Miles Sindercombe
Failed assassin of Cromwell

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.
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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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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.