BOOK OF THE DAY: IAN SANSOMreviews Cromwell's Headby Jonathan Fitzgibbons
IN BRENDAN Kennelly's famously very rich, very crimson Cromwell(1983), the Lord Protector is referred to as "the butcher". In Jonathan Fitzgibbons's rather plain prose Cromwell's Head, readers are treated to a scholarly portrait of the butcher butchered. The moral of Fitzgibbons's book seems to be that he who lives by the sword may not die by the sword, but does run the risk of eventually being disinterred, hung, beheaded and having his remains defiled, exhibited, and buried in a biscuit tin.
Cromwell died on September 3rd, 1658, aged 59, from malaria: the immediate cause of death was septicemia. The state funeral, which took place on November 23rd, was conducted, according to Fitzgibbons, with "all the trappings of a pompous, monarchical pageant": there were standard-bearers, black-velveted horses, fifes, drums, trumpets; the full royal works.
When Cromwell's effigy was taken to Westminster Abbey it was mounted in standing position, with eyes open, and a crown upon its head. The whole affair, according to the poet Abraham Cowley, was one of "Much noise, much tumult, much expense . . . and yet after all this, but an ill sight".
Not nearly as ill a sight, however, as the subsequent disinterment of Cromwell's body and its hanging at Tyburn gallows just over two years later, on January 30th, 1661.
The return of Charles II to England in 1660, and his eventual coronation as King of England and Ireland, excited a great hunger for vengeance upon those who had been instrumental in the murder of Charles I, with no distinction being made between the guilt of the living and the dead.
The putrefying bodies of Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, the Lord President of the High Court of Justice, were accordingly hauled through the London streets to face their fate.
The bodies were hung for six hours, and the heads then hacked off and attached on 20ft oak poles and placed on the roof of Westminster Hall. There remained Cromwell's head - in sun, wind and rain - until near the end of the reign of James II, when it came down in a storm. This is where Fitzgibbons's book picks up. The head was apparently found by a soldier, who hid it in his chimney, and bequeathed it to his family. They then sold it to the improbable Claudius Du Puy, who ran a private museum of curiosities, and its whereabouts are then unknown until it turns up again towards the end of the eighteenth century in the possession of one Samuel Russell, a comic actor and drunkard, who hawks it around various markets and eventually sells it to a wheeler-dealer called James Cox, who in turn sells it on to three brothers who plan to exhibit it in a show and make their fortunes.
The show was a flop, and the head finally passed into the hands of the wonderfully sane Wilkinson family, who - after much careful forensic testing and verifications - arranged for the burial of what really does seem to have been Cromwell's actual head, in a biscuit tin-type box at the tyrant's old Cambridge college, Sidney Sussex, on March 25th, 1960.
Fitzgibbons is undoubtedly at his best when telling the improbable tale of the head's long journeyings, and the various conspiracy theories surrounding Cromwell's death and execution (that Cromwell had arranged for his body, in death, to be substituted for that of Charles I, for example, thus defying the old king once again; or that he was actually buried at Naseby; or in a secret vault).
The rest of the history is okay. "Is this head become a wretched cracked pitcher/ Jingled to frighten crows and make bees hive?", asks Kennelly's Cromwell. Yes. Yes. Ignominiously yes.
• Cromwell's Headby Jonathan Fitzgibbons, The National Archives (UK); 240pp, £12.99
• Ian Sansom teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University, Belfast. He is the author of the Mobile Libraryseries of detective novels