Britain's only republic lasted under six years and ended with Cromwell's son
From December 1653 to May 1659, England, Scotland and Ireland were a single republic ruled by a Lord Protector. Oliver Cromwell held the post for life, divided England among military governors, and became the first ruler to control all of the British Isles. His son Richard inherited the job and lost it within months.
The road there began with regicide. After Charles I was tried and executed in January 1649, an Act of 19 May declared England a Commonwealth, run by the Rump Parliament and a Council of State. Ireland was absorbed after Cromwell's conquest. On 20 April 1653, frustrated that the Rump would neither dissolve nor agree a constitution, Cromwell marched soldiers into the chamber and ended its sitting.
Its replacement was a hand-picked Nominated Assembly, mocked as Barebone's Parliament after one member and chosen partly from names put forward by Congregational churches. It proved unmanageable, and in December Cromwell's allies voted it out of existence at a sparsely attended hour. John Lambert then produced the Instrument of Government, a written constitution making Cromwell Lord Protector for life, able to summon and dismiss parliaments but bound to consult the Council of State. He was sworn in on 16 December 1653.
Parliament and Protector clashed quickly. Cromwell dissolved the first Protectorate Parliament in January 1655, and after Sir John Penruddock's royalist rising he split England into districts run by major-generals, the so-called godly governors, who policed security and morals. The Instrument gave Scotland and Ireland seats in the London parliament. Scotland, defeated in the war of 1650 to 1652, was held by 10,000 English troops; in 1655 Lord Broghill headed a council of six Englishmen and two Scots. In Ireland, a 1652 settlement act ordered executions and pushed most Catholic landowners west, and the occupying army shrank from 35,000 in 1649 to 9,000 by 1657.
Cromwell died in September 1658. Richard Cromwell could command neither the army nor parliament and resigned in May 1659. A Committee of Safety dissolved the third Protectorate Parliament and brought back the very Rump his father had expelled, ending the Protectorate. The historian Barry Coward cautioned that its British policies mixed reform and coercion without amounting to a real plan for a new unified state.
Source: The Protectorate
