I needed to find out more about the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers for a paper I’m writing, so I bought a second-hand copy of the company’s official history for £6 from AbeBooks.

Inside I found this dedication:

Peter Grooke – now Baron Brooke of Sutton Mandeville – was Conservative MP for the Cities of London and Westminster for many years. He was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the point this book would have been given to him. I’m not sure why he was presented with a copy: presumably some link with the company, although I can’t find one.

Whether he read it is a different matter. The book is in excellent condition apart from a very faded spine. Some of the pages had to be pried apart as I was reading it. So it has clearly just sat on a shelf for twenty-five years…

Carnivalesque 56 – an early modern edition – is up at Investigations of a Dog.

A pair of boots alleged to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell went up for auction earlier this week. They belonged to John Fane, a descendant of the  8th Earl of Westmorland. It’s a story that seems to have been around for a while. However, the connection is rather tenuous. The Earl of Westmorland who was Cromwell’s contemporary was Mildmay Fane, the 2nd Earl. He was a royalist, so it seems unlikely they came into his possession.

Reporting in the press has instead drawn attention to the fact that Wormsley Hall, now the home of the Fanes, used to belong to Colonel Adrian Scrope. Scrope was an army officer and a regicide, one of those who was imprisoned and put to death after the Restoration. But he wasn’t exactly close to Cromwell. There was a very slight kinship connection via the Hampden family, but he never served with Cromwell. After the execution of Charles I, Scrope was appointed governor of Bristol and stayed there until 1655, at which point he was made part of the council for the government of Scotland. He stayed in Scotland ntil the summer of 1658, shortly before Cromwell’s death. He didn’t get involved in any of the politicking during Richard Cromwell’s short period of rule. So it seems hard to know where he might have got hold of the boots. At the Restoration he surrendered himself to the authorities, so you might have thought a pair of Cromwell’s boots would be one of the first things he’d get rid of.

Even if they’re not Cromwell’s, it got me thinking about the various pieces of surviving Cromwell memorabilia. There is just about enough out there to reconstruct, Frankenstein’s monster-style, an entire Cromwell:

One of Cromwell’s hats survives at the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon. This is supposed to be the hat he wore to Parliament on 20 April 1653 which he took off while dissolving the Rump.

Various death masks taken on or after 3 September 1658 survive. This one is from the British Museum.

Of course there is also Cromwell’s actual head, now interred at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, but the chances of digging that up seem unlikely.

The Royal Armouries Museum at Leeds has a sword alleged to have belonged to Cromwell, and a buff coat that, while not his, is very like the ones he must have worn.

And now there are the boots to round off the entire ensemble.

Fellow students and alumni of Birkbeck College will doubtless have spotted the spelling mistake in tonight’s Doctor Who episode. Tsk, tsk…

If you are interested in early modern book history or the civil war period, then you will probably be interested to know that Joyce Macadam’s 2005 thesis on Mercurius Britanicus, one of the earliest and most successful newsbooks backed by Parliament, is now online via the British Library’s rather excellent EThOS service. Joyce was very kind to me when I was writing my dissertation and sent me a copy of it, and it is a fascinating read.

Since 2005, part of the thesis has also been published as an article in Historical Research: ‘Soldiers, statesmen and scribblers: London newsbook reporting of the Marston Moor campaign, 1644′.