OLIVER CROMWELL’S HEAD.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4402, 29 April 1875, Page 3

OLIVER CROMWELL’S HEAD.

(From The Times, January 23.) A correspondent draws our attention to a strong corroboration of the main incidents of the story lately told in these columns respecting the head of the Lord Protector Cromwell, to be found in the “Fifty Years’ Eecollections, Literary and Personal,” of the late Mr. Cyrus Bedding, and resting on the authority of Horace Smith, one of the authors of “Beiected Addresses,” &c. Bedding writes under date about 1821 or 1822 “ Horace Smith was acquainted with a medical gentleman who had in his possession the head of Oliver Cromwell, and in order to gratify my curiosity he gave me a note (of introduction) to him. JCnere accompanied the head a memorandum relating to its history. It had been torn from the tomb with the heads of Ireton and Bradshaw after the accession of Charles 11., under a feeling of impotent vengeance. All three were fixed over the entrance of Westminstor-hall, the other bones of those three distinguished men being interred at Tybum under the gibbet—an act well befitting the Stuart character. During a stormy night,” he adds, “the head in the centre, that of Cromwell, fell to the ground. The sentry on guard beneath having a natural respect for an heroic soldier, no matter of what party, took up the head and placed it under his cloak until he went off duty. He then carried it to the Bussells, who were the nearest relations of Cromwell s family, and disposed of it to them. It belonged to a lady, a descendant of the Cromwells, who did not like to keep it in her house. There was a written minute extant along with it. _ I he disappearance of the head (off Westmmsterhall) is mentioned in some of the publications Of the time. It had been carefully embalmed, as Cromwell’s body is known to have been two years before its disinterment. The nostrils were filled with a substance like cotton. The brain had been extracted by dividing the scalp. The membranes within were perfect, but dried up and looked like parchment. I he decapitation had evidently been performed after death, as the state of the flesh over the vertebras of the neck plainly showed. It was

hacked, and the severance had evidently been done by a hand not used to the work, for there were several other cuts beside that which actually separated the bone. The beard of a chestnut color seemed to have grown after death. An ashen pole, pointed with iron, had received the head clumsily impaled upon its point, which came out an inch or so above the crown, rusty and time-worn. The wood of the staff and the sldn itself had been perforated by the common wood-worm. I wrote to Horace Smith that I had seen the head, and deemed it genuine. Smith replied, ‘I am gratified that you were pleased with Cromwell’s head, as I was when I saw it, being fully persuaded of its identity.’ ” It remains then on record that two persons, both men of the world and of large experience, and yet so different from each other in character as Horace Smith and Cyrus Redding, were satisfied with the evidence brought before them to prove its being genuine nearly fifty years ago.