After the restoration of Charles the Second, the body of IRETON was removed from its tomb, in Westminster Abbey, where it had been interred with great pomp by direction of Cromwell, and conveyed on a hurdle to TYBURN, upon which it was taken from the coffin and hung on the gibbet from sun-rise to sun-set; the head was then severed from the body and set upon a pole, and the carcase buried under the gallows. Ludlow, speaking of the preceding pompous funeral with which IRETON was honoured, by his father-in-law Cromwell, and in allusion to the subsequent degradation of his body, says, “IRETON would have despised these pomps, having erected for himself a more glorious monument in the hearts of good men, by his affection to his country, his abilities of mind, his impartial justice, his diligence in the public service, and his virtues; which were a far greater honor to his memory, than a dormitory among the ashes of kings; who, for the most part, as they had governed others by their passions, so were they as much governed by them.” (3) “_By which thou laid’st the treach’rous Stuart low_:” Noble says, “IRETON was perhaps more than any other man the cause of the king’s death:--and which is said to be owing to his having intercepted a letter from his Majesty to the Queen, in which his destruction along with that of Cromwell was fixed:” thus attempting to make private revenge or retaliation, rather than a sense of public duty, the operating principle of his mind in his subsequent conduct towards the infatuated monarch. A notion in which he is not at all borne out by contemporary testimony: for though Bishop Burnet remarks, that “Cromwell was wavering whether to put the king to death or not; but that IRETON, who had the temper and principles of a CASSIUS, stuck at nothing that might have turned England into a Commonwealth, hoping that by the king’s death that all men concerned in it would become irreconcileable to monarchy;” yet it cannot be reasonably inferred from this, that he was at all actuated by personal considerations, but only, that by this decisive step, when Charles’s insincerity was placed beyond doubt, such a bond of union would be formed amongst the whole body of Reformers, and their immediate descendants, as should, in a manner, guarantee the complete abolition of royalty, by a sense of the common danger to which they would be exposed, in their persons and properties, by its restoration.