A closer look
English parliamentarians were so unfathomably petty that in 1661, under the restored King Charles II, they exhumed the body of Oliver Cromwell two full years after he had already died of natural causes just to execute him again. They dragged his rotting corpse through the streets of London, hung it in chains at Tyburn for an entire day, and then viciously chopped off his head before throwing the rest of his remains into a common pit. The severed head was then impaled on a twenty-foot wooden spike outside Westminster Hall, where it stayed for nearly twenty-five years as a gruesome warning against treason. It really highlights the absolute pinnacle of seventeenth-century royal justice, where being safely dead does not actually protect you from the government's completely unhinged theatrical revenge
