1661: Oliver Cromwell, posthumously
January 30th, 2009 Headsman
On this anniversary date of King Charles I’s beheading, the two-years-dead corpse of the late Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell was hung in chains at Tyburn and then beheaded, along with the bodies of John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton.
The great-great-grandnephew of ruthless Tudor pol Thomas Cromwell rose higher than any English commoner, high enough to be offered the very crown he had struck off at Whitehall. Oliver Cromwell declined it in sweeping Puritan rhetoric just as if he hadn’t spent weeks agonizing over whether to take it.
“I would not seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.”
The House of Stuart never could rebuild its Jericho while the Lord Protector ran the realm* — thirteen years, writes Macaulay, “during which England was, under various names and forms, really governed by the sword. Never, before that time, or since that time, was the civil power in our country subjected to military dictation.”
And not only England. Cromwell’s prodigious depredations in Ireland — justifiably or not — remain a source of bad blood.
The English Commonwealth foundered after Cromwell’s death, however, and restoration of the monarchy — a rock, as it turned out, on which the Puritans’ bourgeois revolution could erect its colossus — came with the price of a few examples being made.
Of course, “executing” dead guys displays about as much strength as it does sanitation, and for all Charles II‘s demonstrative vengeance, the politically circumscribed throne he resumed was very far from his father’s dream of absolutism. Between the late dictator and the new king, the future belonged to the corpse clanking around on the gibbet.
When the able Charles II followed Cromwell into the great hereafter, his brother James II promptly fumbled away the crown with his anachronistic insistence on royal authority and his impolitic adherence to Catholicism.**
In the emerging England of the century to come, the divine right would depart the Stuarts for another dynasty more amenable to the rising authority of the parliament whose sword Oliver Cromwell once wielded.
“Cromwell lifting the Coffin-lid and looking at the body of Charles I”, by Hippolyte (Paul) Delaroche — a French painter with an affinity for English execution scenes. The painting is based on an apocryphal but irresistible legend, also used by Nathaniel Hawthorne in a tedious short story.* Resources on the particulars of Cromwell’s career, the English Civil War, et al, are in plentiful supply online. This BBC documentary is a very watchable overview: part I; part II; part III; part IV.
** James II remains England’s last Catholic monarch.
Also on this date
- 1913: John Williams, the Case of the Hooded Man
- 2011: Ahmed Ali Hussein, enemy cleric
- 1474: Not the Archer of Meudon
- 1996: William Flamer, Alito'd
- 1649: Charles I
Entry Filed under: 17th Century,20th Century,Arts and Literature,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,England,Execution,Famous,Gibbeted,Hanged,Heads of State,History,Murder,Notable for their Victims,Politicians,Posthumous Executions,Power,Public Executions,Revolutionaries,Soldiers,The Worm Turns,Treason,Tyburn
Tags: 1660s, 1661, catholicism, charles i, charles ii, English Civil War, english commonwealth, english protectorate, english restoration, hippolyte delaroche, james ii, january 30, nathaniel hawthorne, oliver cromwell, protestant, protestantism, puritans, regicide, thomas cromwell
January 30th, 2009 at 1:40 am
[...] Not the realm’s most famous Lord Protector, of course, but the last to exercise the office as it had been traditionally understood, for the [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:41 am
[...] Cromwell succeeded where Fawkes failed, at least as pertains the royal person. And if you’re the type who can sell a Charles I costume — possibly requiring a fairly highbrow room — you’ll have nigh outstripped the achievements of both. [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:42 am
[...] Charles’ son and heir Charles II had been stuck on the continent during the 1650’s, until the Commonwealth came apart from its own internal contradictions after the death of Oliver Cromwell. [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:42 am
[...] upon Oliver Cromwell shortly after the execution of Charles I, his partner Thomas Allen being taken in the [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:45 am
[...] an overreaching assertion of lordly prerogatives by James Stanley, Earl of Derby, of late made Cromwell’s prisoner, might have prepared a powder keg ignited by the efforts of the Earl’s wife [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 1:53 am
[...] the monarchy’s restoration, Charles was canonized as a saint by the Church of England: he’s still the last person so [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Right. So I was all prepared to defend Hawthorne until I clicked on the link and read the short story. Correction: skimmed it until I couldn’t take it anymore. Seriously, “tedious” is being gracious. More like, wretched and amateurish.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] Executed Today reminds us that on this day in 1661, Oliver Cromwell’s body was disinterred, hung in chains at Tyburn, then posthumously beheaded. [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:50 am
[...] neoliberal taskmaster had introduced the world to the auto-golpe, the “self-coup”, a Cromwellian maneuver of shuttering parliament in order to rule as dictator, and he thereafter made ruthless [...]
