Elizabeth Cromwell

Elizabeth Cromwell (née Bourchier; 1598 –1665) was the wife of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the mother of Richard Cromwell, the second Lord Protector. Family and marriage Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir James Bourchier of Felsted in Essex, a wealthy London leather merchant, and his wife Frances Crane, daughter of Thomas Crane of Newton Tony in Wiltshire. In 1610, Sir James Bourchier obtained a grant of arms (Sable, three ounces in passant in pale or spotted); the only occasion when the arms of the Bourchiers were quartered with those of the Protector was at his funeral, where they appeared on the escutcheons. Elizabeth, the eldest of twelve children, was born in 1598. On 22 August 1620 at St Giles, Cripplegate, London, she married Oliver Cromwell. Throughout the marriage, Oliver wrote Elizabeth solicitous love letters while away on his military campaigns. Some of these letters were later published in an anthology of love letters edited by Antonia Fraser in 1976. The marriage produced nine children, eight of whom reached adulthood.