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| Cromwell's Death Mask |
Justice
would not allow a guilty person to escape his sentence. One such fellow
condemned to be hanged found a way to escape when brought to the gallows.
As
the magistrates hauled the poor fellow to the hanging tree, his legs shackled,
the condemned man dodged a guard and scampered away. The crowd impeded the
goalers from catching him. He ran down the hill and jumped into the river. The
weight his restraints pulled him under and he drowned.
Not
content to have the prisoner die before being properly hanged, the authorities
hauled him sopping wet and completely dead, back to the noose, and there hanged
him with his fellow prisoners. They did this during the French Revolution, too,
threw a dead person in the tumbril to suffer the same fate as those around him.
Guillotined, the most humane way to go, or so it is reported.
Enter
Oliver Cromwell, who succumbed to what experts feel was malarial fever on the
proverbial dark and stormy night in Whitehall, Sept 3rd, 1658. His
enemies described the storm as the devil dragging the great saint to hell.
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| John Bradshaw |
Cromwell’s
men wanted a sumptuous funeral that would rival King James I’s. They gutted and
embalmed him, his coffin filled with spices, but for some reason his body rapidly
decayed. It was reportedly so putrid that the body ruptured, leaving a
horrendous miasma which leaked through the seams of the coffin.
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| Henry Ireton |
This
left no opportunity for Cromwell to lay in state or be paraded through the
city. He was buried quickly in Westminster Abbey alongside England’s kings and
queens. Later, to appease the populace, an effigy replaced the body for
viewing. An empty coffin was hauled through the city streets.
In
1660, King Charles II returned from exile. He did not seek utter reprisal, but
he could not let those who killed his father escape without some sort of
comment.
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| Tyburn Gallows |
Of
the 59 regicides who signed the death warrant, 39 were alive at the
Restoration. Of these, several were in self-exile, a few exonerated. Of those
executed, some met a grisly end.
Really
horrible so I won’t bother telling the details but I’ll tell you the following:
Three
high on the list to meet justice were Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, & John
Bradshaw, all dead and buried in Westminster Abbey. Their bodies were ordered
exhumed, hanged and beheaded.
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| King Charles I at his trial |
January
30th, 1661 (Gregorian calendar), they were pulled from their resting
places and dragged to Tyburn. Since Cromwell’s burial had been so regal, his
body wrapped in a thick shroud, it took several strikes of the axe to behead
him. The three dead men swung from the gallows, then beheaded, their bodies
shoved in unmarked graves beneath Tyburn. Their heads were impaled on pikes and
set on the roof of the Westminster, where they remained for 20-30 years. One
night, during another dark and stormy night, Cromwell’s head was struck by
lightning, which fell to the ground and was spirited away.
There
are several stories about where the head bounced.
In the ensuing years,
Cromwell’s head was considered a conversation piece put on display. Men of
knowledge considered the head more than likely genuine. It is rumored someone
finally put it in a biscuit tin and buried it. One source states it was
interred in 1960 in Cromwell’s old college chapel, its exact location
concealed.
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Many
thanks to Wikicommons, Public domain &
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