If there had been so much of sovereign and aristocratic form in the First Protectorate, there was a natural increase of such in the Second.  In the first place, the family of the Protector now lived in the reflection of that dignity of the purple which had been formally thrown round himself.  The Protector’s very aged Mother having died in honour and peace at Whitehall, Nov. 16, 1654, blessing him with her last words[1], the family, in the Second Protectorate, was as follows:—­

[Footnote 1:  At “ninety-four years of age” according to a letter of Thurloe’s the day after her death (Thurloe to Pell, Nov. 17, 1654, in Vaughan’s Protectorate, I. 79-81); but Colonel Chester (Westminster Abbey Registers, 521, Note) sees reason for believing she had been baptized at Ely, Oct. 28, 1565, and was therefore only in her ninetieth year at her death.]

  HIS HIGHNESS, OLIVER, LORD PROTECTOR:  aetat. 58.

  HER HIGHNESS, ELIZABETH, LADY PROTECTRESS.

  Children and Children-in-Law.

1.  THE LADY BRIDGET:  aetat. 33:  Ireton’s widow, married to Fleetwood since 1652.  FLEETWOOD, though he had been recalled from Ireland in the middle of 1655, and had been in London since then, retained his nominal Lord-Deputyship till Nov. 1657.

2.  THE LORD RICHARD CROMWELL:  aetat. 31:  married since 1649 to DOROTHY MAYOR, daughter of Richard Mayor, Esq., of Hursley, Hants, who had been member for Hants in the Long Parliament, a fellow-Colonel with Cromwell in the Civil War, and afterwards in some of the Councils of the Commonwealth, in the Little Parliament, and in the Council of the Protectorate.—­Though Lord Richard’s tastes were all for a quiet country-life, with “hawking, hunting, and horse-racing,” he had been in both the Parliaments of the Protectorate, and had taken some little part in the Second.  His father now brought him more forward.  On the 3rd of July, 1657, when the Second Protectorate was but a week old, the Lord Protector resigned his Chancellorship of the University of Oxford; and on the 18th Lord Richard was elected in his stead.  He was installed at Whitehall, July 29.  He was also made a Colonel, and at length he was brought into the Council.  The fact is thus minuted in the Council’s Books under date Dec. 31, 1657:—­“The Lord Richard Cromwell did this day take the oath of a Councillor, the same being administered unto him by the Earl of Mulgrave and General Desborough, in virtue of his Highness’s Commission under the Great Seal.”  He was immediately put on all Committees of the Council; and generally after that, when he did attend, his name was put next after the President’s in the sederunt.

3.  THE LORD HENRY CROMWELL:  aetat. 29:  in the Army since his boyhood; Colonel since 1649; Major-General and chief Commander in Ireland since the middle of 1655.  At the beginning of the Second Protectorate he was still