Monuments and Posthumous Honours
In 1776, one of the first ships commissioned to serve in the Continental Navy during the American Revolutionary War was named Oliver Cromwell.
Nineteenth-century engineer Sir Richard Tangye was a noted Cromwell enthusiast and collector of Cromwell manuscripts and memorabilia. His collection included many rare manuscripts and printed books, medals, paintings, objects d'art and a bizarre assemblage of "relics." This includes Cromwell's bible, button, coffin plate, death mask and funeral escutcheon. On Tangye's death, the entire collection was donated to the Museum of London, where it can still be seen.
In 1875 a statue of Cromwell by Matthew Noble was erected in Manchester outside the cathedral, a gift to the city by Mrs. Abel Heywood in memory of her first husband. It was the first such large-scale statue to be erected in the open in England and was a realistic likeness, based on the painting by Peter Lely and showing Cromwell in battledress with drawn sword and leather body armour. The statue was unpopular with local Conservatives and the large Irish immigrant population. When Queen Victoria was invited to open the new Manchester Town Hall, she is alleged to have consented on condition that the statue of Cromwell be removed. The statue remained, Victoria declined, and the Town Hall was instead opened by the Lord Mayor. During the 1980s the statue was relocated outside Wythenshawe Hall, which had been occupied by Cromwell's troops.
During the 1890s plans to erect a statue of Cromwell outside Parliament also proved to be controversial. Pressure from the Irish Nationalist Party forced the withdrawal of a motion to seek public funding for the project, which was eventually funded privately by Lord Rosebery.
Cromwell controversy continued into the 20th century. As First Lord of the Admiralty before the First World War, Winston Churchill twice suggested naming a British battleship HMS Oliver Cromwell. The suggestion was vetoed by King George V, not only because of his personal feelings but because he felt, given the anger caused by the erection of the statue outside Parliament, to give such a name to an expensive warship at a time of Irish political unrest was unwise. Churchill was eventually told by the First Sea Lord Admiral Battenberg that the king's decision must be treated as final.
The Cromwell Tank, a British Second World War medium weight tank first used in 1944, and a steam locomotive built by British Railways in 1951, 70013 Oliver Cromwell were both named after Cromwell.
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Famous quotes containing the words monuments, posthumous and/or honours:
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed: it is a kind of posthumous honor. It does not often caress the great, but the children of the great: it is a hall of the Past.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Come hither, all ye empty things,
Ye bubbles rais’d by breath of Kings;
Who float upon the tide of state,
Come hither, and behold your fate.
Let pride be taught by this rebuke,
How very mean a thing’s a Duke;
From all his ill-got honours flung,
Turn’d to that dirt from whence he sprung.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)