On 30 January 1661, a macabre spectacle unfolded in London as Oliver Cromwell, the erstwhile Lord Protector of England, faced execution—despite having been dead for over two years.
In a theatrical display of royalist vengeance, his exhumed corpse was hanged at Tyburn, subjected to symbolic decapitation, and his severed head mounted on a spike above Westminster Hall, a grim warning to those who had dared to challenge the monarchy.
This posthumous punishment, orchestrated by the restored Stuart regime of King Charles II, was an attempt to erase the legacy of the regicide and the interregnum, a grotesque manifestation of political retribution against a man who had wielded unprecedented power in life, only to be disgraced in death.
