even of his grave; he had paid the full penalty of his rebellion; and the end had come at last.

There are some curious letters of Secretary Nicholas written to the different British agents abroad soon after the 30th of January 1660-1.40 Thus to Sir Henry Bennet at Madrid he writes on the 31st of January, Cromwell and others took their leave at Tyburn yesterday;' to Sir Henry De Vic, at Brussels, on the 1st of February, 'The arch-traitor Cromwell, and two of his choicest instruments, Bradshaw and Ireton, finished the tragedy of their lives in a comic scene at Tyburn;' and to Sir William Curtius in Germany, 'On January 30, a solemn fast was kept by Act of Parliament, in memory of the execrable murder of the late King, on which day the corpses of Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton, being dragged on sledges to Tyburn, remained hung on the gibbet in the view of thousands, attracted by so marvellous an act of justice.'

It is observable that Secretary Nicholas makes no direct reference to the ultimate fate of the body or the head of Oliver Cromwell. So far as I am aware, in every theory of any value which purports to trace the body, or, to speak strictly, the trunk of the body, at a later date than the 30th of January 1660-1, it is taken for granted that the body gibbeted at Tyburn, and therefore the body (if body there was) buried in Westminster Abbey, was not really Cromwell's.41

It will be my duty presently to examine the curious legends relating to the actual fate of his body, if his was not the body that was buried or exhumed in Westminster Abbey. But the accredited story of the gibbeting at Tyburn leaves room for two questions-viz. What became of the body? What became of the head?

The body, as has been seen, was decapitated, and the trunk, apparently without the head, was thrown into the pit at the foot of the gallows. Was it allowed to remain there? If the head was not buried with the body, where was it placed?

It will be convenient to take the case of the head first, as there is direct contemporary testimony relating to it.

I will begin by citing two witnesses, one official, the other personal. The heads of those three notorious Regicides, Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw, and Henry Ireton are set upon poles on the top Westminster Hall, by the common Hangman.'

942

of

'I to Westminster Hall, where I ... saw the heads of Cromwell, Bradshaw, and Ireton, set up at the further end of the Hall.' 43

40 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1660-61 (Lond. 1860), pp. 492, 500, 506. 41 The exception is the theory propounded in Notes and Queries by a writer signing himself 'T. B.' See note 50 on p. 943 in this essay.

42 Mercurius Publicus, January 31-February 7; and Kingdome's Intelligencer, February 4-11, 1660-61.

43 Pepys, Diary (February 1660-61). Pepys' words, if taken by themselves without reference to Mercurius Publicus, would more naturally denote the inside than the outside of Westminster Hall, as the place where the heads were exposed.

It is said that Bradshaw's head was placed between the other two; for, as being in the centre, it would be as nearly as possible over the spot from which he had pronounced sentence upon the King. On that Pinnacle of Legal Advancement,' says Heath, 'it is fit to leave this Ambitious Wretch.' 44

The day when the heads were set up on Westminster Hall was the 6th of February, 1660-1.45

Statements so authoritative seem to stand in no need of confirmation. The question arising from them is, not indeed whether Cromwell's head was placed upon Westminster Hall, but how long it remained there. And here the testimony is at once meagre and curious.

In the strange book entitled Relations Historiques et Curieuses de Voyages en Allemagne, Angleterre, Hollande, Bohême, Suisse, &c., par C. P. (i.e. Charles Paton, D. M. de la Faculté de Paris), which was published at Lyons in 1676,46 occurs a letter dated 'Strasburg, October 1671.' 47

Le pont de Londres n'a rien d'extraordinaire que son spectacle, qui est aussi affreux qu'on en ait jamais élevé à la mémoire du crime. On y voit empaler sur une tour les testes de ces exécrables parricides de la Majesté. Il semble que l'horreur les anime, et que leurs supplices qui continuent toujours les forcent à un repentir éternel. Celles de leurs chefs, Cromvel, Ireton son gendre et Bradshaw, sont sur ce grand édifice qu'on appelle le Parlement, à la veue de toute la ville. On ne sçauroit les regarder sans pâlir, et sans s'imaginer qu'elles vont jetter ces paroles épouvantables; PEUPLES, L'ÉTERNITÉ N'EXPIERA PAS NOTRE ATTENTAT, APPRENEZ A NÔTRE EXEMPLE QUE LA VIE DES ROIS EST INVIOLABLE.

