Oliver Cromwell’s head, despite these conclusions of Dr Welldon, is now generally believed to have been this skull, which since 1815 had been in the possession of the Wilkinson family, where it remained until it was secretly buried in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960.
“OLIVER CROMWELL’S SKULL
In connection with the death of Mr. Horace Wilkinson, of Frankfield, Sevenoaks, it has been widely stated that he was the possessor of Oliver Cromwell’s skull. Bishop Welldon (the Dean of Manchester) has written to the Manchester Guardian an interesting letter, in which he gives the reasons for believing that this is a mistake. The Bishop says:- ‘Some time ago, when I was living in Westminster Abbey, the thought occurred to me that if the Protector’s head or any part of his remains could be recovered it might still be possible in some sense to undo the act of sacrilege which was perpetrated in the Abbey when his body and the bodies of his mother, his sister, and several of his colleagues, including Ireton, who was his son-in-law, and Bradshaw, were exhumed at the Restoration. But after careful, and I hope, complete inquiry, not without inspecting, through Mr. Wilkinson’s kindness, the skull in his possession, I satisfied myself that there was no such evidence as would justify the belief in its genuineness’. Dr. Welldon further refers to an article written by him on the subject for the ‘Nineteenth Century and After’ in June 1905. In that article he summed up the conclusion at which he arrived after considerable research as follows:- ‘All the evidence which I have collected and compared establishes the belief that the body of Oliver Cromwell was privately buried, not long after his death, in Westminster Abbey; that his body was taken to Tyburn, and there decapitated and buried; that the trunk of his body remained where it was buried beneath the site of the gallows at Tyburn; it has long since mouldered away or has been removed or disturbed in the course of excavation, and it is now irrecoverable; that his head, after being exposed on Westminster Hall for more than twenty years, disappeared; it has never been seen since, and it, too, is now irrecoverable.’”
The Stamford Mercury, 25th December 1908