Religion: Roundhead on the Pike

The head of England's great Puritan, open mouth still drawn down in disapproval of a godless generation, glowered for a new master last week. Dr. Horace Wilkinson of Kettering, Northamptonshire, wondered what to do with a family heirloom left by his late father, Canon Horace Wilkinson, the pike-impaled head of Oliver Cromwell.

The Lord Protector's well-embalmed head has not had a reposeful history. In 1660, two years after the 59-year-old Cromwell died in his bed (of a fever), the House of Commons, full of the heady days of the Restoration and Charles II, directed that his body be disinterred and hanged. The cadaver dangled on a gibbet all day long on the twelfth anniversary of Charles I's execution, then was cut down and decapitated; the body was buried under the gallows at Tyburn (near London's present Marble Arch), the head stuck on a pike and displayed atop Westminster Hall. When a high wind blew it down after long exposure, a soldier carried it home and hid it.

Three generations later Cromwell's head belonged to the soldier's granddaughter's husband—a second-rate actor named Samuel Russell, who sold it to a jeweler, who sold it (for £230) to a syndicate, for public exhibition. In the early igih century Josiah Henry Wilkinson picked it up at the bargain price of £100. It eventually came down through the family to the canon, who kept it at the foot of his bed, in a box on which his cat used to sleep, and showed the relic off to visitors as an effective conversation piece.

Is it really Cromwell's head? It looks like him—to the reddish beard and mustache and the wart over the right eyebrow. Scholars who examined it at the Royal Archaeological Institute believed it to be genuine. In Canon Wilkinson's house last week the old Roundhead rested in its oaken box. No one seemed disposed to demand burial.