It is worth while, perhaps, to remark that the letters of which the book is composed are addressed A SON ALTESSE MONSEIGNEUR FREDERIC AUGUSTE Duc de Wurtemberg,' etc. and to other persons of high and noble quality.

In Eachard's History of England 48 it is stated that the head of Sir Thomas Armstrong, who was executed on the 20th of June 1684 for complicity in the Rye House Plot, was exposed on Westminster Hall between the heads of Bradshaw and Cromwell. If this statement is correct, it proves that the head of the Protector still remained on the top of Westminster Hall more than twenty-three years after it

"Flagellum, p. 200. Cp. Kingdome's Intelligencer, and Mercurius Publicus; also Rugge (Mercurius Politicus Redivivus), February 6, 1660–61.

45 Rugge, l.c. Macaulay writes with even more than his customary rhetorical effect when he says, or makes Cowley say: 'The tyrant is borne in more than royal pomp to a royal sepulchre. A few days more, and his head is fixed to rot on the pinnacles of that very hall where he sat on a throne in his life and lay in state after his death' ('A Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton,' Complete Works, vol. vii. p. 643).

Most of the passage is translated in Notes and Queries, 3rd series, vol. v. p. 265; but the date of publication of Paton's book is there given by mistake as 1674. 47 Page 168.

18 3rd ed. (London, 1720), p. 1043.

VOL. LVII-No. 340

3 R

had been set up there by the common hangman. Beyond 1684 his head cannot be traced.

But there is a weird story, destitute of historical evidence, that it was blown down from the roof of Westminster Hall in a great storm; it was picked up and carried home by a sentry, who hid it in his chimney-corner and never revealed the secret of his possessing it until he lay upon his deathbed; then his heirs sold it and the box containing it to a certain Mr. Samuel Russel or Russell; from him, directly or indirectly, it passed into the hands of a Mr. James Cox, a dealer in curiosities; then, when he gave up business, it was sold to three speculators, and by them exhibited in 1799 and later; at the death of the last of the three it became the property of their nieces; by them it was entrusted to the custody of their physician, Mr. William Arthur Wilkinson, at Beckenham; eventually he bought it, and at his death, in 1832, bequeathed it to one of his sons, in whose family it remains to the present day, and it can be seen at Frankfield, Seal Chart, Sevenoaks, the home of Mr. Horace Wilkinson.

It is not possible, within the limits of the present essay, to examine this story in detail. But after considering all the evidence in its favour, and after paying a visit to Seal Court, where I was permitted, by the kindness of Mr. Wilkinson, to inspect not only the actual head in his possession but the papers relating to it, I may briefly indicate the points at which the chain of evidence seems so seriously to break down that the genuineness of the head cannot be accepted as an historical fact.

(a) The story of the sentry picking up the head of Cromwell and taking it home possesses no historical support.

(b) The interval between 1684, when the head is last recorded to have been seen on Westminster Hall, and 1787, when a head alleged to be Cromwell's was sold by Samuel Russell to James Cox, is not bridged over by any evidence of identity.

49

(c) Even if the head had been Cromwell's head, and if it had passed from Russell to Cox, it cannot have been sold at the sale of Cox's museum, as it is not mentioned in the existing catalogue of the museum; nor can it well have been sold by Cox privately without attracting notice; Cox was not a dealer in curiosities, but a mechanician and a jeweller; and the sale of his museum took place in 1775, twelve years before the date at which he is alleged to have bought the head from Russell.

(d) That the head sold, according to the story, in 1787 was the same as came into the possession of Dr. Wilkinson in 1812 is probable,

49 A Descriptive Inventory of the several . . . pieces of Mechanism and Jewellery, comprised in the Schedule to an Act of Parliament . for enabling Mr. James Cox, Museum by way of Lottery

of the City of London, Jeweller, to dispose of his (London, 1773).

but cannot be said to be proved. That it is Cromwell's head is in the highest degree improbable.

The head of Oliver Cromwell was undoubtedly set up on the top of Westminster Hall. That it remained there, exposed to the rain, and the wind for many years, is a fact established by strong evidence. What became of it none can say. It may have been gradually eaten away by the climate and the weather, until nothing was left of it. It may have been blown to the ground in a storm; but, if so, it disappeared, it has never since been seen; it must long ago have followed the course of nature.

There remains the question as to the fate of the body of Oliver Cromwell; and if I deal rather summarily with the various hypotheses which have been advanced, on more or less flimsy grounds, as I think, in regard to it, my justification is that they all assume the story of the burial of his body beneath the gallows on which it hung at Tyburn to be erroneous, and I believe it to be historically certain.

