a Public Museum frequented by Persons of both Sexes and of all ages". Failure to sell to public museums forced the daughter to sell it privately, and in 1815 it was sold to Josiah Henry Wilkinson, in whose family it would remain until its burial. Maria Edgeworth, attending breakfast with Wilkinson in 1822, was shown the head, and she wrote with great surprise that she had seen "Oliver Cromwell's head—not his picture—not his bust—nothing of stone or marble or plaister of Paris, but his real head". Coinciding with the release of his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell in 1845, Thomas Carlyle was asked to view the head. He did not, and on the basis of a friend's visit, wrote a scathing dismissal of the authenticity of the head: "it has hair, flesh and beard, a written history bearing that it was procured for £100 (I think of bad debt) about 50 years ago ... the whole affair appears to be fraudulent moonshine, an element not pleasant even to glance into, especially in a case like Oliver's." Fitzgibbons 2008, Pearson and Morant agree that Carlyle's dismissal was not based on any historical or scientific fact. Although Carlyle conceded that it was "the head of some decapitated man of distinction", the only other known man of distinction to be embalmed and then decapitated in such a manner over the previous 200 years was Henry Ireton. George Rolleston had conducted an examination on another skull—called the Ashmolean skull—after claims that it was Cromwell's head. Rolleston was unconvinced by the skull's supposed history, and visited Wilkinson's home to see the skull shortly afterwards. After an examination, he dismissed the Ashmolean skull as a fake and declared that the Wilkinson head was the real head of Cromwell. After another full examination in 1911, with comparisons with the Ashmolean head, archaeologists dismissed the Ashmolean head as a fake. The absence of firm evidence of the whereabouts of Cromwell's head between 1684 and 1787 made them wary about declaring the head genuine. They concluded their study unable to verify or refute the head's identity. The uncertainty increased public demand for a full scientific examination, and Wilkinson reluctantly allowed the head to be taken for examination by the eugenicist Karl Pearson and the anthropologist Geoffrey Morant. Their 109-page report concluded that there was a "moral certainty" that the Wilkinson head was that of Oliver Cromwell. Horace Wilkinson