In the uneasy spring of 1659, the republican experiment that had governed England since the execution of Charles I teetered on the edge of collapse. At its helm stood Richard Cromwell, son of the late Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell—an unlikely successor and, to many, an unwilling one. Lacking both his father’s iron will and battlefield prestige, Richard struggled to command the fractured loyalties of a republic torn between civilian rule, religious radicalism, and military ambition. On May 6, 1659, his tenuous authority was swept aside. A faction of the New Model Army—distrustful of Richard’s civilian leadership and determined to preserve its political clout—forced his resignation and reinstated the long-defunct Rump Parliament. The move marked a decisive break in England’s revolutionary government and accelerated the chain of events that would culminate in the Restoration of the monarchy scarcely a year later.
The removal of Richard Cromwell was neither sudden nor unexpected. Upon the death of his father in September 1658, Richard inherited the mantle of Protector more by procedural inertia than by popular acclaim. He was untested, uninterested in military affairs, and viewed by army grandees with thinly veiled disdain. Though formally invested with power, Richard’s government was a fragile hybrid—a civil administration dependent upon a military establishment it could neither pay nor control.
At the heart of the crisis was the tension between Parliament and the army. Richard had convened the Third Protectorate Parliament in January 1659 in hopes of shoring up his legitimacy, but the session quickly devolved into conflict. Civilian MPs sought to assert supremacy over the military, questioning the army’s autonomy and budgetary demands. In response, the army council—led by veterans like Charles Fleetwood and John Lambert—grew increasingly alarmed. To them, Richard appeared not only weak but dangerously aligned with Presbyterian moderates who hoped to curtail military influence and even reinstate the monarchy in modified form.
Faced with growing mutiny within the army, Richard capitulated. On May 6, after days of rising tension and pressure from within Whitehall itself, he dissolved Parliament under duress and resigned the office of Lord Protector. In his place, the army restored the Rump Parliament—the remnant of the Long Parliament purged by Colonel Pride in 1648—which had been dissolved by Oliver Cromwell five years earlier. This was not an act of nostalgia but of expediency. The Rump, comprised of hardline republicans and regicides, was seen as a safer bet than any monarchical restoration or moderate coalition.
Yet far from stabilizing the republic, the return of the Rump Parliament only deepened the crisis. The Rump lacked popular legitimacy and quickly alienated both royalists and republicans alike. Its members, many of whom had been sidelined for years, reasserted a narrow ideological vision rooted in the radical phase of the Revolution—one that no longer reflected the mood of the country. Meanwhile, the army, though instrumental in Richard’s ouster, remained a divided force. Officers disagreed on whether to support the Rump, push for a new constitution, or even proclaim a military dictatorship. Factionalism splintered the Commonwealth, and within months, even the restored Rump would be dismissed by the army, replaced in turn by yet another unstable experiment in governance.
Richard Cromwell, for his part, faded from the stage with remarkable meekness. Known derisively as “Tumbledown Dick,” he retired from public life and would live into the early 18th century in quiet obscurity. His brief rule—just nine months—was a cautionary epilogue to the revolutionary fervor that had brought down the monarchy. But its failure, and the military’s inability to govern without him, underscored the deeper truth: the Commonwealth lacked the institutional coherence or popular support to endure.
What began on May 6, 1659 as an assertion of republican control would, within a year, end in its dissolution. The army’s purge of Richard Cromwell and the restoration of the Rump marked not the triumph of radical Puritanism, but its last gasp. The monarchy, long exiled and seemingly discredited, would return in triumph in 1660—not through war, but through exhaustion.
