This death mask, almost certainly of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), was believed by Soane to be that of the naval mutineer Richard Parker (1767-97). In his 1836 Description of his house and Museum he remarks on the ‘…. striking resemblance … of Parker’s appearance to that of [Oliver] Cromwell’. The death mask is not mentioned in Soane’s earlier 1832 Description, suggesting that he acquired it between the two publication dates.

Parker was the son of an Exeter baker, who began training for a naval career at the age of 12. He played a leading role in the Mutiny on the Nore of 1797, for which he earned the sarcastic soubriquet ‘Admiral Parker’. Despite the mutineers at one point blockading the Thames, the mutiny failed. Parker was captured, tried and hanged from the yard-arm of his ship, Sandwich, on 30 June 1797, while his wife watched from a small boat nearby. Parker’s body was initially buried at Sheerness but then secretly retrieved by his wife, taken to London and exhibited in the Hoop and Horseshoe tavern near Tower Hill. There was much public interest and it was at this time that a death mask was probably made by William Clift, former assistant to the famous surgeon and collector John Hunter. Magistrates, fearing public unrest, ordered Parker’s body to be buried and it was reinterred at Whitechapel in July 1797. The death mask remained in Clift’s possession and eventually in the late 1940s entered the collection of the Hunterian Museum – on the other side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields at the Royal College of Surgeons, where it remains today (Hunterian Museum no. RCSHM/Z 31).

Soane’s acquisition of the death mask reflects his interest in newsworthy events of his own lifetime, although at almost four decades distance. However, in this case he was duped by the seller of the death mask – the mask he acquired is very different from the genuine death mask of Parker and by comparison with other copies of Cromwell's death mask (for example at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, number M.2 & A-1912 and Ashmolean Museum, Oxford AN1990.91) is clearly that of the Lord Protector of England who died in 1658. There are a number of surviving examples of Cromwell's death mask, all of which are plaster copies of the original wax mask¹, taken directly from the body by Thomas Simon as the model for the wooden funeral effigy which lay in state in Somerset House on the Strand for some weeks after Cromwell's death.² It is a curious thing that such a famous death mask, which would presumably have appealed to Soane in its own right, should have been sold to him with such a convoluted fake history attached to it!

^1. Other copies are in the National Portrait Gallery (two), at the Museum of London and in Museum's abroad. Those at the Soane and at the Ashmolean are thought to have been cast in the early 19th century.
^2. It was a wooden effigy with a wax replica of the face (made from the cast) that lay in state at Somerset House. At the restoration of the monarchy an effigy was burned at Westminster in May 1660 and another hanged by the neck at Whitehall in June.