![age of conquest iv protectorate age of conquest iv protectorate](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/OKZi1sX5WHo/maxresdefault.jpg)
However, they did object to Elizabeth’s prominence within that sphere. Popular royalists, unlike their republican opponents, did not object to the very presence of a court culture. These are part of the popular royalist polemics against republicanism that survived the Interregnum and flourished again in the early Restoration years (Wiseman, 57). The second set of discourses that feature Elizabeth object to her no less strenuously but on very different grounds. A primary piece of evidence used by to support this suspicion was the creeping royal pretension and visibility of Elizabeth Cromwell as “Protectress.” The popular republican opposition harbored a growing suspicion that Cromwell, the self-proclaimed Lord Protector, had betrayed his revolutionary ideals by creating his own monarchical sphere of official culture rather than dissolving it as promised. The first constitutes an emergent position in post-regicidal popular political rhetoric at this time, one which pilloried Cromwell and his fellow Army grandees as men who would be kings (Wiseman, 49). Indeed, she appears frequently within two other types of discourses. Second, if one turns to the popular cultural productions of the prolific mid-seventeenth- century press, one finds that Elizabeth was not so shadowy after all. (As one might expect, celebrations of Cromwell’s family appear during the last, most monarchical phase of the Commonwealth.) In fact, as Cromwell moved his regime closer to monarchy, his panegyrists could point to their continued omission of Elizabeth from their praise of the Protector as evidence that their politics hadn’t drifted fully into royalism. As I will discuss in section two, ending this practice was to have been a sign that English republicans had limited a ruler’s power over practices that they deemed private hence the absence of representations of Elizabeth and her family from the discourses that emerged from the earlier, more radical and moderate phases of Commonwealth republicanism. Republicans frequently criticized Charles for what they saw as his heavy-handed deployment of the monarchical sphere of “representative publicity.” The early modern monarch deployed the iconographics of his personal life, including, in Charles’s case, carefully crafted representations of his wife and family, as a visual form of public political power over the lives of his subjects (Habermas, 7-8). First, the invisibility of Cromwell’s “consort” should be read within the context of seventeenth-century English republican thought, especially as it pertains to issues of gender and the family.
![age of conquest iv protectorate age of conquest iv protectorate](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/uploads/articles/article_media/1482352583Screenshot2.png)
Rather than continue to assign Cromwell’s relative anonymity to her lack of personal charisma, I offer two counter-claims to the “dull Elizabeth” school of thought. Her own lack of character, in other words, meant that she left behind little material for historians to work with. The general assumption has been that Elizabeth Cromwell remains a “shadowy figure” because her own “heavy-footed” and “dull and tranquil” character prevented her from having the same sort of popular impact on the Protectorate that “the trim French Queen,” Henrietta Maria, had exercised - for better or for worst - upon the Stuart monarchy (Ashley, 49 Wedgewood, 89). (The six who survived included four daughters and two sons - one of whom, Richard, briefly assumed the title of Lord Protector after Oliver’s death in 1658.) Other than relatively minor attention to such details, however, discussions of Elizabeth Cromwell tend to be few and far between.
![age of conquest iv protectorate age of conquest iv protectorate](https://playmody.ru/uploads/posts/2019-09/1569482816_age-of-conquest-iv-1.jpg)
A miniature of the Protectress by Samuel Cooper shows a woman who was “neither uncomely nor undignified in person,” and Elizabeth is said to have provided her husband with the “benefit of the bed” by bearing him nine children (Firth, 8 Ashley, 28). Giles Cripplegate, that she was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier, a knighted fur-dealer and leather dresser, and that her marriage to Cromwell brought the future leader into alliance with those who would become power-brokers within the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I during the Civil wars. They report that Elizabeth married Oliver in 1620 at St. In the course of exhaustively documenting the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Interregnum Protectorate, historians have taken virtually no interest in his wife, Elizabeth.
#Age of conquest iv protectorate series#
(part of a series in Issue 33: First Ladies? Political Wives in Seventeenth-century England)