earances, however, were very deceptive. The death of Cromwell had,
of course, agitated the whole world of exiled Royalism, raising sunk
hopes, and stimulating Charles himself, the Queen-Mother, Hyde,
Ormond, Colepepper, and the other refugees over the Continent, to
doubled activity of intrigue and correspondence. And, though that
immediate excitement had passed, and had even been succeeded by a
kind of wondering disappointment among the exiles at the perfect calm
attending Richard's accession, it was evident that the chances of
Charles were immensely greater under Richard than they had been while
Oliver lived. For one thing, would the relations of Louis XIV. and
Mazarin to Richard's Government remain the same as they had been to
Oliver's? There was no disturbance of these relations as yet. The
English auxiliaries in Flanders were still shoulder to shoulder with
Turenne and his Frenchmen, sharing with them such new successes as
the capture of Ypres, accomplished mainly by the valour of the brave
Morgan. But who knew what might be passing in the mind of the crafty
Cardinal? Then what of the Dutch? In the streets of Amsterdam the
populace, on receipt of the news of Cromwell's death, had gone about
shouting "The Devil is dead"; the alliance between the English
Commonwealth and the United Provinces had recently been on strain
almost to snapping; what if, on the new opportunity, the policy of
the States-General should veer openly towards the Stuart interest?
All this was in the calculations of Hyde and his fellow-exiles, and
it was their main disappointment that the quiet acceptance and
seeming stability of the new Protectorate at home prevented the
spring against it of such foreign possibilities. "I hope this young
man will not inherit his father's fortune," wrote Hyde in the fifth
month after Richard's accession, "but that some confusion will fall
out which must make open a door for us." The speculation was more
likely than even Hyde then knew. Underneath the great apparent calm
at home the beginnings of a confusion at the very centre were already
at work.[1]

[Footnote 1: Thurloe, VII. 405 and 414; Guizot's _Richard Cromwell
and the Restoration_ (English edition of 1856), I. 6-11.]

It will be well at this point to have before us a list of the most
conspicuous props and assessors of the new Protectorate. The name
_Oliverians_ being out of date now, they may be called _The
Cromwellians_. We shall arrange them in groups:--