Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
Page 1
Severed
A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found
Frances Larson
for Greger
Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto
Terence, Heauton Timorumenos
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Prologue: Oliver Cromwell’s Head
Introduction: Irresistible Heads
1 Shrunken Heads
2 Trophy Heads
3 Deposed Heads
4 Framed Heads
5 Potent Heads
6 Bone Heads
7 Dissected Heads
8 Living Heads
Conclusion: Other People’s Heads
Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
Illustrations
Canon Horace Wilkinson holding Oliver Cromwell’s head in 1949. Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
Tsantsas on display in the Treatment of Dead Enemies exhibition case at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.
Horatio Robley, seated with his collection of Maori toi moko in 1895. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Lieutenant E.V. McPherson, of Columbus, Ohio, with a Japanese skull which served as a mascot aboard the United States Navy motor torpedo boat 341. Alexishafen, New Guinea, 1944. Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial 072837.
Severed head of a napalmed Japanese soldier propped up below the gun turret of a disabled Japanese tank. Guadalcanal, January 1943. Photograph by Ralph Morse. Courtesy of Time Life Pictures / Getty Images.
Phoenix war worker Natalie Nickerson penning her Navy boyfriend a thank you note for sending her a Japanese soldier’s skull he gathered as a souvenir while fighting in New Guinea. Life magazine, Picture of the Week, May 1944. Photograph by Ralph Crane. Courtesy of Time Life Pictures / Getty Images.
The execution of the German criminal Eugen Weidmann in Versailles, France, 1939. Courtesy of Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.
The first execution by guillotine, Place du Carrousel, Paris, 13th August 1792. Courtesy of Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library.
A portrait de guillotiné engraving by Villeneuve, ‘A matter for crowned mountebanks to consider’, 1793. Courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Têtes coupées by Théodore Géricault, 1818. Courtesy of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
With Dead Head by Damien Hirst, 1991. © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2014.
Drawings of dissected heads in the University of California, San Diego, anatomy teaching collection, by Joyce Cutler-Shaw, 1992. Courtesy of Joyce Cutler-Shaw.
The head of Saint Oliver Plunkett. Courtesy of St Peter’s Church, Drogheda.
The head of Saint Catherine of Siena. Courtesy of Foto LENSINI Siena and the Basilica di San Domenico, Siena.
The reliquary bust of Saint Just. Courtesy of Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zürich. NEG 33904.
Staff at the West Suffolk Hospital, Bury St Edmunds, positioning Simon of Sudbury’s head in the CT scanner, March 2011. Courtesy of The Ipswich Star / Archant Suffolk.
Franz Joseph Gall leading a discussion on phrenology with five colleagues, among his extensive collection of skulls and model heads. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson, 1808. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
The Hyrtl skull collection on display at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia. Photograph by George Wildman, 2009. Courtesy of the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
A charwoman at the Royal College of Surgeons cleaning the collection of human crania in the early twentieth century. Courtesy of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
The Morton collection of nineteenth-century skulls at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Courtesy of Steven Minicola, University of Pennsylvania.
Staff ‘ascertaining the capacity of the cranial cavity by means of water’, at the United States Army Medical Museum, Washington, DC, 1884. Courtesy of the Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
The arteries of the head and neck, from Engravings of the Arteries by Charles Bell, Longman and Rees, 1811. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Preparation of the nerves within the orbit, from The Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, 1836. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Plastinated split head, on display at the Body Worlds exhibition, Seoul, 2012. Courtesy of Johanne Miller.
Illustration of Giovanni Aldini’s experiments on decapitated bodies, from his Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvinisme, Paris, 1804. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.
Doctors from the Medical Association of Mainz examine a severed head under the scaffold at a public execution in Mainz, 1803. Courtesy of Sheila Terry / Science Photo Library.
Neuro-patient operating apparatus, 2006, and neuro-patient storage, 2009, at Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Courtesy of Murray Ballard.
PROLOGUE
Oliver Cromwell’s Head
Josiah Wilkinson liked to take Oliver Cromwell’s head to breakfast parties. The broken metal spike which had been thrust through Cromwell’s skull at Tyburn, 160 years earlier, provided a convenient handle for guests to use while examining the leathery relic over their devilled kidneys. In 1822, one of his guests wrote: ‘A frightful skull it is, covered with its parched yellow skin like any other mummy and with its chestnut hair, eyebrows and beard in glorious preservation.’ It was Wilkinson’s prized possession, and he kept it in an oak box specially made for the purpose. When friends voiced their reservations about its authenticity he pointed to the distinctive wart over Cromwell’s left eye.
The ability to shock bestows a kind of power, and Wilkinson revelled in the limelight, regaling his audience with stories about Cromwell and the journeys his head had taken since it was severed in 1661. For it really was Oliver Cromwell’s head, and Wilkinson was the latest in a long line of showmen who had capitalized on its magnetism. As he knew, people always wanted a closer look: they were drawn to the horror, the novelty, the notoriety, the intimacy and the finality of Cromwell’s severed head.
