A Head: A Tale
Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland Oliver Cromwell was born in Huntingdon, Huntingdonshire, in 1599 and died of natural causes, aged 59, on 3 September 1658. He was not beheaded for three years after his burial in Westminster Abbey. The Interregnum continued under Cromwell’s son, but it did not last for long. King Charles II returned from exile and was restored (. . . the Restoration. . . ) to the throne in 1660. On the 12th anniversary of the execution of Charles II’s father (Charles I) Cromwell’s remains, with those of two others, were disinterred, to be ritually executed at Tyburn.
Cromwell’s body was hanged in chains, and thrown into a pit. Except for his head, which was finally severed with eight blows. The head was stuck onto a spiked pole outside Westminster Hall, where Charles I’s “trial” had taken place. This location made the revenge point harsher that simply posting it in the usual place for such heads, London Bridge, there to be managed by the Keeper of the Heads). Usually, traitors’ heads were coated in tar and/or parboiled to keep them intact longer, so as to serve as a teaching—warning—tool. What treatment Cromwell’s head underwent is unknown, but it almost certainly was, in some fashion.
In about 1685, the pole bearing Cromwell’s head snapped in a storm, and the head fell to the ground. Someone picked it up by its newly-created handle, and from that time it went through many owners, some of whom exhibited it for a fee. In 1815 it was purchased by one Josiah Wilkinson, who frequently displayed it to dinner guests. The head was examined for authenticity (one characteristic: the wart over the right eye) several times, probably most thoroughly in the 1930s by Karl Pearson and Geoffrey Morant. (Pearson was a pioneer statistician and mathematician, as well as a vocal antisemite and general racist. Morant was at least an anthropologist as well as a racist who, again at least, sought to debunk Nazi racism). Their book concluded in 1935 that the head was, to a “moral certainty”, Cromwell’s.
The head stayed in the Wilkinson family until, finally, in 1960, a Wilkinson decided that the head, once a novel and amusing dinnertime conversation prod, should be buried. And it was, in a deliberately vague location at Cromwell’s alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. (The interment was not announced until 1962). In the summer of 2018, the wonderful Choir of Sidney Sussex College performed, gratis, at the Cotuit Center for the Arts, about four miles from my house. Nobody said anything about Cromwell’s head, that I remember, anyway.
Karl Pearson and G.M. Morant, “The Portraiture of Oliver Cromwell with Special Reference to the Wilkinson Head” (Biometrika Office, London: 1935