Part 55

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JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.

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FOOTNOTES

{1} This stanza is omitted in most collections. Walker was a colonel in the parliamentary army; and afterwards a member of the Committee of Safety.

{2} The Directory for the Public Worship of God, ordered by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster in 1644, to supersede the Book of Common Prayer.

{3} The Earl of Thomond.

{4} The Excise, first introduced by the Long Parliament, was particularly obnoxious to the Tory party. Dr Johnson more than a hundred years later shared all the antipathy of his party to it, and in his Dictionary defined it to be “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.”

{5} Henry the Eighth. The comparison is made in other ballads of the age. To play old Harry with any one is a phrase that seems to have originated with those who suffered by the confiscation of church property.

{6} The Marquis of Winchester, the brave defender of his house at Basing, had been made prisoner by Cromwell at the storming of that house in 1645. Waller had been foiled in his attempt on this place in the year preceding.—T. W.

{7} Sir John Ogle, one of the Royalist commanders, who was intrusted with the defence of Winchester Castle, which he surrendered on conditions just before the siege of Basing House.—T. W.

{8} Wren, bishop of Ely, was committed to the Tower in 1641, accused with high “misdemeanours” in his diocese.

{9} David Jenkins, a Welsh Judge, who had been made prisoner at the taking of Hereford, and committed first to Newgate and afterwards to the Tower. He refused to acknowledge the authority of the Parliament, and was the author of several tracts published during the year (while he was prisoner in the Tower), which made a great noise.—T. W.

{10} Sir Francis Wortley, Bart., was made a prisoner in 1644, at the taking of Walton House, near Wakefield, by Sir Thomas Fairfax.

{11} Sir Edward Hales, Bart., of Woodchurch, in Kent, had been member for Queenborough in the Isle of Sheppey. He was not a Royalist.

{12} Sir George Strangways, Bart., according to the marginal note in the original. Another of the name, Sir John Strangways, was taken at the surrender of Sherborne Castle.

{13} Sir Henry Bedingfield, Bart., of Norfolk; Sir Walter Blount, Bart., of Worcester; and Sir Francis Howard, Bart., of the North, were committed to the Tower on the 22nd of January, 1646.

{14} The horrible barbarities committed by the Irish rebels had made the Catholics so much abhorred in England, that every English member of that community was suspected of plotting the same massacres in England.—T. W.

{15} Sir John Hewet, of Huntingdonshire, was committed to the Tower on the 28th of January, 1645(–6).

{16} Sir Thomas Lunsford, Bart., the celebrated Royalist officer, was committed to the Tower on the 22nd of January, 1646. The violence and barbarities which he and his troop were said to have perpetrated led to the popular belief that he was in the habit of eating children.

From Fielding and from Vavasour, Both ill-affected men; From Lunsford eke dilver us, That eateth up children. Loyal Songs, ed. 1731, i. 38.

T. W.

{17} Sir William Lewis, one of the eleven members who had been impeached by the army.

{18} Col. Giles Strangwaies, of Dorsetshire, taken with Sir Lewis Dives, at the surrender of Sherborne, was committed to the Tower on the 28th August, 1645. He was member for Bridport in the Long Parliament, and was one of those who attended Charles’s “Mongrel” Parliament at Oxford.

{19} Sir Lewis Dives, an active Royalist, was governor of Sherborne Castle for the King, and had been made a prisoner by Fairfax in August, 1645, when that fortress was taken by storm. He was brother-in-law to Lord Digby.

{20} Sir John Morley, of Newcastle, committed to the Tower on the 18th of July, 1645.

{21} King was a Royalist general, in the north, who was slain July, 1643.

{22} Sir William Morton, of Gloucestershire, committed to the Tower on the 17th August, 1644. Cardinal Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury, brought about the marriage between King Henry VII. and the daughter of Edward IV., and thus effected the unison of the rival houses of York and Lancaster.