Odd this day
Well, if it’s 28 January, it must be time to mark the 364th anniversary of the most rational example of that most sensible of judicial measures, capital punishment. Yes, this was the day Oliver Cromwell’s corpse was exhumed so he could be hanged and beheaded for regicide.
(The actual ‘execution’ was on 30 January, the anniversary of Charles I’s own beheading, but I’ve got a story about the latter, too, so I’m telling this one on the day of the exhumation.)
Anyway, up they dug him, hanged and beheaded someone who’d been dead since September 1658, and stuck the bonce on a spike on top of Westminster Hall for 25 years, until it fell down in a storm. It then disappeared from history for a further 25 years, before apparently turning up in a private museum of curiosities in 1710.
A later owner, failed actor and drunk Samuel Russell, let his friends damage it by handling it while… in a relaxed state when they came round for the evening. Eventually, it made its way to an exhibition in Bond Street in 1799, which flopped because tickets were too expensive and rumours were swirling about it being a fake.
But in 1934, a paper in a learned journal published at the time by Cambridge University Press looked at the stories which swirled around the head to try to pick apart what was true, what wasn’t, and whether the nasty, leathery object — while definitely a human head — was really the one that used to be attached to the neck of Oliver Cromwell.
I choose the word ‘nasty’ carefully, because — content warning time — it really isn’t (or wasn’t) pretty.
Anyway, on the question of authenticity, one contemporary source, Mercurius Politicus, says an order was given to embalm Cromwell, and this was carried out the day after his death in September 1658. And…
it may be said almost with certainty that the Head was separated from the body after embalmment. In other words the forgers — if such existed — must have embalmed a large portion, if not the whole of the fresh corpse, and then proceeded to chop off the head with an axe
…and they’d have to have done it as clumsily as Cromwell’s posthumous beheading was done, but…
There was before 1799 no published record of the Tyburn treatment of Cromwell’s corpse stating that the executioner made a failure in his first blows, so that the assumed forgers would have no reason whatever for mimicking such a procedure
The authors also point out that you can tell the skin was embalmed before the axe went in, because the axe left:
embalmed skin on either side, which before embalming would have shrank back on either side
Well, I won’t go into too much more detail, because there is an insane amount of it in a 228-page article, complete with many, many illustrations — including skiagrams (essentially, early X-rays) of the skull with a big iron spike through it.
(One delightful detail I will add, though, is that the embalmers in 1658 scooped out his innards in order to do their work, obviously, and
there [was] a barrel of ejecta to be disposed of
…which may or may not have been yeeted into the Thames.)
But the overall conclusion is that there was “moral certainty” that the head had once been Cromwell’s, and it was finally given to his old college (Sidney Sussex, Cambridge), who buried it on their grounds on 25 March 1960 in an airtight container.
According to the Oxford Mail, that meant “a biscuit tin” (which may please those who enjoyed the tale of Thomas Hardy’s heart the other day). In further pleasing detail, that Oxford Mail article also tells how Dr Louise Scheuer, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Anatomy at London’s Royal Free Hospital, tested a competitor head and found that it wasn’t Cromwell’s.
This one, the ‘Oxford’ skull, was inherited by 19th century philosopher Benjamin Jowett, who had been Master of Balliol (hence its name), but its
dimensions did not remotely fit those of the death mask [and] the skull was made up of the remains of two people — the lower jaw did not match the rest of the head.
A third skull, also an Oxford one, long kept at the Ashmolean Museum, had apparently been chucked out after being declared a fake in 1911 — it, too, bore insufficient resemblance to the death mask.
One final curious fact about the real skull is that not only was it mistreated by 18th century drunks, but its exact location at Sidney Sussex College is secret, “in case it is dug up by latter-day supporters or enemies”. No doubt Cromwell would have known the words of Isaiah 57:21, even if he wouldn’t have been amused by them being applied to him:
“There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.”
Although, having said that, he wasn’t widely renowned for seeing the funny side of anything. Rather like Thomas Hardy.
