OLIVER CROMWELL (The Civil War’s Great Dictator suffered execution – posthumously!)

Few men have had as many curses heaped upon them as Oliver Cromwell, one of the most famous – and most notorious – of all Englishmen.

The curses apparently failed, because although Cromwell’s enemies eventually succeeded in cutting off his head and impaling it on a spike on the roof of London’s Westminster Hall, they didn’t manage to kill him. Cromwell had died naturally a couple of years previously. His corpse had to be exhumed from its grave in Westminster Abbey before it could be publicly hanged and beheaded.

A tall and commanding figure who wore no colour except black, Cromwell devised the English New Model Army and turned it into one of the most formidable fighting machines ever seen. He later rose to become, in effect, President of England.

England’s only dictator was a hard man who believed the end justified the means. “Necessity hath no law,” he once remarked. Neither was he daunted by bigger military forces. “A few honest men are better than numbers,” was his view.

During his relentless rise to power, Cromwell, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, shipped cavalry, infantry and artillery units of the New Model Army across the Irish Sea to launch the most ferocious military campaign Ireland has ever suffered. The subjugation of Ireland began in 1649, directed by Cromwell personally and marked by appalling massacres.

Some 3000 Irish Catholics were massacred when the New Model Army overran the town of Drogheda in County Louth. About the same number were killed at Wexford. Victims included civilians and children, with the few wretched survivors shipped in chains to Barbados for sale as plantation slaves. Many of the defeated Irish suffered the same fate – transportation for life to the Caribbean as slaves.

Cromwell, a devout Puritan, was unmoved by their plight.
“It is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches,” he observed coldly.

Following Cromwell’s Irish campaign, Catholics were herded into a corner of Ireland’s west, with 40 per cent of their land transferred to Protestant settlers imported largely from Scotland. It was one of Europe’s first examples of ethnic cleansing.

Cromwell’s influence is so divisive that in 1999, when his birthplace in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire was preparing to celebrate the 400th year of his birth, the Roman Catholic community there announced they would boycott the ceremony.

Cromwell was was 21 years old when the Pilgrim Fathers sailed to America and in 1638 he seriously considered emigrating to America himself. That would have changed the history of both countries. But he stayed in England instead, becoming a minor landowner and rising to prominence in the early days of the English Civil War as commander of the formidable ‘Ironsides’ cavalry regiment he had created. He was promoted to lieutenant general and helped defeat the Royalists under Prince Rupert in the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644.

“God made them as stubble to our swords,”; Cromwell wrote jubilantly to his brother-in-law after the battle.

“We charged their regiments of foot with our horse, and routed all we charged. The particulars I cannot relate now; but I believe, of twenty thousand the Prince hath not four thousand left. Give glory, all the glory, to God.”

The English Civil War raged for 16 years between 1642 and 1658 – more than 200 years before the American Civil War. The English version pitted the supporters of the King (who tended to be more affluent, called themselves Cavaliers and wore their hair long) against the military forces of Parliament (who cropped their hair and were known as Roundheads). The Roundheads, who favoured pikes as weapons, were in the main uncultured but fought ferociously.

“I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a Gentleman and is nothing else,” Cromwell remarked.
The English Civil War tore society apart and split families, with brothers, cousins, fathers and sons fighting on different sides – a pattern which was to be repeated two centuries later in the American Civil War. One of Cromwell’s uncles fought for the King, while Cromwell himself directed the Parliamentary forces.

The turbulence saw England execute its king, Charles I, and become a republic run by a Council of State. Charles I, the only English king to be executed, walked to the beheading block bravely on 30 January 1649. It was a cold day, and the King wore two shirts for warmth, lest people might think he was shivering with fright.

A curious memento of the execution can be visited at Galway in Ireland’s west. There stands a pub called The King’s Head. Like many names in Ireland, there’s an interesting story behind the title – rather macabre in this case. The story is related on a brass plaque fixed to the pub wall. When Cromwell wanted to find someone to execute King Charles I, he picked an Irish solider called Gunning for the grisly task. Gunning lopped off the king’s head to Cromwell’s satisfaction and was given a purse of golden coins for his trouble. Once back in Galway, Gunning used the money to establish a pub – calling it by the obvious name. The pub serves a fine pint of Guinness, by the way. Years later, Gunning used to boast at the bar that he had no fear of reprisals from outraged monarchists. "This arm has felt the muscle of the king!" he would tell those who would listen.

After the king’s head fell, Cromwell rose swiftly to become de facto monarch. Yet in one of history’s greatest U-turns, the English, tired of the republican experiment just a decade later (two years after Cromwell’s death), and reinstated the monarchy, which has remained in place ever since.

Cromwell’s fierce Puritanism is revealed tellingly in his instructions to the artist Sir Peter Lely, who painted the dictator’s portrait.

“Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.”

Cromwell died in 1658. The diarist John Evelyn saw the funeral and wrote that it had been: “the joyfullest funeral that I ever saw; for there was none that cried but dogs, which the soldiers hooted away with a barbarous noise, drinking and taking tobacco in the streets as they went.”

Cromwell’s son Richard took over after Cromwell’s death but turned out to be incompetent. The monarchy was reinstated and the son of the executed King Charles I returned to the throne of England.

In 1661 the son, Charles II, decided that the people who had killed his father had escaped justice too long. It was true that they had died in the meantime, but that shouldn’t protect them from execution.
Accordingly, by the command of the King, the rotting remains of Cromwell were dug up from their resting place in Westminster Abbey’s Henry VIII Chapel, along with Cromwell’s henchmen, his son-in-law Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, president of the court which had condemned Charles I to death.

The decaying corpses were given a posthumous execution, hanged at London’s notorious Tyburn gallows (where marble Arch now stands), then cut down and decapitated. Their bodies were flung into a pit and their heads were mounted on spikes in front of Westminster Hall.

Cromwell’s mummified head sat there for a quarter of a century until it was dislodged in a violent gale and landed in the street. A sentry discovered it and immediately saw a commercial opportunity – he sold it. And so, the gruesome trophy changed hands a number of times until it fell into the possession of one Canon Wilkinson. The Canon delighted in displaying Oliver’s noggin at dinner parties – the spike still firmly lodged through the skull providing a user-friendly handle. When the Canon died, his son offered the head to Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge, Cromwell’s alma mater, and that’s where it’s buried today. An oval plaque to the left of the chapel entrance reads:

Near to the place was buried, on 25 March 1960, the head of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Fellow Commoner of this college 1616 – 1617.

The exact spot has been left unmarked to deter royalist vandals and student pranksters. It’s one of England’s more intriguing graves of the rich and famous.
There are plenty of others.

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