England dug up Oliver Cromwell, hanged his corpse and put his head on a pole, and collectors sold the head for 300 years until a college buried it in secret in 1960

Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Charles II returned in 1660. On 30 January 1661, the anniversary of Charles I's execution, the bodies of Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were taken from their graves and hanged at Tyburn. Cromwell's head was cut off and raised on a 20-foot pole above Westminster Hall. His trunk went into an unmarked pit, probably near today's Marble Arch. The head was still on the hall in 1684. A storm later broke the pole and a sentry took the head. From 1710 Claudius Du Puy showed it in his London museum. Samuel Russell tried and failed to sell it to Sidney Sussex College, where Cromwell had studied. In April 1787 it passed to James Cox to settle Russell's debts to him. Cox sold it in 1799 to the Hughes brothers for £230, and their Bond Street show failed. In 1815 Josiah Henry Wilkinson bought it. His family kept it in an oak box for 145 years. In 1934 Karl Pearson and Geoffrey Morant wrote of a "moral certainty" that it was Cromwell's. Horace Wilkinson died in 1957 and left it to his son. On 25 March 1960 the college buried it near its antechapel and announced the burial only in October 1962. The exact spot is secret. Cromwell's copper-gilt coffin plate came up at Sotheby's in 2014 with an estimate of £8,000 to £12,000.