No doubt it was the secrecy of the Protector's burial in Westminster Abbey which gave rise to the supposition that he was never buried there. And, indeed, it is strange that, while his funeral was celebrated with the utmost magnificence, the interment of his remains should have gone unobserved. The difficulty of determining the day of burial may throw suspicion upon the fact of the burial itself. But it seems to me impossible to reject the evidence afforded alike by the public funeral and the public exhumation. They who paid the final honours to the great Protector, and they who inflicted the supreme indignity upon his body, knew, and must have known, that it was he whose bones were laid to rest in Henry the Seventh's Chapel in 1658, and disinterred there in 1661.50 For the story which Pepys tells that 'Cromwell did, in his lifetime, transpose many of the bodies of the Kings of England from one grave to another, and that, by that means, it is not known certainly whether the head that is now set upon a post be that of Cromwell or of one of the Kings,' rests upon no better authority than the Frenchman Sorbière's account of his travels in England; 51 and Jeremiah White, who was Cromwell's chaplain, emphatically denied it when Pepys consulted him about it.52

so Most persons who have supposed Cromwell's body to be buried elsewhere than at Tyburn have assumed that it was never laid in Westminster Abbey. But the possibility that it was removed after the exposure at Tyburn has been suggested, e.g., by 'T. B.' in Notes and Queries, 2nd series, vol. xii. p. 192; Waylen, House of Cromwell, pp. 222-4.

51 Published in 1664. Voltaire described it as a scurrilous satire upon a nation of which the author knew little or nothing.

52 Pepys, Diary, October 13, 1664. The story that Charles the First's corpse was placed in Cromwell's tomb (Harleian Miscellany, vol. ii. pp. 285-7, ed. Park, 1809) was proved to be false in 1813, when Charles the First's coffin was opened at Windsor. (See Sir H. Halford's account of the opening, reprinted in J. S. Clarke's Life of James II., vol. ii. pp. 667-72, Lond. 1816. Cp. Annual Register, 1813, pp. 33-4.)

Whatever was the actual fate of the Protector's remains, it seems that Dryden's line

His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest 53

must be taken to be one of the unfortunate prophecies of history. But apart from the accredited narrative of the gibbeting of the Protector's body at Tyburn, and the setting of his head on a pole over Westminster Hall, no fewer than six or seven different stories have at one time or another won some credence. 54 I will now consider them in order:

(1) The supposed burial of Oliver Cromwell's remains in the Thames.

For this I know no earlier authority than Oldmixon,55 in his history published in 1730, more than seventy years after Cromwell's death; but he gives it only as a story which I had 40 years ago from a Gentlewoman who attended Cromwel in his last sickness. . . . She told me, that the Day after Cromwel's death, it was consulted how to dispose of his corpse. They could not pretend to keep it for the Pomp of a publick Burial.' To prevent, then, any desecration of which the Cavaliers might be guilty, 'it was resolv'd to wrap it up in Lead, to put it aboard a Barge, and sink it in the deepest Part of the Thames, which was done the night following: Two of his near relations, with some trusty soldiers, undertaking to do it.'

The story is highly improbable in itself; it lacks contemporary testimony, and if the Pomp of a publick Burial,' for whatever reason, was impossible, the public funeral was undoubtedly celebrated with every circumstance of pomp and magnificence. But the story, with its reference to fear of the Cavaliers, breathes the spirit, not of the Commonwealth, but of the Restoration.

(2) The supposed burial of Oliver Cromwell's remains at Naseby Field.

This rests upon a statement printed in the Harleian Miscellany from a MS. carefully preserved by my Lord Oxford.' The MS. contains an account of the exhumation of Cromwell's body as carried

53 Heroic Stanzas, Consecrated to the Memory of his Highness Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth, &c.

54 Waylen (House of Cromwell, p. 222) enumerates six such stories, but one of these the story of the peaceful urn'-I have omitted, as it is only a poetical anticipation, and I have added two others, of which he takes no account; but the traditions of Northampton and Northborough, or Narborough, I have treated together.

55 History of England during the Reign of the Stuarts (London, 1730), p. 429. In Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. iii. p. 127, there is a letter referring to a tradition, said to exist in one branch of Cromwell's descendants, that the body of somebody who died in Whitehall about the time of Cromwell's death was substituted for his, and that he was actually buried in the Thames.

56 Vol. ii. pp. 285-7 (ed. Park, 1809). The MS. does not appear to be among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum.