Cromwell's head spent three centuries in private hands before its burial
Two years after his death, Oliver Cromwell was executed anyway. His body was taken from Westminster Abbey and hanged at Tyburn, and his severed head went up on the roof of Westminster Hall. That head passed through private collections for about three hundred years and was not buried until 1960.
He was born in Huntingdon in 1599, the only boy among ten children to survive infancy. The family's fortune went back to a Welsh brewer who married the sister of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief minister, and profited from the dissolution of the monasteries. His father, a younger son, inherited only a house and a small plot, putting the family near the bottom of the gentry. Oliver himself later called his birth neither lofty nor obscure. He studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, a young college with a strong Puritan outlook, but left without a degree when his father died in 1617.
Though he sat for Huntingdon in 1628, his life before 1640 was dogged by money troubles and personal setbacks. In the 1630s he became a religious Independent and came to see his victories as the work of providence. Elected for Cambridge in 1640, he joined Parliament's army when civil war broke out in 1642, quickly proved a gifted soldier, and in 1645 took command of the New Model Army's cavalry under Thomas Fairfax.
He pressed hard for the execution of Charles I in January 1649, which ushered in the Commonwealth, and his campaigns in Ireland and Scotland cemented his dominance. From December 1653 until his death in 1658 he ruled as Lord Protector. His son Richard proved too weak to hold power, and the monarchy returned in 1660, followed by the posthumous punishment of his corpse.
Opinion still divides. Critics point to his use of the army to seize and keep power, the killing of the king and the brutality of his conquest of Ireland; Winston Churchill called him a military dictator, while admirers hail a champion of liberty. His statue outside Parliament, suggested in 1856, went up only in 1895, largely paid for by Prime Minister Archibald Primrose.
Source: Oliver Cromwell
