I Hate You “This” Much
Monday, April 6th, 2009Last week, I was reading about posthumous execution.
In a nutshell, a person dies, but you hate them so much that you have them dug up, desecrated, defiled and otherwise fucked up, just to make you feel better about yourself. Often, this would take the form of public “torture”, complete with mock trials.
For example, the Cadaver Synod of Pope Formosus in 897:
Pope Stephen VI, the successor of Boniface, influenced by Lambert and Agiltrude, sat in judgment of Formosus in 897, in what was called the Cadaver Synod. The corpse was disinterred, clad in papal vestments, and seated on a throne to face all the charges from John VIII. The verdict was that the deceased had been unworthy of the pontificate. The Damnatio memoriae, an old judicial practice from the Ancient Rome was applied to Formosus and all his measures and acts were annulled, and the orders conferred by him were declared invalid. The papal vestments were torn from his body, the three fingers from his right hand that he had used in consecrations were cut off and the corpse was thrown into the Tiber (and later retrieved by a monk). [source]
Good times, right? It’s even immortalized in art.
My current favorite is the exhumation and punishment of Oliver Cromwell’s corpse:
In 1661, Oliver Cromwell’s body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey, and was subjected to the ritual of a posthumous execution, as were the remains of John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton. (The body of Cromwell’s daughter was allowed to remain buried in the Abbey.) Symbolically, this took place on 30 January; the same date that Charles I had been executed. His body was hanged in chains at Tyburn. Finally, his disinterred body was thrown into a pit, while his severed head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall until 1685. Afterwards the head changed hands several times, including the sale in 1814 to a man named Josiah Henry Wilkinson,[88][89] before eventually being buried in the grounds of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in 1960.
Here’s his head:

An eyewitness, Samuel Sainthill wrote: “they were hanged by the neck from morning. Cromwell in a green seare cloth, very fresh embalmed; Ireton….hung like a dried rat.” Mmm, dried rat. NOM!



