When the Dead Are Put on Trial

We like to imagine that death is the end of things. The body rests, the disputes settle, and history quietly moves on. But again and again, societies have shown themselves unwilling to let their dead lie undisturbed. Corpses have been exhumed, reputations retried, and sentences delivered long after the grave was sealed. The dead may not answer back, but the living still find reasons to judge them.

Take Pope Formosus. In 897 CE, several months after his death, his enemies decided that he hadn’t suffered enough. He was exhumed, dressed once more in papal robes, and seated upright on a throne in the Basilica of St John Lateran. His successor, Pope Stephen VI, was determined to obliterate Formosus’ legacy. A deacon was appointed as defence counsel, though what defence could possibly be mounted on behalf of a decomposing body?

The charges were as muddled as they were political — perjury, illegally becoming Pope, violations of canon law. Unsurprisingly, the verdict was guilty. But Stephen wanted more than a legal judgment; he wanted humiliation. Formosus’ papacy was declared null and void, his acts annulled, his blessing fingers hacked off, and his body dragged through the streets before being dumped in the River Tiber. It was supposed to erase him. Instead, it scandalised Rome. Within a year, Stephen was overthrown and strangled in prison, and later Popes tried to restore Formosus’ reputation. Yet the macabre theatre of the Cadaver Synod has lingered as one of the most grotesque episodes in legal history…the literal trial of a corpse.

Leap forward nearly eight centuries, and England had its own variation on the theme. Oliver Cromwell, the man who led a revolution, executed Charles I, and ruled as Lord Protector, died in 1658. But when Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, the monarchy wasn’t content to let Cromwell rest. He was beyond earthly punishment — yet not beyond symbolic justice. Parliament ordered his body exhumed. In January 1661, Cromwell’s corpse was taken to Tyburn, ritually hanged, then beheaded. His head was placed on a spike outside Westminster Hall, where it remained for almost three decades, battered by wind and rain, before disappearing into private collections. The head was finally buried at Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge in 1960. Cromwell’s remains had been reduced to theatre, but the message was clear: the Restoration wanted to show that rebellion could not survive, even in memory. His body was punished as a warning to the living.

The story takes a different turn with Alan Turing. Unlike Formosus and Cromwell, Turing wasn’t disinterred, mutilated, or displayed. His trial came in life, not death. He was convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency” for being a gay man, he was offered prison or chemical castration. He chose the latter and died two years later, widely believed to have taken his own life. For decades, Britain ignored its debt to him — the man who cracked the Enigma code and helped shorten the Second World War, saving countless lives. Only in 2013 did the state finally act, issuing him a royal pardon. Unlike Formosus and Cromwell, this was not condemnation but absolution. Yet the effect is much the same; long after his death, Turing’s legacy was retried by the living, his memory judged once more. The pardon said as much about the state as it did about him, an admission that the law had been cruel, and that Britain had failed one of its greatest minds.

What ties these stories together is the uncomfortable truth that death does not shield anyone from judgment. The law, politics, and morality all reach into the grave. Sometimes this takes the form of grotesque theatre, like a Pope’s corpse dragged into court. Sometimes it is vengeance dressed up as justice, like Cromwell’s head on a spike. And sometimes, as with Turing, it is an attempt at restoration — a symbolic apology, offered too late for the person it concerns.

The dead cannot defend themselves. They cannot feel shame, or vindication, or relief. Posthumous trials are really about the living and about how we choose to remember, how we settle our scores, and how we rewrite the past to suit the needs of the present. In that sense, they never really stop happening. Every time a statue is pulled down, a knighthood rescinded, or a pardon granted, we see echoes of Formosus, Cromwell, and Turing. The trial of the dead is not a relic of history. It is part of how societies tell stories about themselves — sometimes grotesque, sometimes redemptive, always revealing.

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