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| Cromwell's coffin plate up for grabs at Sothebys. |
Oliver Cromwell’s gilt copper coffin
plate was sold yesterday at Sotheby’s in London for £74,000. The plate had
originally been placed inside the inner lead coffin in which Cromwell was
buried, the Order Book of the Privy Council for September 1658 details the
arrangement, “his Highness Corps being
embalmed, with all due rites appertayneing thereunto, and being wrapped in
Lead, There ought to be an Inscripcion in a plate of Gold to be fixed upon his
Brest before he be putt into the Coffin. That the Coffin be filled with odours,
and spices within, and Covered without with purple Velvett, and handles,
Nayles, and all other Iron Worke about it, be richly hatched with Gold." The plate was removed by James Norfolk, Serjeant
of the House of Commons when he supervised the disinterment of Cromwell’s
corpse in 1661 for his public ‘posthumous execution’. Norfolk handed over the
corpse but kept the coffin plate as a souvenir.
The Protector died on 3 September 1658:
….. about four of
the clock in the afternoon. I am not
able to speak or write; this stroke is so sore, so unexpected, the providence
of God in it so stupendous, considering the person that is fallen … I can do
nothing but put my mouth in the dust, and say, It is the Lord; and though his
ways be not always known, yet they are always righteous, and we must submit to
his will.
John Thurloe to
Henry Cromwell on the death of his father
Cromwell’s death may have come as
a shock to those closest to him but they should not have been surprised. He had been ailing for some time, suffering
from tertian ague (probably some form of malaria) and the grief of losing his
favourite daughter to cancer on 6 August. On August 17 he was seen out riding
by the Quaker George Fox who later commented “I saw and felt a waft of death go
forth against him.” By September 3 he was dead. The Lord Protector had refused
the crown when it had been offered to him but in death he was treated like
Royalty. The Venetian envoy reported that “at Whitehall they are now preparing
for the funeral of the late Protector, which will take place with extraordinary
pomp and magnificence…”
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| Cromwell lying in state at Somerset House |
The funeral arrangements were,
ironically, modelled on those of James 1. The body was embalmed and then taken
to lie in state in Somerset House where thousands of silent, solemn citizens
filed past the elaborate catafalque. The funeral procession took place on 23
November, a wooden effigy standing in for Cromwell who, despite the embalming,
had started to decompose and been buried in Westminster Abbey 13 days before in
a private ceremony. The cortege was
headed by a carriage adorned with plumes and escutcheons and drawn by six
horses draped in black velvet. Soldiers dressed in new red coats with black
buttons lined the route and only ticket holders were allowed anywhere near the
procession which took seven hours to travel little more than a mile. Anyone who
was anyone in the protectorate followed the hearse, down to the Protectors
household servants. After a ceremony in the Abbey the catafalque and effigy
stood on public view for many weeks.
The ostentation of the funeral
provoked mixed reactions. John Evelyn reported that it was “it was the
joyfullest funeral that ever I saw, for there was none that Cried, but dogs,
which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking & taking tobacco
in the streets as they went”. Cromwell was succeeded as Protector by his son Richard
but the regime lasted less than a year and by 1660 the English had invited
Charles II to become their king. One of the first royal acts was to order the
trial of 12 surviving regicides who were convicted and then hung, drawn and
quartered as traitors. Newly Royalist Parliament also ordered the posthumous
execution of three deceased regicides Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton.
Cromwell’s remains were removed from the middle wall of the Lady Chapel in
Westminster Abbey and taken to the Red Lion Inn in Holborn, where he was joined
by Ireton and Bradshaw. On the morning of January 30 1661, the anniversary of
the execution of Charles the First, the three corpses, in open coffins, were
taken to Tyburn where they were hung in public view until the late afternoon.
As the light began to fade the bodies were taken down and beheaded – it took
eight blows to separate Cromwell’s head from his body. The bodies were thrown
into a pit at Tyburn and the heads impaled on spikes on twenty foot poles and
raised above Westminster Hall. There the heads remained until the late 1680’s.
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| The 'Wilkinson' head photographed in the late Fifties |
Cromwell’s head went missing in around 1688 when a storm snapped the pole on which it was impaled and the head fell into the grounds of Westminster Hall. A sentry found it and hid it in the chimney of his house, ignoring the considerable reward that was offered for its return. No one knows what happened to the head after this until it reappeared in 1710 in the Cabinet of Curiosities owned by Claudius Du Puy who put it on public display. Du Puy boasted to a German visitor that he could get 60 guineas for the head if he wished to sell it. On Du Puy’s death in 1738 the head passed through various hands; a failed comic actor named Samuel Russell used to produce the head and pass it around at drunken revels, the clumsy hands of the carousers causing “irreparable erosion of its features”. The Hughes Brothers put it on public display in Bond Street and charged two shillings and sixpence to see it but the venture was a failure as many potential customers simply did not believe that it was the head of Cromwell.
In 1815 one of the Hughes’ descendants sold the head to
Josiah Henry Wilkinson who astonished the novelist Maria Edgeworth by producing
it one morning at breakfast “not his picture—not his bust—nothing of stone or
marble or plaster of Paris, but his real head”. On the other hand Thomas Carlyle
point blank refused to see it or to believe that the head could be Cromwell’s “it
has hair, flesh and beard, a written history bearing that it was procured for
£100 (I think of bad debt) about 50 years ago...the whole affair appears to be
fraudulent moonshine, an element not pleasant even to glance into, especially
in a case like Oliver's.” There were other candidates to be the authentic head
of Cromwell – a skull in the Ashmolean museum in particular made strong claims
to the one and only genuine article. The distinguished physician George Rolleston
examined both heads and thought that the Ashmolean skull was a fake, a verdict concurred
with by later investigators who pointed out that it had been pierced from the
top, not the bottom, and that there were no vestiges of skin, flash or hair as
would be expected from an embalmed head. In 1960 a descendent of Wilkinson’s
presented the head to Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge where Cromwell had
been a student. On March 25 1960 the head was finally reburied in the college chapel
inside an airtight container with just a few witnesses. The burial was only
made public in October 1962 and a plaque now marks the approximate spot, the
exact location remaining a closely guarded secret.
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| One of the ferocious head hunters of Sidney Sussex College |
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