On Richard Cromwell’s accession, a new Parliament was called, when Bradshaw was again returned to the House of Commons for Chester. Though he did not scruple to take the oath of fidelity to the new Protector, he, nevertheless, entered into active co-operation with Haslerig, Vane, and other Republicans, in their opposition to the Government. This Parliament came to an end on the 22nd April, 1659, the dissolution having been forced by the officers of the army, and with it Richard Cromwell’s power and authority were gone, and the Protectorate was at an end. It is about this time that we discover the first indications of Bradshaw’s health failing him. At the Easter assizes, in 1659, he was lying sick in London, and unable to attend the Welsh circuit; and as Thomas Fell, who had been associated with him—the Judge Fell, of Swarthmoor in Furness, whose widow George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, afterwards married—had died in September of the previous year, John Ratcliffe, Recorder of Chester, was appointed to act as his deputy _pro hac vice tantum_. That anomalous authority, the “Rump,” which the elder Cromwell had so ignominiously expelled from the House of Commons, was, on the 17th May, restored by the same power of the army that, six years previously, it had been dismissed. Six days after, a Council of State was appointed, in which Bradshaw obtained a seat, and was elected president; and on the 3rd June following he was named, with Serjeants Fountain and Tyrrel, a Commissioner of the Great Seal. His health, however, had now seriously given way, and as he had been for some months suffering from “aguish dystemper,” he asked to be relieved of the duties of the office. For the following copy of a letter written at this time, while he was lying sick at Fonthill—one of the few of Bradshaw’s which have escaped destruction—the author is indebted to the courtesy of that industrious labourer in the field of literature, the late Mr. John Timbs, F.S.A., by whom it was transcribed from the original in the possession of Mr. F. Kyffin-Lenthall, a descendant of “Speaker” Lenthall, to whom it was addressed:—