Oliver’s Story

The title of Cromwell’s Head, which might strike the common reader as unappetizingly specialized, is in fact somewhat misleading. To be sure, a fair portion of this modest volume is devoted to the Cromwellian cranium. But it is also a brief, compelling, and fair-minded account of the life and career of Oliver Cromwell, the country gentleman and back-bench parliamentarian who rose to power as a citizen-soldier in the Civil War, dethroned the Stuart monarch Charles I, and presided over England’s experiment in a Puritan republic in the middle 17th century. Few are agnostic on the subject of Cromwell, especially in Ireland; but Jonathan Fitzgibbons, a doctoral candidate at Oxford, treats Cromwell as the complicated–cruel, large-hearted, merciless, generous–man that he was, and successfully translates his time to ours.

No easy task, especially when considering what happened to Cromwell after he died in 1658. The English Civil War had been a struggle for power between royalists and parliamentarians, but the judicial killing of Charles I left a vacuum in the polity. Cromwell did not wish to replace one dynasty with another, but he did step in as “Lord Protector”–somewhere between head of government and absolute monarch–and when he died, another vacuum was created. Cromwell’s son Richard was briefly appointed to succeed him; but “poor Tumbledown Dick,” an otherwise capable man not cut out for authoritarian rule, couldn’t navigate the rapids between the New Model Army and parliament, and General Monck, commanding general in Scotland, summoned the exiled Charles II from France.

Restored to the throne that the Puritans had confiscated when they beheaded his father, Charles sought a measure of vengeance, executing several surviving regicides and, in the case of the Lord Protector, some posthumous justice. In 1661 Cromwell’s corpse (along with two other regicides, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw) was disinterred from its vault in Westminster Abbey, ritually hanged at Tyburn, and thrown in a pit. His head, which had been cut off from his body, was dipped in tar, impaled on a pike, and hung over Westminster Hall, where it remained for the next 20 years.

No one is quite certain when and how the head disappeared–there is a tradition that it was blown down during a gale and retrieved by a sentry–but as early as 1710 it had turned up in London on exhibit in a museum of curiosities, and passed from dubious owner to dubious owner until the early 19th century, when it landed in a family of rural gentry, which withdrew the object from public display. Its last private proprietor, Canon Horace Wilkinson, allowed a forensic medical examination in the 1930s which confirmed that, for various circumstantial reasons, it was the genuine head of Oliver Cromwell.

In 1960 this macabre remnant of the age of Roundheads and Cavaliers was buried in the chapel of Sydney Sussex College, Cambridge (Cromwell’s alma mater), where a plaque informs visitors about its residence “near to this place.” The exact location is alleged to be a secret, known only to the master of the college and a handful of others, for fear of theft (by Cromwell’s detractors) or adulation (by Cromwell’s admirers). In any case, there it rests, after a highly improbable journey, probably indefinitely.

The reader–well, this reader, anyway–has one practical and one rhetorical question. The practical question is to wonder why, in the age of DNA analysis, it hasn’t occurred to the master and fellows of Sydney Sussex to pluck a hair from the scalp, or perhaps a flake of epidermis, to determine whether their chapel really does harbor the head of the Lord Protector, or not. There were all sorts of rival claimants in the 19th century, and there are troublesome gaps in chronology. The head is in a better state of preservation than one might expect–at least according to the entertaining photographs in the text–and the ever-growing throng of Cromwell descendants could quickly, and easily, settle the matter.

The other point is, perhaps, a little unfair–but that is, to be astonished by it all. The saga of Oliver Cromwell’s head is an amusing, if ancillary and largely capricious, footnote to Cromwell’s life and works; and it could be argued that the stages of its disembodied career–from artifact and oddity to prized possession and sacred relic–reflect the times. But that Cromwell’s disinterment, postmortem execution, and the public display of his severed head occurred as recently as the late 17th century is a commentary, of sorts, on civilization. Yes, it was a long time ago; but Harvard College had been founded a generation earlier, John Locke was writing his theories of liberal politics, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was around the corner.

Philip Terzian is the literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.