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
Possibly Related Executions
- 1535: Thomas More, the king’s good servant but God’s first
- 1900: En Hai, the murderer of von Ketteler
- 1871: The Paris Commune falls
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
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10 Comments Add your own
1. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
2. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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. [...]
3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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. [...]
4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
6. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
7. SGMoore | 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.
8. The execution of Charles &hellip | 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. [...]
9. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
10. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | 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 [...]
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