Cromwell’s head was intended to be displayed. Cromwell himself had died of a recurrent fever on 3 September 1658. Two and a half years later, during a spate of reprisals by the Restoration government against the ‘king killers’, the Lord Protector’s embalmed body was dug out of its tomb in Westminster Abbey, dragged through the streets of London on a hurdle, hanged from the gallows at Tyburn to the delight of a raucous crowd, and decapitated. A few days later, his head was impaled on a twenty-foot pole and mounted on the roof of Westminster Hall for the whole of London to see. The metal spike had been driven into his head with such force that it burst through the top of his skull. Spike and skull would never part: Cromwell had returned to the public stage two years after his death transformed into the King’s puppet.
Evelyn and Pepys, the two great diarists of the age, were dismayed at this turn of events. ‘It doth trouble me,’ wrote Pepys, ‘that a man of so great courage as he was should have that dishonour, though otherwise he might deserve it enough’, while Evelyn wondered at ‘the stupendous and inscrutable judgments of God!’ as thousands of people watched the Lord Protector dragged from his tomb ‘among the King
s’ and saw his body thrown into a pit under ‘that fatal and ignominious monument’ at Tyburn. Neither writer witnessed these events himself, but they saw Cromwell’s head, because it adorned Westminster Hall for the next forty years. It was taken down only for a brief period in 1681 during routine repairs to the roof.
Westminster Hall was the perfect arena for such a spectacle. It housed the three chief Courts of Justice in the Palace of Westminster and for centuries it had accommodated coronation celebrations, state funerals and ceremonial addresses. Westminster Hall symbolized the rightful passage of power, the authority of the monarchy and Parliament, and the fatal fragility of their alliance in the wake of civil war. Charles I had been brought to trial at Westminster Hall in 1649; four years later Cromwell took his seat there before the Lord Mayor and accepted the title of Lord Protector, and in 1657 he processed into the Hall again for his investiture, with all the pageantry of a king at his coronation. Now, his mute, mutilated head watched vacantly as guests arrived for King Charles II’s coronation banquet in April 1661, and it continued to preside over the activities of the King’s government for decades. Cromwell, the ultimate traitor, had been deposed post mortem. His severed head was as hollow and as dead as his republican ideals, and as long as it played its part as the marionette on the roof of Westminster Hall, no one would be allowed to forget.
A storm blew Cromwell’s head down from the roof at Westminster one night towards the end of the seventeenth century, so the story goes, and not long afterwards, it turned up in a museum case. During the eight eenth century, the head passed into private circulation and it was transformed into a curiosity, a precious relic and a business opportunity.
Various people put Cromwell’s head on display. First, there was Claudius du Puy, a Swiss calico printer, who exhibited it in his museum in London alongside exotic herbs and rare coins. In 1710 one of his German visitors wondered that ‘this monstrous head could still be so dear and worthy to the English’. Then there was Samuel Russell, a drunken actor who entertained the public from a ramshackle stall amongst the butchers’ meat hooks in Clare Market, and who used to pass the head to curious shoppers for a closer look. Russell sold the head to James Cox, who had also owned a successful museum and knew a valuable trophy when he saw one. Cox showed the head to select guests in private, and made a tidy profit when, after twelve years, he decided to sell it to the Hughes brothers, who made it the star attraction of their Cromwelliana exhibition in Old Bond Street.
From one showman to another, Cromwell’s head passed through the eighteenth century, turning a profit each time. The only problem was wear and tear. At some point, perhaps as far back as the day at Tyburn, Cromwell had lost an ear and several teeth. His nose had been crushed, his hair was thinning, his flesh was desiccated and reduced, and his skin was yellowy-brown, stretched and leathery. The incongruous appearance of this hard, dry object made it a most effective memento mori, for few can have handled Cromwell’s head without reflecting on their own mortality. This was what death looked like. Cromwell, the great commander, was now nothing more than a lump of matter, dependent on the passions of the paying public and vulnerable to the elements.
Georgian men of science had concluded that the head was little more than a curiosity, and to some it was a distinctly distasteful artefact. Joseph Banks, the eminent naturalist who had joined Captain James Cook’s first voyage to Australia, was asked to view the head in 1813, but he refused on political grounds. He said that he could not bring himself to view the remains of ‘the old Villainous Republican, the mention of whose very name made his blood boil with indignation’. In the same year, William Bullock, an antiquarian whose collection was displayed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, thought about acquiring the head for his museum as ‘a mere matter of curiosity’, but he was informally advised by the Prime Minister against the propriety of exhibiting human remains to the paying public.
That decision signalled a change. Cromwell’s head was transferred into private hands when Josiah Wilkinson bought it in 1814. Now it was destined for more exclusive audiences and people who could assess its merits in controlled conditions. Wilkinson might not have been able to resist showing his famous relic to delighted guests at his dining table, but it would never be passed around the street markets of London again.
