HIST362: Modern Revolutions

Cromwell suffered from malaria and from 'stone,' a common term for urinary/kidney infections, yet he was in generally good health. He was struck by a sudden bout of malaria, followed directly by an attack of urinary/kidney symptoms. Although weakened, he was optimistic about the future as were his attendants. A Venetian diplomat, also a physician, was visiting at the time and tracked Cromwell's final illness. It was his opinion that The Lord Protector's personal physicians were mismanaging his health, leading to a rapid decline and death.

Within two years of Cromwell's death on September 3, 1658, parliament restored Charles II as king, as Cromwell's son Richard Cromwell had proved an unworthy successor. Maligned as a hypocrite who used religion to further his ambitions, Cromwell has been defended and criticized in turn by successive generations. Fraser (2001) says that he could be blinded by his own sense of righteousness, and that in "seeking to bring about change - peace through war - as his Latin motto had it - he displayed indeed a remarkable freedom from daunt" (703). He passionately believed that the "lives of ordinary people should be improved, not brutalized by the deeds of the powers that ruled them" (702). The “feeling spread by his eulogists," Lady Fraser concludes, "that he had been called out of a private station to his country's service" is a case that can still be made (703). He loved England, she says: "the English countryside, English field sports, horses, dogs, hunting and hawking, all of which not only marked him as a rounded man, but also brought him closely in touch with many of the people over whom he ruled, because he shared their tastes" (701).

This would have been the end of the story, but in 1661 Oliver Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution - on January 30, the same date that Charles I had been executed. He was in fact hanged, drawn and quartered. At the end his body was thrown into a pit. His severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Abbey until 1685. Since then it changed hands several times before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960.