“[Cromwell’s] severed head was as hollow and dead as his republican ideals,” Frances Larson writes in Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, “and as long as it played its part as the marionette on the roof of Westminster Hall, no one would be allowed to forget.” As Jonathan Fitzgibbons writes in his book Cromwell’s Head, “Anecdotal evidence claims that the head finally came down one evening in the midst of a great storm that battered London towards the end of the reign of James II.” The head was still attached to its pole, which, they wrote, “had long been in contact with the Head, for some of the worm holes pass through the Head and the pole.”