Abstract

Sir George Grey’s gift to Auckland Public Library in 1887 included a collection of original documents from the English Protectorate of 1653–59. Central to the collection is a manuscript treaty signed by English and Dutch commissioners. The Cromwell papers have received scant attention since Grey’s death but the ‘secret treaty’, as it was called, rewards investigation for the light it sheds both on the Cromwellian ‘imperial moment’ identified by recent scholarship and on the ‘cult of Cromwell’ in the most distant part of the nineteenth-century British Empire. Unlocking its secret, moreover, involves showing that the manuscript has been misdated and mistakenly described for at least 140 years.

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