underpin their authority—in Laura Lunger Knoppers’s words, “the language of family encode[d] political power.”⁴⁰ “By the Law of Nature the King becomes a natural Father to all his Lieges at his Coronation” wrote James VI & I, the father of Charles I, in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598).⁴¹ The family was a microcosm of the kingdom. Domestic bliss symbolised and produced a peaceful realm: the fruits of domesticity—children—ensured dynastic continuity and secured monarchic power.⁴² The queen had a natural role in this construction, as the model subject to her lord and as the vessel through which the bloodlines flowed. But republicanism replaced divine ordination and a benign faith in the natural order with the modern constructed state, a cult of virtú, and an emphasis on civic participation that only occurred in public spaces traditionally inaccessible to half of the population. “Arms and letters, ars et mars: Women were shut out of the twofold work of culture and civilization,” writes Joan Kelly, because they could not govern and they could not attend grammar schools and universities.⁴³ Mothers and wives were still revered, but their role was “to nourish [a son’s or] husband’s ability to perform his public work.”⁴⁴

The burden of being a puritan woman during the Protectorate further blocked access to political participation. Rachel Trubowitz borrows from Milton to describe how puritan culture celebrated some women prophets as “lowliness majestic” but ultimately “reinforced traditional anti-female views of the nature of ‘women’” as unfit for public activity. Like the ass from the Book of Numbers who inspires King Baalam, women access grace by humbling and submitting themselves.⁴⁵ In Paradise Lost, “lowliness majestic” characterizes Eve’s demeanour as she rises from her position as a retiring auditor for the Socratic conversation between Adam and Raphael in order to tend the garden. Eve, John Milton describes, is so beautiful in her movements that were anyone to see her leaving, they would “wish her stay”—but her beauty comes particularly from her modesty and poise in leaving without disturbing those who might see her.⁴⁶ Such a paradox is one that Elizabeth and Dorothy would recognise.

Elizabeth and Dorothy: Life as Protectress

With the King dead, Oliver left London to assume the position of Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. Elizabeth may have initially planned to accompany him, but she cut short her travels with her husband to visit the newly married Richard and Dorothy. She was back in London and residing at the Cockpit, a residence attached to Whitehall, by 1650. Oliver joined her briefly before leaving to command the New Model Army in Scotland, fighting against the Scottish-crowned Charles II.⁴⁷ It is from this period that we have the only surviving letter in Elizabeth’s hand, addressed to her husband, and the only letters to Elizabeth from Oliver. To her, he writes of his health and of his relationship to God, and he presses her to “pray for me; truly I do daily for thee.”⁴⁸ On 4 September 1650, the day after a decisive victory at Dunbar in Scotland, he penned a quick note telling her gruffly that she “is dearer to me than any creature” and instructing her to ask either “Harry Vane or Gil: Pickering” for “particulars of our late success.”⁴⁹ Early in the next year, he sent her another message to “bless all thy good counsel and example to all those about thee,” suggesting that she advised him or a family member on some matter.⁵⁰ In her only response, from December 1650, Elizabeth complained that Oliver does not write to her often enough (“I wonder you should blame me for writing nowe oftnir, when I have sent thre for one: I canenot but thenk thay ar miscarid”), that she misses him, and that he neglects his “deare frend me Lord Chef Justes,” Sir Henry Rolle, who waits to hear from him. She also struggles to temper what reads like true affection with the piety that Oliver and her religion demanded:

I should rejoys to hear you desire in seing me, but I desire to submit to the provedns of God, howping the Lord, houe hath separated us, and heth oftune brought us together agane, wil in heis good time breng us agane, to the prase of heis name.⁵¹

Oliver returned to London in September 1651. By summer 1653, Parliament was pushing to have him crowned king. They settled for “Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland” and invested him as “His Highness” at Westminster Hall on 16 December 1653. The ceremony occurred in the afternoon, followed by a meal at the Banqueting House in Whitehall.⁵² There is no record that Elizabeth attended, but she did celebrate with her husband afterwards, feasting beneath the huge Rubens painting of James VI & I ascending to the heavens that was installed fewer than twenty years’ prior, an ominous start for the new antimonarchical government. On 14 April 1654, Elizabeth and Oliver moved into Whitehall Palace and took up residence in the rooms that had been assigned to the royal family for the past century. They were also granted the use of Hampton Court, the favourite residence of Henry VIII, and began decamping there on the weekends. At both Whitehall and Hampton Court, the rooms were re-hung with the late king’s collection of paintings and tapestries. The palaces were outfitted with a staff that included many of the mainstays of a royal retinue, such as a Master of the Ceremonies, Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and a suite of musicians—several of whom had been in the private company of Charles I and James VI & I before him.⁵³ Elizabeth helped to manage Whitehall’s refurbishment, and although later pamphlets derided her for dressing cheaply in the hood of a “Baggage Lady,” she encouraged or at least acquiesced to the use of £35,000 worth of royal decor.⁵⁴

