Cromwell, conscious of his own integrity and free from superstitious fears, did not hesitate to occupy the palace outside which his late monarch had been executed. Though he refused the crown offered to him in 1657, his residence in Whitehall began to assume more and more the aspect of a court, he himself gradually acquiring a dignified and stately manner, as we are assured by the contemporary royalist writer, Sir Philip Warwick. "And yet I lived to see this very gentleman," he writes, "when for six weeks together I was a prisoner in his sergeant's hands, and daily waited at Whitehall, appear of a great and majestic deportment and comely presence." After six years of almost autocratic power as Protector of England, during which period he had shown his capacity as a statesman, Cromwell breathed his last in the palace of his royal predecessors, relinquishing his hold upon life, in spite of his strong religious faith, with obvious reluctance. Worn out with anxieties and domestic grief, especially over the death of his much-beloved daughter, Elizabeth Claypole, the great Protector died at the age of fifty-nine, on September 3, 1658, a day which he had always accounted as peculiarly fortunate, having been the occasion of his victories at Dunbar and Worcester. A tremendous storm, one of the most violent ever known, was raging over England when Oliver Cromwell's spirit passed into the great Unknown. On his arrival in London after his restoration, Charles II. proceeded to Whitehall, where he confirmed all the great charters of English liberty, such as Magna Carta, and the Petition of Right. Two years later, Charles brought his unhappy young bride by river in state to Whitehall, after their honeymoon at Hampton Court. Samuel Pepys watched the pageant from the top of the banqueting hall, which he describes as "a most pleasant place as any I could have got." The whole river was covered with boats and barges, "so that we could see no water for them," some boats representing the mimic court of a King and Queen, until the actual royal pair appeared, who were greeted with guns on their arrival at Whitehall Bridge.