July 28th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
[...] bitterness for the crown, maybe his spirit would take some satisfaction a century later when another of his name and family rose high enough to behead a [...]
January 18th, 2010 at 4:06 am
[...] Stuart line was (for now) restored to the throne, and the regicides of its late king horribly if not voluminously [...]
February 12th, 2010 at 10:10 am
[...] guy sure had a thing for executions. If this blog had a patron artist, it would be Paul [...]
July 3rd, 2010 at 4:00 pm
[...] benådningar som inträffat på dagens datum. Det rör sig om kända personer, okända personer, döda personer, legender och litterära figurer. Inriktningen må låta makaber (och är det till viss del också) [...]
August 20th, 2010 at 7:22 am
[...] 1654, Johan brought the First Anglo-Dutch War to a close, making with Oliver Cromwell a secret pact he was only too happy to enforce never to allow William II’s son, the eventual [...]
October 27th, 2010 at 4:01 am
[...] had fled C-of-E persecution earlier in the 17th century, Quakers migrated to the New World with Cromwell’s Puritan [...]
November 8th, 2010 at 1:26 pm
[...] continued to complicate Dutch-English relations into the reign of Charles I and beyond. Even Oliver Cromwell required, as the price of peace for the First Anglo-Dutch War in the 1650s, punishment of any [...]
April 2nd, 2011 at 10:24 am
[...] benådningar som inträffat på dagens datum. Det rör sig om kända personer, okända personer, döda personer, legender och litterära figurer. Inriktningen må låta makaber (och är det till viss del också) [...]
April 24th, 2011 at 6:29 am
[...] was promulgated in Albion, along with collections for the relief of the survivors. Oliver Cromwell personally put £2,000 into the [...]
April 27th, 2011 at 6:40 am
[...] up in high statecraft, Oliver Cromwell was preparing to make his name accursed of Ireland by smashing up the island and the Grandees hit [...]
May 16th, 2011 at 4:49 am
[...] it was also not a revolution in the Cromwellian, world-turned-upside-down sense. For the English polity, and certainly for the conduct it [...]
December 15th, 2011 at 4:37 am
[...] certainly can be no doubt,” wrote a Venetian diplomat in 1658 late in the rule ofOliver Cromwell, “that Charles [II] is betrayed by some of those who stand about him, otherwise it would be [...]
December 30th, 2011 at 11:56 am
[...] especially when the Presbyterians’ parliamentary faction got on the wrong side of Cromwell‘s New Model Army.* “Pride’s Purge”, the de facto army coup d’etat [...]
January 28th, 2012 at 11:03 pm
[...] remains be made to suffer for their former soul’s transgressions. Charles II could not best Oliver Cromwell in life, but finally made Cromwell’s bones suffer for regicide. As an object lesson, what [...]
January 5th, 2013 at 4:35 am
[...] this period laboring under social crisis, or a set of crises. It had been declared in rebellion by Cromwell‘s parliament for taking too-vigorous umbrage at King Charles‘s execution. Its official [...]
February 20th, 2013 at 4:33 am
[...] of 1641 — a bloody Catholic-Protestant civil war that would start the ball rolling towards Cromwell‘s [...]