The luxury and pomp of Cromwell’s household preserved Whitehall as a location for state functions. Elizabeth Cromwell was now given something of a more concrete role, as head of a household that frequently entertained public dinners. Just two weeks after she settled there, for example, she hosted the Dutch ambassadors on the occasion of a peace treaty that the Protectorate signed with the Netherlands “with the same regal splendour” as the former queen, Henrietta Maria, had done for foreign dignitaries.⁵⁵ But the transition to the royal palaces also provided critics of Elizabeth, from both sides of the proverbial aisle, with fodder for personal attacks. Some accused her of having too “slender” a retinue, “as slenderly accoutred, no more commonly, then one of her Husbands Horse boys running by her” when she went out.⁵⁶ This ill-befit the consort of the head of state. Others, like the poet and parliamentarian Lucy Hutchinson, thought her trappings too grand: “Oliver himself had much natural greatness, his wife and children were setting up for a principality, which suited no better with any of them than scarlet on an ape.”⁵⁷

As continues to be the case with women in the political sphere, Elizabeth’s appearance and any sign of ambition inflamed critics. She was grasping for power, according to a satirical pamphlet play called The Cuckoo’s Nest at Westminster (1648), which pits her against the Lady Fairfax in a comical fight for the crown.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, in an equally anti-Protectorate tract written during Richard’s regime, Oliver Cromwell rises from the dead and absolves his wife of his own misdeeds: “you were never accessary to any of my horrid Vilanies.”⁵⁹ Nor could anti-Protectorate writers decide whether Elizabeth was more an affront to their sense of decorum and English nobility, or to their eyes. A popular image from the Restoration depicts Elizabeth dressed poorly, unbefitting her new station in life, and declares in script below the image, “see how Protecresse & a Drudge agree.”⁶⁰ Elsewhere, she is likened to a gaudy courtesan with a painted face and false airs.⁶¹ Within the expansive bounds of these opposing opinions, where is the truth about Elizabeth?

The most well-read Restoration text on Elizabeth Cromwell was a satirical cookbook called The Court and Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwel (1664), which purports to share the Protectress’s recipes and eating habits. Reading it now is like undergoing a crash course on the politics of food and of keeping house. Styled “Joan,” a common name that referenced her humble origins, Elizabeth appears on the frontispiece with a monkey over her shoulder, symbolizing lust. The book’s subtitle, “Made Publick for the general Satisfaction” continues the insinuation that Elizabeth enjoyed exposure to an indecent degree. She is lascivious but thrifty: her clothing is beggarly, and she everywhere looks to cut corners, save money, and make the capital feel more like the farmland for which she longs. She is accused of bringing cows to Whitehall and of setting up a brewery in one of its royal chambers, creating a chaotic marketplace that the introduction compares to “Bartholomew Faire.” In many ways, as Laura Lunger Knoppers puts it, “Elizabeth’s household retrenchments [as the Restoration writer imagined them] parallel Oliver’s work in ruining the kingdom,” but The Court and Kitchin also allows readers to place disproportionate blame for the state of politics firmly upon “Joan.” At home, Elizabeth controls Oliver, refusing to let him eat an orange or to spend money, starving him and, by extension, the state. She is the antithesis of the nourishing housewife. She is the conniving rot at the base of the tree of government.

In reality, Whitehall probably never saw the backside of a cow or the “Covy of Milkmaids … Spinsters and Sowers” bustling about.⁶² Elizabeth Cromwell may have longed for a more familiar countryside, but she likely enjoyed some of her time in London. If she ever looked back upon her life in her final years, 1657 might have stuck out to her as the apex before the descent. It was a year marked by accolades and festivities. On 26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was re-invested as Lord Protector in a ceremony that distinguished itself in several important ways from that of 1653. This time, the coronation chair was used, and after the formal investiture had occurred, the crowd shouted, “God save the Lord Protector.”⁶³ Behind the symbols lurked significant power too: Oliver officially accepted the responsibility to select his successor. Elizabeth had been born to obscure gentry: she was now presumed to be the mother of the next Lord Protector. Her family had entered the highest echelon in British society. In August, Elizabeth danced at the elaborate wedding thrown for her youngest daughter, Frances, to Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick’s grandson, to a band that supposedly comprised of “48 violins”—double the number in residence at the court of Louis XIV of France.⁶⁴ In November, Mary wed the Viscount Fauconberg in a smaller, more intimate ceremony, and the celebrations included a courtly masque by Marvell.⁶⁵

