III. The Good Old Cause and the Fall of the Protectorate

Abstract

If any single turn of events condemned the Great Rebellion to its final collapse and made the Restoration ultimately inevitable, it surely took place that April night in 1659 when the regiments about London gathered at St James's in defiance of Richard Cromwell, ‘unanimusly crieing up the good ould cause And A Comanwealth, and noe single person’. The coup d'état which virtually ended the Protectorate left England at the mercy of the military grandees who had headed it and the Republican politicians who meant to profit by it. Both groups found themselves sunk too low in credit to erect a new regime in place of the one they destroyed, and after exposing their political bankruptcy for half a year longer they finally committed political suicide by quarrelling between themselves.

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