ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Cromwell's granddaughter, Bridget. Despite Restoration persecution, there was an afterlife to the memory of Cromwell and the civil wars that could not be extinguished. The continuing communities of nonconformists and those with links to Cromwell's kin after 1660 was, while practical as support groups, also an act of public ownership of the past. Bridget, in her life at Stoke Newington and after 1669 in Yarmouth was part of such communities that were increasingly more open after 1688 to expressing publicly ownership of Cromwell's memory. Central to this, from contemporary accounts, was Bridget herself and her apparent deliberate open use of her grandfather as a role model. Such generally positive accounts of Bridget, while shaped by the non-conformity of the commentators, were also a reflection that after 1700, more positive attitudes to Cromwell's memory were more openly expressed in print. Bridget's position after 1711 as an independent owner of an East Anglian refinery is set against the gender norms of the period, and representations of her are examined in relation to the links, she and those who met her made to her grandfather, as part of the ownership of memories of the civil wars.