Yet, the pendulum of fortune quickly swung the other way: in early spring 1658, Elizabeth Claypole, then just 29, became ill with what was probably cancer. She and her husband moved into Hampton Court so that she could be cared for by her parents and their doctors, and she died in great pain on 6 August 1658. Oliver was too distraught to attend the funeral, and his favourite daughter’s death precipitated his own. He died mid-afternoon on 3 September, surrounded by his family and holding his wife’s hand. His passing was marked by a proliferation of pamphlets and broadsides; one printed a eulogy to the Lord Protector and followed the poem with imperfect anagrams for each of his family members. “Elisabeth Cromvvell” becomes “Chast love be my rule,” befitting of a woman who spent thirty-six years by her husband’s side. Dorothy makes a rare appearance in print, and her name scrambles to “Come lordly worth”—unsatisfactorily non-descript about her personality or the personal trials that she underwent as wife to the heir presumptive.⁶⁶

Richard was appointed Lord Protector immediately and met with the Lord President and other councillors that same evening. He and Dorothy already had quarters in Whitehall, assigned to them back in 1654. Though they preferred to stay in Hursley, and Richard loved to hunt, Oliver had been increasing his son’s responsibilities in government throughout the Protectorate. Richard’s own tenure as the head of state was short and shaky and effectively over by the middle of April 1659. He penned his last official letter on 25 May 1659, and retired to Hursley in July.⁶⁷

There are no records that indicate Dorothy had any role in the short government to which she was intimately attached, so we cannot know how she felt to be back at her family home, living on her father’s extensive property with her young children. Certainly, though, her marriage did not weather the ensuing storms as well as that of her parents-in-law, which had withstood war and political upheaval. When Charles II landed in England in the spring of 1660, Richard Cromwell fled to the continent. He left Dorothy, who was eight months pregnant with their last child, and never returned in her lifetime. Dorothy spent the next fifteen years at Hursley, abandoned by her husband but unmolested by the new monarch. She died in January of 1676, leaving a gaggle of children who inherited her own father’s taste for property and litigation.⁶⁸

The end of the Protectorate was hardly less distressing for Elizabeth. After Oliver’s death, she was at first voted a one-time payment of £20,000 and a generous annuity of the same amount, titled “her Highness dowager,” and lent St James House for the duration of her life. These honours, however, ended with the Restoration.⁶⁹ At least she had left London, bound for the home of her son-in-law, John Claypole, in Northamptonshire by the time the new regime had her husband’s remains exhumed from Westminster Abbey so that they could be tried as a traitor to the realm. Hopefully, she never saw Oliver’s head displayed outside Westminster Hall, though it stayed there for over twenty years. Maligned in print and by London gossip, she wrote to the new King in November 1660 in an effort to absolve herself of charges of stealing royal jewels. In the extant plea, she describes herself as the victim of “many sorrows” and “ready to yield humble and faithful obedience to [Charles II’s] government.” She also “prays therefore for a protection, without which she cannot expect, in her old age, a safe retirement in any place of His Majesty’s dominions.”⁷⁰ No evidence was found against Elizabeth, and she was left to herself for the last five years of her life. Like her namesake daughter, she died of a difficult and protracted illness, cared for by her daughter Mary, in November 1665.⁷¹

Not long after Oliver was named Lord Protector, Elizabeth sat for an official portrait.⁷² Dressed in an expensive black gown with a low neckline, with heavy pearls around her neck and hanging from her ears, she has been described by modern commentators as stiff and clearly “uncomfortable.”⁷³ The pose resembles that of Henrietta Maria from a painting ascribed to the studio of Anthony Van Dyck, in which the Queen stands at the same angle to the viewer, with a similarly styled dress and an identical pearl choker around her neck. The golden brown satin silk in which Henrietta Maria is fully clothed even appears to be of the very same material that is draped about the arms of Elizabeth in the later portrait. Their faces, too, have a similar expression, tight lips below an impenetrable stare. The Queen is more beautiful than Elizabeth, whose hooded eyes droop into an expansive flat face; the painter, Robert Walker, evidently did not feel the need to ‘airbrush’ her features. But while it is likely that Elizabeth would have been less comfortable with the luxury and the responsibilities that came with the role of “her Highness” than Henrietta Maria had been, it does not show in the portrait. Her back is slightly more arched, and her eyes more daringly focused upon the viewer, but the sum of these details is a woman who could not be cowed by circumstance or gossip, whose demeanour merited the love and loyalty of England’s leading man, and who rose from lowliness to majesty.