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The best of political London: a history of Britain in the places where it happened, from parliament and palace to courts and counting houses and the streets where people pushed back.
The man who abolished the monarchy, outside Parliament with a sword and a Bible, paid for in secret because the Commons would not vote for him.
Government & ParliamentMonarchyFree to enter
Also in Royal London.
Between 1642 and 1651 England fought a civil war over who ruled it. Charles I held that his authority came from God and had governed for eleven years without calling Parliament at all; Parliament disagreed. Parliament won, tried the king and beheaded him outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall in January 1649, and for eleven years England had no monarchy. Oliver Cromwell, the general who had won the war, governed as Lord Protector until he died in 1658.
Hamo Thornycroft's bronze went up in 1899, and the row nearly stopped it. The Commons divided on whether to have it at all; the Irish Nationalist members and most Conservatives voted against, because of what Cromwell's army did in Ireland, and the government withdrew the proposal on 17 July 1895. It was built anyway, paid for by an anonymous private donor rather than out of public money - Lord Rosebery, the former Prime Minister, who was not named at the time and who gave the speech at the unveiling on 31 October 1899. Cromwell stands with a sword in one hand and a Bible marked 1641 in the other, his head down.
When the monarchy returned in 1660 Cromwell was two years dead. Parliament had him dug up, hanged at Tyburn and beheaded, and his head was set on a pole above Westminster Hall - the building immediately behind this statue - where it stayed for about twenty years.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.