The annexed picture,[15] a favorite with the Protestants of England, Holland, and Germany for more than a century, is composed of twenty-two articles and objects, most of which are employed in the Roman Catholic worship. A church-bell forms the hat, which is decorated by crossed daggers and holy-water brushes. A herring serves for a nose. The mouth is an open wine-flagon. The eye is a chalice covered by the holy wafer, and the cheek is a paten, or plate used in the communion service. The great volume that forms the shoulders is the mass-book. The front of the bell-tiara is adorned by a mitred wolf devouring a lamb, and by a goose holding a rosary in its bill; the back, by a spectacled ass reading a book, and by a boar wearing a scholar's cap. At the bottom of the engraving the pierced feet of Christ are seen resting upon two creatures called by the artist "the Queen's badges." The whole figure of Christ is supposed to be behind this mass of human inventions; for in the original these explanatory words are given, "Christ Covered."

It was by this device that Master Batman, at the beginning of the Puritan period, sought to present to the eye a summary of what the Reformation had accomplished, and what it had still to fear. Half a century before, Henry VIII. being still the Defender of the Faith, the various articles used in Master Batman's satirical picture were objects of religious veneration throughout Great Britain. They had now become the despised but dreaded rattle-traps of a suppressed idolatry. From the field of strife one of the victors gathered the scattered arms and implements, the gorgeous ensigns and trappings of the defeated, and piled them upon the plain, a trophy and a warning.

There is no revolution that does not sweep away much that is good. The reformation in religion, chiefly wrought by Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, was a movement of absolute necessity to the further progress of our race. The intelligence of Christendom had reached a development which was incompatible with respect for the assumptions of the papacy, and with a belief in the fictions which the papacy had invented or adopted. The vase must have broken, or the oak planted in it must have ceased to grow. Nevertheless, those fictions had their beauty and their use. There was a good and pleasing side to that system of fables and ceremonies, which amused, absorbed, and satisfied the people of Europe for a thousand years. If we could concede that the mass of men must remain forever ignorant and very poor, we could also admit that nothing was ever invented by man better calculated to make them thoughtlessly contented with a dismal lot than the Roman Catholic Church as it existed in the fifteenth century, before the faith of the people had been shaken in its pretensions. There was something in it for every faculty of human nature except the intellect. It gave play to every propensity except the propensity of one mind in a thousand to ask radical questions. It relieved every kind of distress except that which came of using the reason. All human interests were provided for in it except the supreme interest of human advancement.

One must have been in a Catholic community, or else lived close to an important Catholic church, in order to form an idea of the great part the Church once played in the lives and thoughts of its members-the endless provision it made for the entertainment of unformed minds in the way of festivals, fasts, processions, curious observances, changes of costume, and special rites. There was always something going on or coming off. There was not a day in the year nor an hour in the day which had not its ecclesiastical name and character. In our flowery observance of Easter and in our joyous celebration of Christmas we have a faint traditional residue of festivals that once made all Christendom gay and jocund. And it was all so adapted to the limited abilities of our race! In an average thousand men, there is not more than one man capable of filling creditably the post of a Protestant minister, but there are a hundred who can be drilled into competent priests.

Consider, for example, a procession, which was formerly the great event of many of the Church festivals, gratifying equally those who witnessed and those who took part in it. In other words, it gratified keenly the whole community. And yet how entirely it was within the resources of human nature! Not a child so young, not a woman so weak, not a man so old, but could assist or enjoy it. The sick could view it from their windows, the robust could carry its burdens, the skillful could contrive its devices, and all had the feeling that they were engaged in enhancing at once the glory of God, the fame of their saint, the credit of their town, and the good of their souls. It was pleasure; it was duty; it was masquerade; it was devotion. Some readers may remember the exaltation of soul with which Albert Dürer, the first of German artists in Luther's age, describes the great procession at Antwerp, in 1520, in honor of what was styled the "Assumption" of the Virgin Mary. One of the pleasing fictions adopted by the old Church was that on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, the Virgin Mary, aged seventy-five years, made a miraculous ascent into heaven. Hence the annual festival, which was celebrated throughout Europe with pomp and splendor. The passage in the diary of Dürer has a particular value, because it affords us a vivid view of the bright side of the ancient Church just before the reformers changed its gorgeous robes into the Puritan's plain black gown, and substituted the long prayer and interminable sermon for the magnificent ceremonial and the splendid procession.