As the stories surrounding the head’s past proliferated, questions were raised about its authenticity. A number of heads began to circulate: another of Cromwell’s heads was put on display in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Wilkinson was convinced that his head was the real one, but other people were not so sure. The writer and historian Thomas Carlyle, for instance, whose book Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches had inspired a new vogue for Cromwell in mid-Victorian Britain, thought Wilkinson’s curio ‘fraudulent moonshine’ and refused to examine it in person.
This was now a problem which demanded a scientific approach to the evidence. A lengthening list of professional academics examined the yellowing head: an expert medalist, a numismatist at the British Museum, a leading member of the Phrenological Society, an eminent sculptor, an Oxford physiologist, various members of the Royal Archaeological Institute and two medical statisticians. All brought their training to bear on Cromwell’s head, and all now came out in support of Wilkinson.
By the 1930s, countless calipers had been wielded, numerous microscopes had been focused and hundreds of pages had been written about Cromwell’s head. Every lump, bump, stitch and scratch on that ‘somewhat repulsive’ object had been examined and described. Yet the scientists who studied Cromwell’s head had also fallen under its spell, and the intensity of their gaze was a reflection of the power this decaying artefact still wielded after two hundred years in private ownership. The Wilkinson family, who had now owned the head for four generations, preferred to shy away from publicity, but time and again they were dragged back into the limelight by journalists who came across the story of Cromwell’s head and wrote about its extraordinary past.
Canon Horace Wilkinson holding Oliver Cromwell’s head in 1949.
In the mid-twentieth century, Dr Horace Wilkinson, Josiah’s great-grandson, came to feel that the burden of caring for an infamous human head was too onerous. He decided that Cromwell should rest in peace. And so, in 1960, during a small, private ceremony, Cromwell’s head was buried in its old oak box somewhere beneath the floor of the ante-chapel at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. The exact location has been kept a closely guarded secret by the university. A plaque reads, ‘Near to this place was buried on 25 March 1960 the head of Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, Fellow Commoner of this College 1616–17.’
There will be no forensic examination and no DNA testing: science has been denied a final say in the story of Oliver Cromwell’s head. Of course, this does not prevent tourists coming to see the place for themselves. Cromwell’s head may have been laid to rest at last, but it still draws the crowds.
INTRODUCTION
Irresistible Heads
This is a book about severed heads. Our history is littered with them. The word ‘headhunting’ conjures up exotic, strange and dangerous worlds far from civilization, but the truth is that human heads have long been paraded closer to home. We have our own particular traditions when it comes to headhunting and, over the centuries, human heads have embellished almost every facet of our society, from the scaffold to the cathedral, and from the dissecting room to the art gallery. Our traditions of decapitation run deep and linger on, albeit tacitly, even today.
The story of Oliver Cromwell’s head is extraordinary, not simply because it survived intact for three centuries, but because it was recast in so many different guises over the years. Hewn on the scaffold and staked up as a traitor’s head, within a few decades Cromwell’s head had been transformed into a museum piece. It was variously thought of as a trophy, a precious relic, a memento mori and a data set. Its value shifted with the changing attitudes of the times, and it is emblematic of thous
ands of human heads that have furnished the worlds of justice, science and leisure over the centuries. In this way, it neatly links many of the stories in this book, simply by virtue of its pedigree and longevity.
Cromwell’s head was, however, just one, exceptional, head dating from long ago. It bears out two of our most common assumptions about severed heads today: that they are unusual, and that they are old. Occasionally the story of a famous person’s errant head hits the headlines: recently Ned Kelly’s skull and the embalmed head of King Henry IV of France have undergone scientific testing, and, on the anniversary of his death, journalists recounted the well-worn story of the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, who donated his head to the Royal College of Surgeons when he died in 1942. Stories like these capitalize on the notion that human heads are historical specimens of singular interest, but that is far from being the case. The story of Cromwell’s head is astonishing because it reveals a little-known aspect of our very own cultural fabric, and, perhaps, part of our human nature.
Severed heads have long had a value, or a place, in our society; even if that value is contested or troubling. People’s heads have been, and in some cases continue to be, displayed in the name of science, warfare, religion, art, justice and politics. Soldiers have taken people’s heads as trophies, not hundreds of years ago, but in our own lifetimes. Videos of beheadings have been uploaded online by terrorists and murderers in recent years and downloaded by millions of Europeans and Americans to watch in their own homes. Medical students must face the task of dissecting severed human heads and the vast majority of them find it an enlightening experience. Pilgrims travel to gaze at the heads of saints that are displayed in churches across Europe. Artists find inspiration in dissection rooms and morgues, contemplating other people’s dead bodies and severed heads. People request that their own heads be removed after their death and cryopreserved, in the belief that at some future date it will be possible to regrow a second body around a person’s brain and so restore them to life. And countless preserved, shrunken, jarred and defleshed heads are shown to enthusiastic visitors in our museums, those temples of modern civilization.