Oliver Cromwell wrote, in a letter to Sir William Spring in 1643, of the archetypal plain, russet-coated captain who embodies the ideal of republican soldiery (many of those who supported the Good Old Cause were also Independents who advocated local congregational control of religious and church matters).
[2] The phrase was open to interpretation, but in 1659 to its exponents it meant the pure Republican constitution which had been founded on the Regicide and which lasted until Cromwell's dissolution of the Rump Parliament on 20 April 1653.
[3] In October the same year Daniel Axtell, the officer who had commanded the guard during the Trial of Charles I, went to his execution unrepentant declaring that "If I had a thousand lives, I could lay them all down for the [Good Old] Cause".
[4][a] Similarly, Algernon Sidney, before his execution for allegedly being involved in the Rye House Plot in 1683, thanked God for allowing him to die "for that [Good] Old Cause in which I was from my youth engaged".
[5] The revolution did not perish in 1660, but lived on in the words and deeds of the host of soldiers and sailors, officers and men, sectaries and republicans who found the Restoration regime wanting ... No amount of penal legislation could eradicate dissent from the restored church, nor did the return of the Cromwellian officers and men to their traditional occupations quench their thirst for a government more responsive to their needs and aspirations.