Albert Dürer was in sympathy with Luther, but his heart swelled within him as he beheld, on that Sunday morning in Antwerp, the glorious pageantry that filed past for two hours in honor of the "Mother of God's" translation. All the people of the city assembled about the Church of "Our Lady," each dressed in gayest attire, but each wearing the costume of his rank, and exhibiting the badge of his guild or vocation. Silver trumpets of the old Frankish fashion, German drums and fifes, were playing in every quarter. The trades and guilds of the city-goldsmiths, painters, masons, embroiderers, statuaries, cabinet-makers, carpenters, sailors, fishermen, butchers, curriers, weavers, bakers, tailors, shoe-makers, and laborers-all marched by in order, at some distance apart, each preceded by its own magnificent cross. These were followed by the merchants, shop-keepers, and their clerks. The "shooters" came next, armed with bows, cross-bows, and firelocks, some on horseback and some on foot. The city guard followed. Then came the magistrates, nobles, and knights, all dressed in their official costume, and escorted, as our artist records, "by a gallant troop, arrayed in a noble and splendid manner." There were a number of women in the procession, belonging to a religious order, who gained their subsistence by labor. These, all clad in white from head to foot, agreeably relieved the splendors of the occasion. After them marched "a number of gallant persons and the canons of Our Lady's Church, with all the clergy and scholars, followed by a grand display of characters." Here the enthusiasm of the artist kindles, as he recalls the glories of the day:

"Twenty men carried the Virgin and Christ, most richly adorned, to the honor of God. In this part of the procession were a number of delightful things represented in a splendid manner. There were several wagons, in which were representations of ships and fortifications. Then came a troop of characters from the Prophets, in regular order, followed by others from the New Testament, such as the Annunciation, the Wise Men of the East riding great camels and other wonderful animals, and the Flight into Egypt, all very skillfully appointed. Then came a great dragon, and St. Margaret with the image of the Virgin at her girdle, exceedingly beautiful; and last, St. George and his squire. In this troop rode a number of boys and girls very handsomely arrayed in various costumes, representing so many saints. This procession, from beginning to end, was upward of two hours in passing our house, and there were so many things to be seen that I could never describe them all even in a book."

In some such hearty and picturesque manner all the great festivals of the Church were celebrated age after age, the entire people taking part in the show. There was no dissent, because there was no thought. But the reformers preached, the Bible was translated into the modern tongues, the intelligence of Christendom awoke, and all that bright childish pageantry vanished from the sight of the more advanced nations. The reformers discovered that there was no reason to believe that the aged Virgin Mary, on the 15th of August, A.D. 45, was borne miraculously to heaven; and in a single generation many important communities, by using their reason even to that trifling extent, grew past enjoying the procession annually held in honor of the old tradition. All the old festivals fell under the ban. It became, at length, a sectarian punctilio not to abstain from labor on Christmas. The Puritan Sunday was gradually evolved from the same spirit of opposition, and life became intense and serious.

For it is not in a single generation, nor in ten, that the human mind, after having been bound and confined for a thousand years, learns to enjoy and safely use its freedom. Luther the reformer was only a little less credulous than Luther the monk. He assisted to strike the fetters from the reason, but the prisoner only hobbled from one cell into another, larger and cleaner, but still a cell. No one can become familiar with the Puritan period without feeling that the bondage of the mind to the literal interpretation of some parts of the Old Testament was a bondage as real, though not as degrading nor as hopeless, as that under which it had lived to the papal decrees. You do not make your canary a free bird by merely opening the door of its cage. It has to acquire slowly, with anguish and great fear, the strength of wing, lungs, and eye, the knowledge, habits, and instincts, which its ancestors possessed before they were captured in their native islands. It is only in our own day that we are beginning really to enjoy the final result of Luther's heroic life-a tolerant and modest freedom of thought-for it is only in our own day that the consequences of peculiar thinking have anywhere ceased to be injurious.

