Cromwell’s Head

"John Fitzgibbons, first of all, is a very gifted young scholar in Oxford – he is an expert on the short career of Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s son, who was head of state for a year after his father’s death. So Fitzgibbons already has enormous expertise in the immediate period after Cromwell’s death. The extraordinary adventures that Cromwell’s head had – hung at Tyburn in 1661, exposed on a spike at the palace of Westminster for 20 years (it eventually fell off), used as a circus trick, kept in private houses and brought out at dinner parties, and, finally, buried at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge – allow Fitzgibbons to tell the story of the hugely conflicted history of Cromwell over the last 300 years. Why he matters, why he’s been so debated, how he is a key figure in many of the great arguments about political and religious liberty. So it’s really a history of English radicalism since the time of Cromwell, through the adventures of his head. I don’t think it does, actually. I think I said once on the radio that it doesn’t matter where his head is, because his soul goes marching on. It matters only insofar as the story of the head is in some rather curious way the history of England. This might be a macabre detail to add, but when the head was buried, it was at a time when the Sidney Sussex College Chapel floor was being relaid, so the five people who witnessed the burial are taking the secret of exactly where it is to their graves (in fact, only one of them is still alive today). I think after this long, long period – during which the head had been handed around, sold, displayed and so on – the idea was that he should just be allowed to rest. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Ironically enough, the head was buried just before DNA testing came in, and we could actually have done some very interesting DNA tests on the head. First of all, to establish for absolutely certain that it is him, because there is a claim by another family that they’ve got the body buried in Yorkshire. I think it’s 90% certain that the head in Sidney is Cromwell’s, but there is another story, which Fitzgibbons goes into (as does Antonia Fraser), and it goes like this. After his death, the body is dug up at Westminster Abbey to be taken to be hanged at Tyburn, but on the way, it’s kept in the back room of a pub in High Holborn for two nights. Now why on earth, if you’re going from Westminster to Marble Arch, would you go via High Holborn? One of the theories is that it was so the body could be swapped – so the family of Cromwell’s son-in-law could actually buy the body from the soldiers, in order to give it a decent burial in Yorkshire. If we go by this narrative, it was some other man’s corpse that was hung. So there is just a possibility that this thing isn’t Cromwell. On the other hand, the head in Sidney Sussex was examined by doctors before it was buried. They confirmed that it had been embalmed at death, and had been exposed to the air for a long time – not many heads in the early modern period would have had that experience. There’s obviously lots of macabre interest in this. There’s mystery involved. But there’s also the history of the head as it passes from being a freak-show, to dinner table treat, to being buried in a Cambridge college. It’s a fascinating story, and it’s a story linked to major issues in the history of Britain."