Between the death of Oliver Cromwell in September 1658 and the return of Charles Stuart as Charles II in May 1660, political reversals and upheavals succeeded each other with astonishing speed. A fresh phase of contestation of the protectorate under Richard Cromwell was ended by the power of the army, as was the restored Rump which followed from May to October 1659. Beyond that point expedients failed and a succession of restorations - first of the Rump and then of the Long Parliament's excluded members - paved the way for the return of the Stuart monarchy. Historians have tended to characterize the republican and constitutional debate of this period as vague, visionary, and nostalgic - nostalgic, indeed, for a republican moment in the early 1650s which had never really existed and was now only hazily imagined. The ‘Good Old Cause’, itself a conveniently loose formulation, stirred impulses which were ‘always more emotional than rational’. The fervent, or desperate, hopes and fears of 1659 were chiliastic, prophetic; the republican debate with which sectarian desires were intertwined has sometimes seemed like a by-product of the same irrational ‘enthusiasm’. Squabbles between the republican thinkers themselves, and among the political constituencies backing some version of the Good Old Cause, have featured prominently in the historiography, adding to the sense of political stalemate and dysfunction, with the various factions acting out the hopeless endgame of the interregnum before an inevitable monarchical restoration.