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Miles Sindercombe

Failed assassin of Cromwell

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionDec 23, 2025
Entity authorityQ6851541
Source-derived summary

Miles Sindercombe (died 13 February 1657) was the leader of a group that tried to assassinate Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell during the period of the Protectorate in 1657.

Early military career

Sindercombe was born in Kent and was apprenticed to a surgeon. During the English Civil War, he became a Roundhead and a Leveller. In 1649, he took part in the mutiny of his regiment and when it failed he fled. In 1655, he re-appeared as a member of a cavalry regiment in Scotland and took part in a plot to take control of the local army. This failed as well, and Sindercombe fled to the Netherlands.

Plotters

In Flanders, he met another Leveller and anti-Cromwell plotter, Edward Sexby, in 1656. Sindercombe joined his plot to assassinate Cromwell in hope of restoring the Puritan republic as they saw it. Sexby supplied Sindercombe with money and weapons.

In 1656, Sindercombe returned to England and gathered a group of co-conspirators, including the renegade soldier John Cecil, the apparent conman William Boyes; and John Toope, a member of Cromwell's Life-Guards.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Miles Sindercombe” as failed assassin of Cromwell. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1657, 1649, 1655, 1656—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Miles, Sindercombe and Failed can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as failed assassin of Cromwell. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q6851541. VIAF identifies the subject as 56501549. The Library of Congress control number is nr95023529. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1657, 1649, 1655 and 1656.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Miles Sindercombe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.