Warts and all

Warts and all, as in the statement, “You have to accept me, warts and all,” means that the speaker is making an appeal for acceptance, inclusive of his or her unappealing, unattractive or negative qualities. The origin is debatable but the Oliver Cromwell and Horace Walpole story often comes up. Horace Walpole, writing in Anecdotes of English Painting c.1764, maintained that Cromwell, in true puritanical style, gave the following instruction to Peter Lely, the famous portrait painter. “Mr Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.” Cromwell may well have given Peter Lely such an instruction but it is extremely odd that no record of such an expression as ‘warts and all’ appears during the hundred or so years between Cromwell’s supposed utterance and Walpole’s report of it in 1764. The OED will have nothing to do with the supposed Cromwellian/Walpole origin and maintains that the expression warts and all is first cited from 1930.