Before that time Oliver Cromwell was to be out of the world.  Though but in his sixtieth year, and with his prodigious powers of will, intellect, heart, and humour, unimpaired visibly in the least atom, his frame had for some time been giving way under the pressure of his ceaseless burden.  For a year or two his handwriting, though statelier and more deliberate than at first, had been singularly tremulous, and to those closest about him there had been other signs of physical breaking-up.  Not till late in July, however, or early in August, was there any serious cause for alarm, and then in consequence of the terrible effects upon his Highness of his close attendance on the death-bed of his second daughter, the much-loved Lady Claypole.  She had been lingeringly ill for some time, of a most painful internal disease, aggravated by the death of her youngest boy, Oliver.  Hampton Court had received her as a dying invalid, tortured by “frequent and long convulsion-fits”; and here, through a great part of July, the fond father had been hanging about her, broken-hearted and unfit for business.  For his convenience the Council had transferred its meetings from Whitehall to Hampton Court; but, though he was present at one there on July 15, he avoided one on July 20, another on July 22, and a third on July 27.  On the 29th, which was the fifth meeting at Hampton Court, he did look in again and take his place.  Next day Lord and Lady Falconbridge arrived at Hampton Court, where already, besides the Protestor and the Lady Protectress, there were Lord Richard Cromwell, the widowed Lady Frances, and others of the family, all round the dying sufferer.  After that meeting of the Council of July 29 which he had managed to attend, and an intervening meeting at Whitehall without him, the Council was again at Hampton Court on Thursday the 5th of August.  At this meeting one of the resolutions was “That Mr. Secretary be desired to make a collection of such injuries received by the English from the Dutch as have come to his cognisance, and to offer the same to the Council on this day seven-night.”  This was a very important resolution, significant of a dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Dutch, and a desire to call them to account again, which had for some time been growing in Cromwell’s mind; and there can be no doubt that he had suggested the subject to the Council.  But his Highness did not appear in the meeting himself, and next day Lady Claypole lay dead.  Before her death his grief had passed into an indefinite illness, described as “of the gout and other distempers”; and, though he was able to come to London on the 10th of August, on which night Lady Claypole’s remains were interred in a little vault that had been prepared for them in Henry VIIth’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, he returned to Hampton Court greatly the worse.  But, after four or five days of confinement, attended by his physicians—­on one of which days (the 13th) Attorney General Prideaux and Solicitor General