The story of Jolly Old Ollie is well known and he did give his army one of the coolest names ever and inspire Elvis Costello to sing a cracking song about him as well as banning Christmas as he considered it was more about the eating, drinking, dancing and having fun rather than the birth of Jesus and believed that people needed strict rules to be religious and that any kind of merrymaking was sinful.
The Churchy types can always be relied upon to suck the fun out of everything but even they surpassed themselves by taking their own holiday and have a problem with people celebrating it but after a decade, Cromwell caught malaria and a water infection and spurned treatment as he thought that God would cure him but in short, he never and he died at age 59 in 1658 and was laid to rest in peace.
Charles II took the throne, the ban on the Festive season was lifted and Parliament was reinstated and the first thing they did was decide that being dead was not enough of a punishment for Ollie so dug him up, his body hanged in chains and then his body thrown into a pit and his head displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall which is where it stayed for 24 years and is mentioned by the diarist Samuel Pepys who recorded seeing it.
The pole on the which the head was impaled snapped during a fierce storm and Cromwell’s head rolled into a gutter in Parliament Square and is believed to have been found by a sentry who took it home and stashed it in his chimney.
It got passed around until 1960 where it was buried somewhere in Cambridge with a plaque stating 'Near to this place was buried the head of Oliver Cromwell', they kept the exact site secret just in case any more Royalists decided to use his noggin as a weather vane again.
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