Christmas Card Curiosties
From Christmas Curiosties: Odd, Dark and Forgotten Christmas by John Grossman.
Advent Calendar of Oddments 2012: December 11th
@ladykrampus / ladykrampus.tumblr.com
From Christmas Curiosties: Odd, Dark and Forgotten Christmas by John Grossman.
Advent Calendar of Oddments 2012: December 11th
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who was part of the joint republican, military and parliamentarian effort that overthrew the Stuart monarchy as a result of the English Civil War, and was subsequently invited by his fellow leaders to assume a head of state role in 1653. Following [his] death on 3 September 1658, he was given a public funeral at Westminster Abbey, equal to those of monarchs before him. After the monarchy was reinstated, and Charles II, who had been living in exile, recalled, parliament ordered the disinterment of Cromwell’s body from Westminster Abbey. After hanging “from morning till four in the afternoon”, the [body was] cut down and the head placed on a 20-foot (6.1 m) spike above Westminster Hall. In 1685 a storm broke the pole upon which it stood, throwing the head to the ground, after which it was in the hands of private collectors and museum owners until 25 March 1960, when it was buried at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge.
The symbolic value of the head changed over time. While it was spiked on a pole above the London skyline, it gave a potent warning to spectators. In the 18th century, the head became a curiosity and a relic. The head has been admired, reviled and dismissed as a fake throughout the centuries. After Thomas Carlyle dismissed the head as “fraudulent moonshine”, and after the emergence of a rival claimant to the true head of Oliver Cromwell, scientific and archaeological analysis was carried out to prove the identity. Inconclusive tests culminated in a detailed scientific study by Karl Pearson and Geoffrey Morant, which concluded, based on a study of the head and other evidence, that there was a “moral certainty” that the head belonged to Oliver Cromwell.