The Death of Oliver Cromwell (review)

BOOK REVIEW The Death ofOliver Cromwell by H. F. McMain (University Press of Kentucky, 2000) A well-written historical-mystery tale, The Death of Oliver Cromwell is a whodunit of the highest order. McMain intends to determine the immediate cause(s) of Oliver Cromwell's death on September 3, 1658, and to set the record straight as to his body's burial, exhumation, and final resting place. By examining afresh the conflicting and incomplete record concerning the Lord Protector's last days and his elaborate but delayed funeral, McMain has constructed a circumstantial case that Cromwell was murdered by royalists. McMain further contends that Cromwell's body was not ritually hanged and thrown into a pit at Tyburn in 1 661, as most historians have assumed. Instead, he argues, Cromwell's corpse was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and then secretly buried just outside London. Arguing that had Cromwell lived beyond September 1658, the chances of a Stuart restoration would have decreased, McMain uses medical evidence and pharmaceutical details to construct a plausible case that George Bate, the physician who treated Cromwell's gout in August 1658, poisoned him. Bate's motive, according to McMain, was to facilitate the restoration of the Stuarts, whom he had loyally served as physician in the 1630s. His method was to use a combination of antimony mercury, and arsenic at the appropriate times, culminating his treatment with "a massive amount of arsenic . . .enough to push the Protector over the edge" (101). McMain contends that Cromwell was physically vigorous in 1 658 and that his death was unusual for a man who had not often been ill. This is an important element of McMain's argument, since the death is usually attributed to the effects of recurring illness on a man whom the seventeenth century considered old. Cromwell had been quite ill on a number of occasions, and his symptoms often looked like malaria. Indeed, Cromwell was so ill in Scotland that active campaigning had to be postponed in early 165 1 until he was sufficiently recovered to lead the army. Prolonged illness also hindered his military operations in Ireland in the fall of 1649. Is it possible that !Doctor Bate hastened Cromwell's death with his medical attentions, or even with poison, as contended? Bate does seem to have taken credit for the lord protector's death, but he did so discreetly, with an inconclusive confession . In any case, when Cromwell died, the Protectorate continued under his eldest son, Richard. Further, Richard's accession to the title of Lord Protector was accepted throughout the British Isles without resistance, and in some cases enthusiastically. It was Richard Cromwell's failure to control the army and to surmount the financial crisis of the state that brought the Protectorate to an end. Even then, in the spring of 1659, the Stuarts could not return, and only the internal divisions in the army allowed an initiation of the restoration process. Since the Protectorate continued for six months, any hint of murder would presumably have been investigated, but none was. Once the Restoration had occurred, one would expect Doctor Bate to loudly proclaim his contribution, but he did not. Confusion accompanied the Stuarts' restoration in 1660-61 after Cromwell's death, and the Cavalier Parliament viewed the decision to exhume and "execute" the remains of Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw, the former president of the Commonwealth's Council of State, as a necessary ritual. McMain, however, concludes that the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton were not in fact hanged at Tyburn on January 30, 1661 , as generally thought, but that several of Cromwell's supporters replaced his body secretly with another body. Similarly, he argues that Ireton's body was never buried in Westminster Abbey and another body had to be substituted in its place to achieve the ritual execution ordered by Parliament. Only Bradshaw's decayed corpse was desecrated at Tyburn; his head, along with two others, was put on a spike over Westminster Hall. 18 BOOK REVIEW McMain diverts the reader from his presentation of the central case by suggesting that Ireton did not die of plague but more likely from typhus. The...