Oliver Cromwell, the straight-laced Puritan who usurped the English throne, wasn’t exactly a wild man. His head, however, was sometimes the life of the party. Cromwell died in 1658, but two years later, the reinstated English monarchy exhumed, tried, and hanged his body, then dumped it in an unmarked grave. In addition, as a warning to would-be killers, his head was placed on a pike in Westminster Hall, where it remained for 20 years. After a subsequent sting in a small museum, it was sold in 1814 to a man named Josiah Henry Wilkinson (perhaps looking to parade it around as an exceptionally gruesome ice-breaker at parties). Such was the ironic afterlife of the Puritan until 1960, when his head was finally laid to rest in a chapel in Cambridge.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 18:47:15 +0000
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