Oliver’s Head

Today marks the four hundredth anniversary of one of the more bizarre events in English history- the public execution of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, all attainted by Parliament for high treason, arising from their part in the trial and execution of Charles I in on the same day in1649. It was bizarre because all three men were already dead and thus, it might be imagined, beyond all temporal punishment. It was really just an act of symbolic justice, or frustration, in which the condemned were exhumed, their remains then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, the traditional punishment for traitors.

I have mixed feelings about Oliver Cromwell, at once the greatest commoner and the greatest traitor in our history. The best verdict ever passed on him was by a man who knew him well - Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, the chief minister of Charles II. In his History of the Rebellion he writes;

In a word, as he was guilty of many crimes against which Damnation is denounced, and for which hell-fire is prepared, so he had some good qualities which have caused the memory of some men in all Ages to be celebrated; and he will be look’d upon by posterity as a brave badd man.

A brave, bad man who took a remarkable journey: from burial with all honour among kings at Westminster Abbey to the ignominy of Tyburn just over two years later. How are the mighty fallen, not only in the midst of battle.

In David Copperfield Mad Mr Dick is continually troubled by the question of King Charles’ Head. He might just as well have been troubled by that of Cromwell, which had a far longer afterlife, in and out of the public eye.

After his ‘execution’ his body was cast into a common pit while the head was put on a spike above Westminster Hall, a warning to all the others who would never stand in his place. There it remained for almost twenty-five years, finally being blown down in a storm, disappearing in the streets of London. Despite the offer of a ‘substantial reward’ for its safe return it did not finally resurface until 1710, then in the possession of one Claudius du Puy, a Swiss-French collector of curios, who displayed it in his London museum.

From a sinister warning looming above the skies of London it descended into a prop in a kind of black comedy. After the death of Puys in 1738 it once more vanished from public view before coming into the possession in the late eighteenth century of one Samuel Russell, a failed comic actor and notorious drunkard, who was rumoured to be a descendent of the Lord Protector. Apparently he passed the ‘sacred relic' - his own expression - among his friends during their inebriate sessions, causing further erosion to the features. He finally sold it in 1799 to three brothers by the name of Hughes, who used it as a centrepiece in an exhibition of Cromwell-related items.

The daughter of one the brothers, failing to interest public museums in the curio, sold it on in 1815 to Josiah Wilkinson. It was to remain in his family’s possession until it was finally interred in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Cromwell’s alma mater, in early 1960. Not a bad fate in the end, really, to come back to Cambridge, a place for all sorts of heads, old and new, bad and good.

Killing, Noe Murder

A figure as controversial and devise in English history as Oliver Cromwell must have been the source of many murderous thoughts but the only assassination plot I am aware of is that conceived by Edward Sexby and Miles Sindercombe, and it came not, as one might expect, from the Cavalier and Royalist right, but from the Leveller and Republican left. Sexby and Sindercombe were, in effect, Cassius and Brutus in an English guise, determined on the destruction of the new Caesar. Sexby was to publish a pamphlet before his death, under the title Killing, Noe Murder, a detailed justification of tyrannicide.

Sexby, a former officer in the New Model Army, and an ardent republican, was the driving force behind the whole plot. He had been deeply angered by the coup of April 1653, which saw the end of the Commonwealth of England and the eventual elevation of Cromwell into the semi-regal position of Lord Protector. From this time forward Sexby plotted to remove the 'apostate', as he referred to Cromwell, by one means or another. His hatred of the English dictator led him into the oddest of alliances. In 1655 he left England after one of his intrigues went wrong, immersing himself in a variety of cloak-and-dagger schemes among spies and plotters of all kinds, even making contact with the court of the exiled Charles Stuart.

Sexby initially wanted to lead a military invasion of England, but realised that such a thing would never work in view of the military strength of the Protectorate; so the murder of Cromwell became the key part of his whole strategy, which was to create a political vacuum into which he and his colleagues could step. As he noted to a correspondent "either I or Cromwell must perish." To further his aims he even tried to persuade his Royalist contacts that he himself favoured a restoration of the ancient monarchy.

