What happened to Cromwell’s head?
Decay and a slow integration into the soil that surrounds a final resting place is the basic fate of a corpse. That process hardly enthrals an audience as much as the sexual, social and medical record of a human life, but some live their lives in such a way that those who exist after them interfere with their remains, producing morbid tales of grave-robbing and relic-trading. This is the case with the hidden head of the puritanical despot, Oliver Cromwell.
In 1658, Cromwell died of natural causes. His extraordinary career as an MP, military officer, constitutional reformer and Lord Protector left an indelible mark on our history and the way we conduct politics, but following his demise at the age of fifty-nine, Cromwell’s body went on a journey, the full extent of which we still cannot account for.
Born into the English gentry but of modest means, Cromwell was elected to Parliament in 1628. The rift between King Charles I and his Parliamentary subjects eventually yawned into a chasm of civil war that swallowed Britain for a decade. After an arduous and labyrinthine conflict between the roundheads and cavaliers, the victorious parliamentarians imprisoned Charles I, put him on trial and cut off his head on the 30 January 1649. Cromwell signed the death warrant of the king and went on to rule the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.
When he died, he was buried as a monarch in the vaults of Westminster Abbey, but was exhumed by Royalists when the son of his arch-adversary, Charles II, returned from exile. In 1661, on the 12th anniversary of Charles I’s execution, Cromwell was posthumously hanged and beheaded at Tyburn. His head and those of his two enforcers, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, stared blankly across the London sky-line atop spikes pitched outside Westminster Hall. They were left there to show any who dared to think of rebelling against the new King what sort of out outcome awaited their treachery – political messaging made more memorable points back then.
Some years later, possibly in 1684, a great gale howled through London and hurled Cromwell’s head off its spike. A guard nearby noticed the gruesome relic and decided to wrap the dictator’s now decrepit cranium in his cloak before quietly toddling off home to deposit his discovery up his kitchen chimney. It is alleged that the guard’s daughter sold the head after her father’s death to a Swiss-French collector of curiosities called Claudius Du Puy in 1710. He owned a private museum in London and exhibited the piece to amuse and astonish his guests. After Du Puy’s death in 1738, the head disappeared again. That was until 1780 when another noted collector of strange items, James Cox, came across a head with a spike protruding out its scalp hanging on a stall owned by the alcoholic actor, Samuel Russell.
Russell believed he was descended from Cromwell and felt a great attachment to the head in his possession. This sense of a familial connection was so strong in Russell that despite often being poor and in debt, he refused to part with the coveted remains of his illustrious ancestor. Cox determinedly waited for an opportunity to acquire this prize and lent the impoverished thespian money over a long period until he was unable to honour his arrears. Cox then asked for the head of Cromwell to cover the debt he was owed and reluctantly Russell agreed. Not long later, Cox sold the artefact to three brothers who wished to display it on Bond Street, but questions as to the provenance of the head they purchased plagued the exhibition and the project was a financial failure. The three brothers all died soon after, leading to speculation that there is a curse upon the head of Cromwell.
The daughter of one of the Hughes brothers sold the head privately in 1815 to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, a scholarly clergyman who bequeathed it to his heirs. Over the course of the century, the Wilkinson family happily showed the head to anyone who was interested and eventually submitted their grisly heirloom to the examination of forensic scientists to conclusively confirm its identity. Once its status had been professionally verified, the Wilkinson family offered Cromwell’s head to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where Cromwell had attended university over three centuries earlier.
The head was reportedly placed into a metal container and buried near the college’s antechapel. But, according to historian Professor Keith Wrightson, only two people alive know its exact whereabouts – the Master of Sidney Sussex and the Dean of the college chapel. It has been described as a “closely guarded secret”, but it does prompt the question: why is it a secret? Are they frightened that some enthusiastic Royalist will dig it up and kick it about the college gardens? Are they worried that if it is exhumed again it might become a rallying symbol for hard-core republicans? Perhaps they simply believed that after its bloody and chaotic history, it deserves to lay in peace beneath the lawns it lovingly looked upon in life.
The sequestering of Cromwell’s head is not the only odd Cromwellian tradition at Sidney Sussex College. A portrait hangs beside high table equipped with curtains. If ever a member of the royal family should attend Sidney Sussex for some event, the curtains are quietly and politely drawn, to avert any offence that might be given. I’m sure our present royals are over the slaughter of Charles Stuart, but it is these gratuitous formalities that seem to keep us sane.
Why and where the head is hidden precisely remains a murky mystery. It might have a map leading to El Dorado stuffed into its mouth. Is it in fact cursed? I have a feeling that the history of this adventurous head hasn’t quite come to an end.