Dunbar Medal

After the battle of Dunbar in 1650, in which Oliver Cromwell’s forces defeated a Scottish Royalist army, Thomas Simon was sent up to Edinburgh to take a portrait of the victorious general to appear on a celebratory medal. Cromwell was pleased with the design, believing Simon to be ‘ingenious and worthy of encouragement’. As a result, he was appointed Cromwell’s personal medallist and on the death of the Lord Protector in 1658 he had the unpleasant task of producing the now famous death mask of Cromwell.