BRLGRADE, THURSDAY

ONE OF THREE facial warts once sported by English strongman and religious zealot Oliver Cromwell has sold at auction in Paris for $2 million, having been bought at a village sale of work in Ireland for 50 pence back in 1976.

The wart, whose provenance was certified by DNA sample, is said to have been one of those same facial imperfections the Catholic-hating Lord Protector told his portrait painter to include, giving the world and posterity the phrase, “warts and all”.

Warts aside, Cromwell died in his bed. However after the restoration of the monarchy in England, his corpse was disinterred and ritually hanged and beheaded. His head – warts and all – was then put on a pole near Westminster Hall, London, where it remained for many years before falling off. It was later taken, perhaps by a guard, and did the rounds as a collector’s item and tourist attraction before winding up at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, the dictator’s old alma mater. There it was quietly buried.

“Somewhere along the journey to its resting place, the three warts either fell off or were removed from Cromwell’s face,” says wart historian Dr Fester Boyle, who says that all three warts together would be worth a small fortune. “The two missing warts are the stuff of legend and many an adventurer has come to grief searching for them. How this one wound up in Ireland of all places – where Cromwell has the same reputation Hitler has among Jews – is anyone’s guest. Perhaps a Anglo-Irish lord, from a family that benefited from the Cromwellian plantation of Ireland, took it or bought it, or something like that. It would be great to know the story. There are those who hold Cromwell in such high regard in England that they claim the warts have supernatural properties. You know, he who carries Cromwell’s warts into battle is invincible. That kind of thing. Rumour has it that the Duke of Wellington was holding all three warts in his pocket when he won at Waterloo. And curiously, he was Anglo-Irish, though his family’s arrival predates the Cromwellian plantation of the Emerald Isle.”