While in Flanders, Sexby made contact with Sindercombe, a former Leveller, and a man just as passionate in his hatred of the usurper. Sexby promised to provide arms, ammunition and money, and, in return, Sindercombe promised to arrange the assassination, returning to England in 1656. It was then that things started to go wrong, for one reason or another.

One scheme failed because Cromwell, whose usual practice was to leave town at the weekends for Hampton Court, decided to remain in Whitehall because of pressure of business. Others followed, which also came to nothing, either because of a failure of nerve or an absence of opportunity. As is usual with these things, the more people who became involved, the more difficult it was to keep matters secret, and John Thurloe, Cromwell's secretary and spy-master, picked up the rumours.

As a last act of desperation, the plotters planned to burn the Palace of Whitehall, killing Cromwell and everyone else, guilty and innocent alike. In the fashion of Guy Fawkes, the terrorists-and it now seems fitting to use this word-planted a device in the palace chapel in January 1657. All the while they were being watched by Thurloe's men, who now made their move. Sindercombe eventually killed himself while a prisoner in the Tower of London, but not before revealing Sexby's part in the plot.

Not long after Killing, Noe Murder appeared on the streets of London, in justification of Sindercombe's actions, and arguing that if Cromwell really wanted to serve his country he should do so by dying as quickly as possible. Three hundred copies of this seditious pamphlet were seized in the city on 27 May alone. Sexby himself came to England in disguise, only to be captured, dying of disease in the Tower in January 1658.

His real legacy was in his theoretical defence of political murder, which still has some resonance today. For Sexby tyrants had placed themselves beyond the law, and therefore the scriptural precepts and ethical imperatives against murder no longer applied. In the place of God and the morality Sexby substituted political necessity. He did not invent political assassination; for that is as old as human history. He did, rather, provide a theoretical defence for the indefensible, and an abiding notion that, in certain circumstances, the ends will always justify the means.

Christmas Died at Naseby Fight

The Battle of Naseby was, of course, the penultimate Puritan victory in the First English Civil War, a victory of the 'new' England over the 'old'; and Christmas, and all that was associated with it, was very much part of the old. The festival was hated, in the first place, because it was 'popish', and in the second, because it was 'pagan'; it had no authority in scripture and it was the occasion for unseemly and drunken revels, presided over by the Lord of Misrule.

In the 1580s Philip Stubbes had written in The Anatomie of Abuses that;

The more mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides, what masking and mumming, whereby robbery, whoredom, murder and what not is committed? What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used, more than in all the year besides, to the great dishonour of God and impoverising of the realm.

Ah, yes: robbery, whoredom, murder, dicing and carding. Just a typical family Christmas, then!

The festival had also become something of a political battleground between the stricter Protestant sects and Catholic recusants in England; for while it was condemned by the one it was growing in popularity with the other. Catholics, moreover, were quite happy to combine religious devotion with an attachment to the more profane aspects of Christmas celebration. Dorothy Lawson, a Catholic gentlewomam, was noted for celebrating "in both kinds...corporally and spiritually." Christmas thus became a prime target during the period of Puritan ascendency, both before and after Naseby.

The attack began with attempts to divorce the religious from the secular elements of the holiday, with Parliamentary ordinances from 1642 onwards calling for a more 'seemly' observation. The campaign was stepped up in early 1645 with the publication of the Directory of Public Worship, which plainly stated that "Festival days, vulgarly called Holy days, having no Warrent in the Word of God, are not to be continued."

The final victory over the King also saw the victory over Christmas. In June 1647 it was abolished outright. Neverthless, the festival remained popular with ordinary people, and fresh ordinances had to be issued throughout the period of both the Commonwealth and the Protectorate; even people attending church on 25 December were liable for arrest and interrogation by the army. The World is Turned Upside Down was part of a much wider popular and literary response to the whole Puritan campaign, including the wonderful satire The Arraignment, Conviction and Imprisioning of Christmas, printed by 'Simon Minced Pie' for 'Cicely Plum Pottage.'

