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Museum fundraises to buy Oliver Cromwell’s watch
The Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, is seeking to acquire one of only two pocket watches known to have belonged to Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England. Because Cromwell fell so far out of favor after his death and the Restoration of the monarchy, his possessions were scattered and there is almost no material with a strongly evidenced connection to him. The only other provenanced watch of Cromwell’s is in the British Museum.
The timepiece, with its delicately etched image of a hand with pointed finger, is “of a style known as a Puritan watch”. [Cromwell Museum curator Stuart] Orme said: “Seventeenth Century watches were completely over the top, with pierced foliate on the outside, whereas this is quite small and, to our modern eye, it appears classically beautiful.”
Puritans were Protestants who, like Cromwell, thought the Reformation of the Church of England had not gone far enough. Such a watch was also quite an expensive status symbol for the parliamentarian, who was second-in-command by 1647 but “not quite as austere as people think”.
The fob watch was made by William Clay around 1645. It has a circular clock face with a single steel hand, Roman numerals and a gilt outer calendar ring. It is mounted in a silver oval case. It is wee at just 1.5 inches long and one inch wide. Clay was a well-known watchmaker in the mid-17th. century, opening his first London shop in the 1630s. He established a workshop on King Street in Westminster in 1646.
Cromwell bought the watch in 1647 when moved into a home a couple of doors down from Clay’s shop on King Street. He had it with him on his campaign in Ireland in 1649. According to Blackwell family lore, in 1650 Cromwell gifted the watch to cavalry officer and Deputy Treasurer at War John Blackwell, and husband of Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, Elizabeth Smithsby.
Blackwell would go on to have a colorful career, working in the treasury, as a judge and as an MP during the Protectorate. Despite his republican leanings, he was loyal to Oliver Cromwell to the end, following his effigy in the cortege for his state funeral in 1658. He was not so fond of Oliver’s son and successor Richard, however, and took part in the military coup that overthrew him.
Come the Restoration, Blackwell was permanently barred from holding government office. He moved across the pond to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he was appointed Governor of Pennsylvania by William Penn. He retired back to England by 1694. He died in 1701, bequeathing the watch Cromwell had given him 50 years before to his sons.
It remained in the Blackwell family (Bagwell for the Irish branch) by descendance for more than 350 years. One of those heirs, Colonel John Bagwell (1751-1816), showed the watch to historian and Cromwell genealogist Richard Gough. Gough had it sketched and published in the December 1808 issue of Gentleman’s Magazine, an extremely rare instance of a Cromwell object being documented so early in a scholarly publication.
Historic jewelry specialist Martyn Downer acquired the watch when the family sold it at an auction in Carlisle in 2019. He paid £18,000 and purely as a 17th century Puritan watch with a silver case that price would have been a huge bargain. For such a rare timepiece which additionally boasted a demonstrable connection to Cromwell, the price was a small fraction of its worth. During COVID lockdown, Downer restored the watch and researched its history to confirm the Blackwell lore. In 2021, he offered it for sale for ten times the amount he’d paid for it, £180,000. It is still for sale today.
The watch has been on display at the museum since January of this year. The special exhibition November 10th, but the museum is raising funds to buy the watch for its permanent collection. It has one of the best collections in the world of objects from the life and times of Oliver Cromwell, but as a charitable organization, it has no acquisition budget. The museum is working on securing most of the money needed in grants from trusts and foundations, but must raise £9,500 on its own. So far they have raised £1,025 of that target. Click here to donate.
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