If there are any who can not yet forgive the Puritans for their intolerance and narrowness, it must be they who do not know the agony of apprehension in which they passed their lives. It is the Puritan age that could be properly called the Reign of Terror. It lasted more than a century, instead of a few months, and it was during that long period of dread and tribulation that they acquired the passionate abhorrence of the papal system which is betrayed in the pictures and writings of the time. There was a fund of terror in their own belief, in that awful Doubt which hung over every soul, whether it was or was not one of the Elect; and, in addition to that, it seemed to them that the chief powers of earth, and all the powers of hell, were united to crush the true believers.

Spayne and Rome Defeated. (London and Amsterdam, 1621.)

Examine the two large caricatures, "Rome's Monster" and "Spayne and Rome Defeated," in the light of a mere catalogue of dates. The Field of the Cloth of Gold, which we may regard as the splendid close of the old state of things, occurred in 1520, three years after Luther nailed up his theses. Henry VIII. defied the Pope in 1533; and twenty years after, Bloody Mary, married to Philip of Spain, was burning bishops at Smithfield. Elizabeth's reign began in 1558, which changed, not ended, the religious strife in England. The massacre of St. Bartholomew occurred in 1572, on that 24th of August which, as Voltaire used to say, all the humane and the tolerant of our race should observe as a day of humiliation and sorrow for evermore. In 1579 began the long struggle between the New and the Old, which is called the Thirty Years' War. The Prince of Orange was assassinated in 1584, in the midst of those great events which Mr. Motley has made familiar to the reading people of both continents. Every intelligent Protestant in Europe felt that the weapon which slew the prince was aimed at his own heart. The long dread of the Queen of Scots' machinations ended only with her death in 1587. Soon after, the shadow of the coming Spanish Armada crept over Great Britain, which was not dispelled till the men of England defeated and the storm scattered it in 1588. In 1605 Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot struck such terror to the Protestant mind, that it has not, in this year, 1877, wholly recovered from it, as all may know who will converse with uninstructed people in the remoter counties of Great Britain. Raleigh was beheaded in 1618. The civil war began in 1642. In 1665 the plague desolated England, and in the next year occurred the great fire of London, good Protestants not doubting that both events were traceable to the fell influence of the Beast. The accession of James II., a Roman Catholic, filled the Puritans with new alarm in 1685, and during the three anxious years of his reign their brethren, the Huguenots, were fleeing into all the Protestant lands from the hellish persecution of the priests who governed Louis XIV.

Upon looking back at this period of agitation and alarm, it startles the mind to observe in the catalogue of dates this one: "Shakspeare died 1616." It shows us, what the ordinary records do not show, that there are people who retain their sanity and serenity in the maddest times. The rapid succession of the plays-an average of nearly two per annum-proves that there was a public for Shakspeare when all the world seemed absorbed in subjects least akin to art and humor. And how little trace we find of all those thrilling events in the plays! He was a London actor when the Armada came; and during the year of the Gunpowder Plot he was probably meditating the grandest of all his themes, "King Lear!"

The picture entitled "Spayne and Rome Defeated"[16] was one of the most noted and influential broadsheets published during the Puritan period. It may properly be termed a broadsheet, since the copy of the original in the British Museum measures 20-2/3 inches by 13. The Puritans of England saw with dismay the growing cordiality between James I. and the Spanish court, and watched with just apprehension the visit of Prince Charles to Spain, and the prospect of a marriage between the heir-apparent and a Spanish princess. At this alarming crisis, 1621, the sheet was composed in England, and sent over to Holland to be engraved and printed, Holland being then, and for a hundred and fifty years after, the printing-house and type-foundry of Northern Europe. Some of the Pilgrim Fathers of Massachusetts, then residing at Leyden, and still waiting to hear the first news of the Mayflower company, who had sailed the year before, may have borne a hand in the work. Pastor Robinson, we know, gained part of his livelihood by co-operating with brethren in England in the preparation of works designed for distribution at home.

Besides being one of the most characteristic specimens of Puritan caricature which have been preserved, it presents to us a résumé of history, as Protestants interpreted it, from the time of the Spanish Armada to that of Guy Fawkes-1588 to 1605. It appears to have been designed for circulation in Holland and Germany as well as in England, as the words and verses upon it are in English, Dutch, and Latin. The English lines are these:

"In Eighty-eight, Spayne, arm'd with potent might,

Against our peacefull Land came on to fight;

But windes and waves and fire in one conspire,

To help the English, frustrate Spaynes desire.

