The Corpse as Text:The Polemics of Memory and the Deaths of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell

When history and legend unite they produce a unique form of creative energy. In the case of the deaths of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, that energy revolves around literary and folkloric efforts to establish a posthumous relationship between them. The two men “speak” to and about each other from beyond the grave in poems, treatises, epitaphs, and via ghost legend. This “dialogue” continues by way of each man's burial place and tomb monuments, sites that are used by the living to “locate” each man and establish his place in English memory. This posthumous relationship is imagined largely during the seventeenth century, but it persists into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.