Oliver's Head Poem by David Lewis Paget

They ripped his body out of the grave
That had been a National Shrine,
Tipped his statue into the nave
To avenge his terrible crime,
They dragged his body and Ireton’s
On a litter around the town,
Then hung them high on a Tyburn rope
Until the sun went down.

It took eight strokes of a royal axe
To take off his hated head,
And then it was spiked at Westminster
To afford the people dread,
They say a terrible storm had struck
On the day that Cromwell died,
And that was the Devil, taking his soul
To burn on the other side!

They’d buried him with full honours
To befit a regicide,
Right to the end of the Commonwealth
When his reputation died,
But Charles returned to claim the throne
His father had thrown away,
And first condemned all the regicides
Who were still alive, to pay.

To hang and draw and quarter them
For the murder of a King,
But what about the already dead?
He still decreed they’d swing.
They took the main conspirators
And Bradshaw from their graves,
To teach the English people
What the royals did with knaves.

The heads were spiked so many years
And grisly, looking down,
That people ceased to notice them
In dear old London Town,
A storm blew up, and it broke the spike
That held aloft the dead,
And spilled it into an alleyway,
The Lord Protector’s head.

A sentinel first found it there
And he took the head back home,
Hid it up in the chimney piece
‘Til the hue and cry died down,
It passed from hand to hand for years
As a curiosity,
Was shown in exhibitions and
Museums, constantly.

The head that ruled the Commonwealth,
That overcame the Scots,
Was hated in Drogheda for
Three thousand lives it cost,
Was laid to rest, three hundred years
From the time that he had died,
And it lies at last in Cambridge,
The head of a regicide.