CROMWELL’S HEAD.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume I, Issue 130, 18 May 1911, Page 11

CROMWELL’S HEAD.

AT BURLINGTON HOUSE. A GRIM RELIC. ( ("London Daily Telegraph. } * London. April 6. It would be safe to say thai. never ’ since its foundation has the Royal Archteological Society of Great Britain held a more interesting or 1 more important meeting than that over which Sir Henry Howorth pre- : : sided yesterday afternoon at Bur- ; ! lington House. All the world has heard that the Wilkinson fariiily j claims to possess the head of Oliver Cromwell. The fact has again and again been mentioned, and again : and again been forgotten. Each ! time a little flurry of debate, and interest, half conviction, half seep- ; ticism, has been aroused, but in a month or so the matter has always died down again, and the authenticity of the grim relic has hitherto been allowed to remain among the ’ traditions rather than the accepted > facts of antiquariumsm. But at last, and for the first time, the present owner of the head, the Rev. H. . R. Wilkinson, has made a frank exhibition of the terrible souvenir, and has laid it and its history before the first authority in England. < ijie Royal Archaeologists. The • scene was impressive. There was not a great gathering in the room of the Society of Antiquaries, but it included a score of world-famous experts, and the tense silence in j which Mr. Wilkinson’s brief and : admirably clear exposition was lis- j tened to was a proof of the appre- • ciation of a critical audience. He began by explaining the, natural reluctance he and his ; father had always felt in permitting I mere curiosity to excuse the exhi- ! bition of such a relic. It had never ; before been exhibited publicly. In- ■ deed, even yesterday the occasion ; was privileged, if not entirely pri- ? vate. But there could be no valid reason to refuse to lay the head and the accompanying proofs of its j genuineness before such a society, s and in all reverence he did so. The j story of the skull is briefly as fol- | lows : Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, ! and his body, after being embalmed was buried with royal ceremony in ' Westminster Abbey. The exact . place was at the extreme west end - of Henry VII."s Chapel. In Janmy ary. 1661, his body—together with ' those of Ireton and Bradshaw, who ; also had been interred there—was I exhumed by one John Lewis, a j mason, at the direction of the l|ouse of Commons. He received 15'- for the work. The three bodies ' were then taken to a public house in Hol born, and on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. they f were dragged on sledges to Tyburn : amid the execrations and insults of th fickle mob, and there hanged with their faces towards Whitehall. Next day they were taken down. , and the heads were struck off by the executioner. The bodies were buried beneath the gallows, the heads being taken to Westminster and set up upon the roof of the Hall, an oaken iron-tipped pike being driven up trom under the jaw through the top of the head. There they remained for twentyfive years. Pepys mentions them, and the head of an offender named Armstrong is recorded as having been set up with them in 1684. Cromwell’s head was certainly there at this date. In 1686, during a heavy storm of wind, the head of the Protector, pike and all, was blown down. The sentry secreted it under his cloak and took it home.

A hue and cry was raised, and the head remained hidden until after the death of the soldier, when it was sold by his wife to a kinsman z of the Protector named Russell. In ! ■ his family it remained for about a century, being bought for £llB i from the last of the Russells, a dis- : solute comedian, in 1787, by a Mr. ■ Cox. At and from this point documentary evidence exists. A syndicate of three ardent democrats purchased it for £2.30. and exhibited it at 26 a head. All three seem to have died violent or sudden deaths, and the daughter of the last survivor sold it to Mr. Wilkinson, the grandfather of the present owner. That, briefly told, is the story. PROOFS OF AUTHENTICITY. After sketching this career, Mr. Wilkinson produced the head itself. It is in a good state of preservation, though the fat and flesh have almost entirely disappeared between the skin and the bone. The upper part of the skull has been neatly sawn off and replaced by the embalmer. The moustache and beard —Oliver had refused the use of a razor during his last illness—are present, and of a bright chestnut colour. The famous wart is clearly indicated by a slack depres- * scion in the skin of the forehead. The right ear has been torn off as a relic, and much of the hair has been lost in the same way. The mouth is gaping, the cheekbones are high,

and there is a curiously sudden ; slant backwards from the top of : the forehead to the apex of the skull. Behind, there may clearly be seen the double blow of the executioner s axe. just as may be • seen in the head of the Duke of Suffolk —Lady Jane Greys father, —which until lately was preserved j in Lord Dartmouth’s vault at Holy ( Trinity. Minories. ; Turning to the question of au- \ thenticity, Mr. Wilkinson slowly forged a chain of links which clearly I surprised the society. The main; fact is that the head was both embalmed and impaled. No other person in English history has ever i experienced these extremes of honour and of insult. Again, the pike’s general condition of decay could not possibly have been brought about within less than 150, vears from the tune of its acquisiHon by Mr. Wilkinson’s grandfather —a period that brings it well within the lifetime of Richard Cromwell —who would have been quick to resent any imposition. The pike and the head are eaten through in one place by the same worm-hole, a curious and final proof of the impossibility of a later forgerv. The facial characteristics are all there, the high cheekbones. the low and broad forehead. > the close evebrows, the twist of

the bone of th nose to the left, the fleshy end of the broken nose, the large eye-orbits, the mark of the famous wart close above the right eyebrow—al’ are clearly present. The beard was much as appears in the death-mask, which was also exhibited yesterday. Clearly and certainly the proofs were exhibited, and at the close of Mr. Wilkinson s short lecture some interesting corroborations of the truth of his claim were offered by those present. OTHER SPEAKERS. Perhaps the remarks of Professor Boyd Dawkins were the most interesting. He recalled the official investigation that the late Professor Rolleston, of Oxford, had made, and the minutely careful measurements—in which Professor Dawkins had assisted—which established the identity of the head with that which had been th original of ■the death-mask. Incidentally, Pro- ■ fessor Dawkins explained how it came about that the falsity of the so-called Cromwell skull in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford which was also shown yesterday had been exposed, and the authenticity of the Wilkinson head vindicated by Rolleston. He also noted a curious point about the tendency of the red pigment in hair to surj vive after darker pigments had ; perished. Against this close and i connected array of proof—which,

as Sir Henry Howorth remarked, was amazing in its completenessonly the somewhat untutored scepticism of one non-expert critic had ever been marshalled, and that was based chiefly on the ground that no details of the relic had been published until the close of the eight eenth c ent ury. To the plain man the double fact of embalming and impalement contributes a weight of evidence that the admitted conformity of the skull with the death-mask does but clinch more firmly still. Heads on pikes can never have been common. Of embalmed heads on pikes there is but one example—Cromwell. It was a curious sensation to feel that there in front of one were the lips that ordered the battles of the Civil M ar, acquiesced after long demur, in the cruel necessity for the martyrdom of a King, refused the Crown twice, and above all. ordered war with

Spain rather than desert the English victims of the Inquisition. Here was the man who founded our sea-mastery, who foresaw the Empire, who invited Holland to link herself and divide the habitable world with us, and who said thai he would never be satisfied untr the words fi Civis Britannicus sum’ were as perfect a protection abroac as was ever the boast of the citizer of Rome. We are apt to belitth

our own. Cromwell mane England a first-class Power; his dreams of Pan-Protestantism were defeated only because other nations could not “think in continents” as he did; and Clarendon admits that “his greatness at home was a mere shadow to his greatness abroad.” This was the man whose lonely and disfigured head lay before the Society of Archaeologists yesterday afternoon. It was an occasion that no one present will forget.