Cromwell died on September 3, and the news had reached Ireland by September 17. On September 17 Lady Ranelagh, in Youghal, wrote the long letter to her brother Lord Broghill, an extract from which stands at the head of this chapter. The man who a few days before “shooke all Europe by his fame and forces” was dead; and with his death the face of British history was changed. In Cromwell Lady Ranelagh herself had lost a generous and powerful friend; and in the last part of her letter she reverts, sadly enough, to what she calls “the penny half-penny of my own particular.” For Cromwell had helped her not only with her Irish estates, but with her recalcitrant husband. “His now Highness,” she says of Richard Cromwell, “seems not to me so proper a person to summon my lord[227] or to deal with him in such an affair as his father did, from whose authority and severety against such practices as my lord’s are, I thought the utmost would be done that either persuasions or advice would have effected upon my lord ... soe, as there being little hopes left of bringing him to reason either here or there, I thinke my present work is to seeke a maintenance for me and my children without him.” She had consented, she says, some time before, to “retyre” among her own friends from “my lord’s oppressions”; and she can now “remove lightly”, not having much wealth to gather together. Owing to “the unreasonableness of my lord” her children “are neither like to be preferred in marriage nor prepared for the narrow condition their father’s obstinacy condemns them to live in.” She wishes people to know that “I left not my lord upon humour, but necessety, and that in soe doing I sought privacy and submitted to scarsety than persued a croud or designed aboundance to myselfe.”[228]