The domestic life of the Protector was all that might be expected from a man whose heart was as warm as his spirit was high. In the midst of his most arduous labours he seldom passed a day, as long as he was at Whitehall, on which he did not dine and sup in the family circle, and up till his aged mother's death in 1654 he was in the habit of visiting her every night before she retired to rest. Of his four daughters two were already married, the eldest, Bridget, after the death of her first husband, Ireton, having become the wife of Fleetwood; and the second, the sprightly and graceful Elizabeth, had married John, otherwise Lord Claypole, whom the Protector had entrusted with the charge of his stables, under the style of Master of the Horse. On November 11, 1657, some months after the commencement of the second Protectorate, Frances, the youngest of the four, was married to Robert Rich, the grandson of the Earl of Warwick, the Lord High Admiral of the Long Parliament, and in the following week her sister Mary was married to Lord Fauconberg. The first of these two marriages was long delayed by the Protector's doubts as to the character of the suitor, as well as by his dissatisfaction with the proposed settlement--Oliver's moral sense once more entwining itself with his practical decisions. It was said at the time that he valued the Fauconberg alliance more than that with the Warwick family, as winning over a Royalist peer to his side. Not one of Oliver's four daughters ever gave their father cause for real anxiety. Though they were less strenuous than himself and sometimes needed, in his judgment, to be spurred on to higher spiritual aims, he never seems to have addressed them otherwise than as those who were worthy of parental love. If he really preferred Lady Claypole to his other daughters, it was most likely because she was more sprightly and less outwardly pious than her sisters. "Your sister Claypole," he had written to Bridget soon after she had become Ireton's wife, "is, I trust in mercy, exercised with some perplexed thoughts. She sees her own vanity and carnal mind; bewailing it. She seeks after--as I hope also--what will satisfy: and thus to be a seeker is to be of the best sect next to a finder; and such an one shall every faithful humble seeker be at the end. Happy seeker, happy finder! Who ever tasted that the Lord is gracious, without some sense of self, vanity, and badness? Who ever tasted that graciousness of His, and could go less in desire--less than pressing after full enjoyment?" Of Bridget herself he writes with fuller assurance. "Dear Heart," he continues, "press on; let no husband, let not anything cool thy affections after Christ. I hope he will be an occasion to inflame them. That which is best worthy of love in thy husband is that of the image of Christ he bears. Look on that, and love it best, and all the rest for that. I pray for thee and him; do so for me." Yet even Bridget was far from answering to the