The remarkable career of Algernon Sidney the martyr has been recounted elsewhere. Constructed, Frankenstein-like, from the remnants of a living person, Algernon the ‘stern inflexible patriot’ had a number of qualities true to his original. On the whole however that original was Sidney in death, rather than life. Reinforcing Sidney's stoicisation of himself was a perceptible rigormortis by which this inflexibility was maintained over continents, and centuries. Allied to it was an incorruptibility apparently superior to death itself. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, when public excitement could contain itself no longer, Algernon's grave was opened. ‘Curiosity was excited – the body was very perfect.’ Sidney the patriot-hero was a triumph of the mortician's art.