To second that the Pope in counsell sitts,

For some rare stratagem they strayne their witts;

November's 5th, by powder they decree

Great Brytanes state ruinate should bee.

But Hee, whose never-slumb'ring Eye did view

The dire intendments of this damned crew,

Did soone prevent what they did thinke most sure.

Thy mercyes, Lord! for evermore endure."

This interesting sheet was devised by Samuel Ward, a Puritan preacher of Ipswich, of great zeal and celebrity, who dedicated it, in the fashion of the day, thus:

"To God. In memorye of his double deliveraunce from ye invincible Navie and ye unmatcheable powder Treason, 1605."

It was a timely reminder. As we occasionally see in our own day a public man committing the absurdity of replying in a serious strain to a caricature, so, in 1621, the Spanish embassador in London, Count Gondomar, called the attention of the British Government to this engraving, complaining that it was calculated to revive the old antipathy of the English people to the Spanish monarchy. The obsequious lords of the Privy Council summoned Samuel Ward to appear before them. After examining him, they remanded him to the custody of their messenger, whose house was a place of confinement for such prisoners; and there he remained. As there was yet no habeas corpus act known among men, he could only protest his innocence of any ill designs upon the Spanish monarchy, and humbly petition for release. He petitioned first the Privy Council; and they proving obdurate, he petitioned the king. He was set free at last, and he remained for twenty years a thorn in the side of those who dreaded "Spayne and Rome" less than they hated Puritans and Parliaments.

This persecution of Samuel Ward gave his print such celebrity that several imitations or pirated editions of the work speedily appeared, of which four are preserved in the great collection of the British Museum, each differing from the original in details. Caricatures aimed directly at the Spanish embassador followed, but they are only remarkable for the explanatory words which accompany them. In one we read that the residence of Count Gondomar in England had "hung before the eyes of many good men like a prodigious comet, threatening worse effects to Church and State than this other comet," which had recently menaced both from the vault of heaven. "No ecclipse of the sunne," continues the writer, "could more damnifie the earth, to make it barraine and the best things abortive, than did his interposition." We learn also that when the count left England for a visit to his own country, in 1618, "there was an uproare and assault a day or two before his departure from London by the Apprentices, who seemed greedy of such an occasion to vent their own spleenes in doing him or any of his a mischiefe." Another picture exhibits the odious Gondomar giving an account of his conduct in England to the "Spanishe Parliament," in the course of which he attributes the British abhorrence of Spain to such men as "Ward of Ipswich," whom he describes as "light and unstayed wits," intent on winning the airy applause of the vulgar, and to raise their desperate fortunes. Nor does he refrain from chuckling over the penalty inflicted upon that enemy of Spayne and Rome: "And I think that Ward of Ipswich escaped not safely for his lewed and profane picture of '88 and their Powder Treason, one whereof, my Lord Archbishop, I sent you in a letter, that you might see the malice of these detestable Heretiques against his Holiness and the Catholic Church." This broadsheet being entitled "Vox Populi," the writer concludes his explanation by styling the embassador "Fox Populi, Count Gondomar the Great."

From Title-page to a Sermon, "Woe to Drunkards," by Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, 1627.

Ward of Ipswich continued to be heard from occasionally during the first years of the reign of Charles I. Ipswich itself acquired a certain celebrity as a Puritan centre, and the name was given during the life-time of Samuel Ward to a town in Massachusetts, which is still thriving. One of his sermons upon drunkenness was illustrated by a picture, of which a copy is given here,[17] designed to show the degeneracy of manners that had taken place in England in his day. Mr. Chatto truly remarks that twenty years later the picture would have been more appropriate with the inscriptions transposed.

