Oliver Cromwell the Timelord

My readers will be pleased to know that one of the grandsons of John Tyler (10th U.S. President, 1841–45) is still alive, although his brother died a few years ago.

Here is an excerpt from an article Simon Jenkins wrote at the turn of the millennium headlined “Oliver the Timelord (An extraordinary memory reminds us of the ambiguities of time)".

A man of my acquaintance was addressed, when a child, on the subject of Oliver Cromwell. The speaker was a lady of 91. She told him sternly never to speak ill of the great man. She went on: "My husband's first wife's first husband knew Oliver Cromwell - and liked him well." It was an admonition my friend has not forgotten.

At first hearing, the story is unbelievable. This was not a great-grandfather who knew a great-grandson. Here at the dawn of the new century is someone able to recall a single matrimonial generation linked directly with the mid-17th century*. I know of no comparable leap of history, no domestic arrangement that can gather dynasties, revolutions and empires so effortlessly in its embrace. We can wipe out civilisations in a flash, yet extend the experience of a single human imagination over a third of a millennium. What a thing is man (and in this case woman).

*The remark was made in 1923 by a lady born in 1832. At the age of 16 she had married an 80-year-old man named Henry. Sixty-four years earlier, in 1784, the young Henry had, for reasons obscure, married an 82-year-old woman. Her first marriage, in 1720, was to an 80-year-old who had served Cromwell before his death in 1658.

Is this true? I'd like to see the evidence.

David Wilson says that he heard that E.A. Freeman gave a lecture in Oxford on the Bicentenary of Cromwell's death in 1858 and that a little old lady said to him afterwards, 'Mr Cromwell was really rather a pleasant man. My first husband's father knew him quite well'. David Wilson comments, 'Short as that chain sounds, it does work: if the father was thirty-five when Cromwell died in 1658, and became a father fifty years later, at the age of eighty-five (1708), his son could have been seventy-eight in 1786, when he married the little old lady, who was then eighteen, but who was ninety in the Bicentenary year, 1858.'

It is possible but?