The great career, the incidents of which we have been following, was now, however, drawing to a close. Cromwell's health had long been impaired by the hardships of campaigning. Now at the age of 58 he was already old, and his firm, strong signature had become feeble and trembling. The responsibilities and anxieties of government unassisted by parliament, and the continued struggle against the force of anarchy, weighed upon him and exhausted his physical powers. "It has been hitherto," Cromwell said, "a matter of, I think, but philosophical discourse, that a great place, a great authority, is a great burthen. I know it is." "I can say in the presence of God, in comparison of whom we are but like poor creeping ants upon the earth, I would have lived under my woodside to have kept a flock of sheep rather than undertook such a government as this." "I doubt not to say," declared his steward Maidston, "it drank up his spirits, of which his natural constitution afforded a vast stock, and brought him to his grave."
Domestic bereavements added further causes of grief and of weakened vitality. On the 6th of February 1658 he lost his favourite daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, and he was much cast down by the shock of his bereavement and of her long sufferings. Shortly afterwards he fell ill of an intermittent fever, but seemed to recover. On the 20th of August George Fox met him riding at the head of his guards in the park at Hampton Court, but declared "he looked like a dead man." The next day he again fell ill and was removed from Hampton Court to Whitehall, where his condition became worse. The anecdotes believed and circulated by the royalists that Cromwell died in all the agonies of remorse and fear are entirely false. On the 31st of August he seemed to rally, and one who slept in his bedchamber and who heard him praying, declared, "a public spirit to God's cause did breathe in him to the very last." During the next few days he grew weaker and resigned himself to death. "I would," he said, "be willing to be further serviceable to God and his people, but my work is done." For the first time doubts as to his spiritual state seemed to have troubled him. "Tell me is it possible to fall from grace?" he asked the attendant minister. "No, it is not possible," the latter replied. "Then," said Cromwell, "I am safe, for I know that I was once in grace." He refused medicine to induce sleep, declaring "it is not my design to drink or to sleep, but my design is to make what haste I can to be gone." Towards the morning of the 3rd of September he again spoke, "using divers holy expressions, implying much inward consolation and peace," together with "some exceeding self-debasing words, annihilating and judging himself." He died on the afternoon of the same day, his day of triumph, the anniversary both of Dunbar and of Worcester. His body was privately buried in the chapel of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, the public funeral taking place on the 23rd of November, with great ceremony and on the same scale as that of Philip II. of Spain, and costing the enormous sum of £60,000. At the Restoration his body was exhumed, and on the 30th of January 1661, the anniversary of the execution of Charles I., it was drawn on a sledge from Holborn to Tyburn, together with the bodies of Ireton and Bradshaw, accompanied by "the universal outcry and curses of the people." There it was hanged on a gallows, and in the evening taken down, when the head was cut off and set up upon Westminster Hall, where it remained till as late as 1684, the trunk being thrown into a pit underneath the gallows. According to various legends Cromwell's last burial place is stated to be Westminster Abbey, Naseby Field or Newburgh Abbey; but there appears to be no evidence to support them, or to create any reasonable doubt that the great Protector's dust lies now where it was buried, in the neighbourhood of the present Connaught Square.
