Elizabeth Claypole

Elizabeth Claypole (née Cromwell; 2 July 1629 – 6 August 1658) was the second daughter of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and his wife, Elizabeth Cromwell, and reportedly interceded with her father for royalist prisoners. After Cromwell created a peerage for her husband, John Claypole, she was known as Lady Claypole. She was buried in Westminster Abbey. Biography Her marriage to John Claypole took place on 13 January 1646. She was the favourite daughter of her father, to whom her spiritual condition seems to have caused some anxiety. On one occasion he writes to his daughter, Bridget, expressing his satisfaction that her sister (i.e. Claypole) "sees her own vanity and carnal mind, bewailing it, and seeks after what will satisfy". But four years later he bade her mother warn her to "take heed of a departing heart and of being cozened with worldly vanities and worldly company, which I doubt she is too subject to".<ref>Firth, DNB, xi,12 cites Letter clxxi.</ref> Some of her contemporaries felt she was too much exalted by her father's sovereignty. Lucy Hutchinson, a biographer and scholar who married one of the regicides, termed Claypole her and all her sisters (excepting Bridget Fleetwood) "insolent fools." Captain Titus wrote to Hyde relating a remark of Elizabeth Claypole's at a wedding feast concerning the wives of the major-generals: But according to the account of James Harrington, "she acted the part of a princess very naturally, obliging all persons with her civility, and frequently interceding for the unhappy." It was to her he applied with success for the restoration of the confiscated manuscript of his Oceana.Firth, DNB, xi,12,13