Alas, England, ruled by Cromwell, in much the same fashion as Narnia was by the White Witch, was a land 'where it was always winter and never Christmas.' Old Father Christmas only returned with Summer and the King!

Cromwell's Last Battle

Every age has a tendency to refashion the past in its own image, and the story of Cromwell's statue at Westminster provides no better illustration of this general principle. In fact, this statue, if 'read' in its own particular historical context, tells us far more about the shifts and changes in Victorian opinion than it does about the infamous Lord Protector.

The saga begins soon after the old Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834. To enhance the new gothic structure designed by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin, the recently established Fine Arts Commission, arranged for a series of paintings, statues and stained glass, all intended to celebrate the nation's history. This, of course, included depictions of the various monarchs. Only Oliver Cromwell was omitted, passed over in silence as a regicide and a tyrant, a view that had been in place ever since the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

But the decision of the hapless Commmissioners was greeted by protests from across the country. Radicals and Nonconformists of all sorts demanded that he should have his rightful place in the national panorama. The reason for this is not too hard to detect. England was undergoing some rapid social and political changes; the old aristocratic dominance, the dominance of the Cavaliers, if you like, was under challenge by the 'Roundheads' on a whole variety of fronts. The Reform Act of 1832 had extended the basis of the franchise to large sections of the new middle-classes.

The landed interest was under sustained challenge from the Anti-Corn Law League. Right at the heart of this desire for change were to be found the religious Nonconformists, once confined to the political margins, now moving steadily towards the centre. For all of these people Cromwell was a symbol. On this occasion the agitation failed; but it would not go away. Admiration for Cromwell grew still further when Thomas Carlyle, the historian, published Cromwell's Letters and Speeches in 1845. No longer perceived as the tyrant who dismissed more Parliaments than any other man in history, Cromwell re-emerged as an earnest middle-class Victorian moralist, an advocate of the twin ideals of empire and religious toleration.

In the years that followed he appeared in provincial town halls and Nonconformist chapels up and down England, in statue, bust or in stained glass, wherever the radical tradition was strongest. Another attempt to install him at Westminster was made in 1871, supported by over 100 MPs, but once again was defeated as Whigs and Tories fought out the old battles of the English Civil War.

Thereafter the issue died away somewhat, especially after William Ewart Gladstone took over the leadership of the Liberal Party. For the Nonconformists and the radicals the 'Grand Old Man' became something of a living embodiment of Cromwell, full of the same moral earnestness and sense of purpose. What need of statues when one had the real thing?

The project revived for the oddest of reasons: in 1894 the 'Roundhead' Gladstone was suceeded both as leader of the Liberal Party and as Prime Minister, by the 'Cavalier' Lord Rosebery. Rich, elegant, urbane, Rosebery, a member of the Jockey Club, is said to have had two ambitions: to become Prime Minister and to win the Derby. What he needed to do immediately was to uphold the uncertain coalition of interests that made up the Liberal Party, which almost came apart in the latter stages of Gladstone's ministry over the question of Irish Home Rule. To secure his position he needed the support of the Nonconformists; and to secure the Nonconformists he proposed to give them Cromwell. But he was surprised from an unexpected direction, as yet another old battle was refought, the bitterest of them all.

Rosebery mangaged to push the issue of the statue through Cabinet; but when the Commons was asked to fund the project in June 1895 John Redmond, the leader of the block of Irish Nationalist MPs, on whose votes the ministry also depended, rose in protest, reminding the House of the horrors of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. The motion had to be withdrawn, a move which was greeted, as one Cabinet member noted, "with anger and disgust from English Liberals, with thick-witted jibes from Unionists...and with wild cries of aboriginal joy from our Irish friends."

In the end Rosebery decided to pay for it out of his own pocket, but the erection was resisted all along the way, by an odd combination of Tory and Irish opinion. it was only finally unveiled on 14 November 1899 at 7.30 in the morning, an unusually early hour, intended to avoid any adverse demonstration. Cromwell had won his last battle.