CROMWELL'S HEAD.

Shannon News, 9 November 1923, Page 2

CROMWELL'S HEAD.

Street repair work near the Marble .Arch.has led to the disinterring of a number of bones and skulls near the site of the old Tybuirn gallows, where Oliver Cromwell's body was shamefully buried, and many writers are conjecturing whether Cromwell's skull is hot one - of .these relics'. It cannot be, declares the "Manchester Guardian," because Cromwell's head at present lies in a box lined with red silk in a-Suffolk vicarage There is no doubt about, its. identity, which was accepted by the Royal Archaeological : Society. Its history can be easily followed. Cromwell's body was exhumed from the Abbey, hung at Tyburn,, taken down, and the head struck off by the executioner. The head was set up upon the roof of Westminster Hall, an oaken iron-tipped spike being driven up through the top of the; head. It remained there for twenty-five years, and Pepys mentioned seeing it. In 1686, during a heavy storm the head of Cromwell, pike and all, was blown down, and the sentry secretly took it home. It remained hidden till after his death, when his wife sold it to a kinsman of the Protector named Russell, whose family sold it a century,later for £llß to a Mr Cox, who sold it to a company of three men for £230 and it was. (exhibited at. half a crown a head. All three men 1 had a violent death, and the daughter of the last survivor sold it to the grandfather of the present owner. There is no documentary proof until it came into thehandsof Cox in 1787, but since then it is fully documented. The main proof lies in the head itself. It is in a good state of preservation, although the flesh has almosdisappeaneid between the skin and the bone. The upper part of he skull has been sawn off and replaced by the embalmer. The famous wart can be discerned. The moustache and beard J grown in illniefes still exist and are still brown. The heard appears in the death mask. The head was bo'ih , embalmed and impaled, one of the I few in history that had had these vicissitudes. The late Professor Rollieston, of Oxford, and Professor Boyd Dawkins both minutely examined and , measured the head and accepted it as; the original of the death-mask. There is a skull in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford shown as_Cromwell's skull, 'but its cladms wietfc entirely rejected j by these experts. ' • I It is strange to think that the head ' of the tremendous Cromwell, who refused a crown and made the name of England shine through Europe as it never did before, should he as a curio in ai country vicarage, and stranger still that' its possessor—the 'possessor of the head of Cromwell—should dare to have it there.