A museum which tells the story of Oliver Cromwell is hoping to acquire an "astonishingly small and beautiful" pocket watch believed to have been owned by the statesman.
Cromwell was an English statesman, politician, and soldier, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in British history. He came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, initially as a senior commander in the Parliamentarian army and latterly as a politician. A leading advocate of the execution of Charles I in January 1649, which led to the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, he ruled as Lord Protector from December 1653 until his death in September 1658.
The "Puritan-style", silver-cased timepiece was sold at auction in 2019 by a descendent of John Blackwell, one of Cromwell's officers.
Stuart Orme, curator of the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, said it "has provenance, which is the key thing when trying to tie an object to notable people from history".
The museum needs to raise £9,500 to match funding in grants to add the watch to its collection. The only other surviving watch associated with the 17th Century parliamentarian is in the British Museum, London.
"It's remarkable the watch has been passed down through the generations for 350 years," said Mr Orme. "It helps add to the provenance that it's said to have been gifted to Blackwell, but it was also made by a watchmaker who lived two doors down from Cromwell in London from 1647."
The timepiece, with its delicately etched image of a hand with pointed finger, is "of a style known as a Puritan watch". Mr 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".