The marriage of Charles I. with the Princess Henrietta of France, in 1625, was one of the long series of impolitic acts which the king expiated on the scaffold in 1649. It aggravated every propensity of his nature that was hostile to the liberties of the people. Under James I. the élite of the Puritans had fled to Holland, and a little company had sought a more permanent refuge on the coast of New England. During the early years of the reign of Charles, the persecution of the Puritans by his savage bishops became so cruel and so vigilant as to induce men of family and fortune, like Winthrop and his friends, accompanied by a fleet of vessels laden with virtuous and thoughtful families, to cross the ocean and settle in Massachusetts. Boston was founded when Charles I. had been cutting off the ears and slitting the noses of Puritans for five years. All that enchanting shore of New England, with its gleaming beaches, and emerald isles, and jutting capes of granite and wild roses, now so dear to summer visitors-an eternal holiday-ground and resting-place for the people of North America-began to be dotted with villages, the names of which tell us what English towns were most renowned for the Puritan spirit two hundred and fifty years ago. The satirical pictures preserved in the British Museum which relate to events in earlier reigns number ninety-nine in all; but those suggested by events in the reign of Charles I. are nearly seven hundred in number. Most of them, however, were not published until after the downfall of the king.

Several of these prints are little more than portraits of the conspicuous persons of the time, with profuse accounts on the same sheet of their sufferings or misdeeds. One such records the heroic endurance of "the Reverend Peter Smart, mr of Artes, minister of God's word at Durham," who, for preaching against popery, lost above three hundred pounds per annum, and was imprisoned eleven years in the King's Bench. The composer adds these lines:

"Peter preach downe vaine rites with flagrant harte;

Thy Guerdon shall be greate, though heare thou Smart."

Another of these portrait pieces exhibits Dr. Alexander Leighton, who spoke of Queen Henrietta as "the daughter of Hell, a Canaanite, and an idolatresse," and spared not Archbishop Laud and his confederates. For these offenses he was, as the draughtsman informs us, "clapt up in Newgate for the space of 15 weekes, where he suffered great miserie and sicknes almost to death, afterward lost one of his Eares on the pillorie, had one of his nosthrills slitt clean through, was whipt with a whip of 3 Coardes knotted, had 36 lashes therewith, was fined 1000ll., and kept prisoner in the fleet 12 yeares, where he was most cruelly used a long time, being lodged day and night amongst the most desperately wiked villaines of ye whole prison." He was also branded on the cheek with the letters S. S.-sower of sedition. Several other prints of the time record the same mark of attention paid by the "martyred" king to his Catholic wife. By-and-by, the crowned and mitred ruffians who did such deeds as these being themselves in durance, Parliament set Dr. Leighton free, and made him a grant of six thousand pounds.

A caricature of the same bloody period is entitled, "Archbishop Laud dining on the Ears of Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton." We see Laud seated at dinner, having an ear on the point of his knife and three more ears in the plate before him, the three victims of his cruelty standing about, and two armed bishops at the foot of the table. The dialogue below represents Laud as rejecting with scorn all the dainties of his table, and declaring that nothing will content him but the ears of Lawyer Prynne and Dr. Bastwick. He cuts them off himself, and orders them to be dressed for his supper.

"Canterbury. This I doe to make you examples,

That others may be more careful to please my palate.

Henceforth let my servants know, that what I will, I will have done,

What ere is under heaven's Sunne."

"Let not the World devide those whom Christ hath joined."

A burst of caricature heralded the coming triumph of the Puritans in 1640, the year of the impeachment of the Earl of Strafford. Many of the pictures recorded both the sufferings and the joyful deliverance of the Puritan clergymen. Thus we have in one of them a glowing account of the return of the three gentlemen whose ears furnished a repast for the Archbishop of Canterbury. They had been imprisoned for many years in the Channel Islands, from which they were conveyed to Dartmouth, and thence to London, hailed with acclamations of delight and welcome in every village through which they passed. All the expenses of their long journey were paid for them, and presents of value were thrust upon them as they rode by. Within a few miles of London they were met by such a concourse of vehicles, horsemen, and people that it was with great difficulty they could travel a mile in an hour. But when at length, in the evening, they reached the city, masses of enthusiastic people blocked the streets, crying, "Welcome home! welcome home!" and strewing flowers and rosemary before them. Thousands of the people carried torches, which rendered the streets lighter than the day. They were three hours in making their way through the crowd from Charing Cross to their lodgings in the city, a distance of a mile.

It was during the exaltation of the years preceding the civil war that such pictures appeared as the one here given, urging a union between the Church of England and the Church of Scotland against the foe of both. This is copied from an original impression in the collection of the New York Historical Society.

The caricaturists pursued Laud and Strafford even to the scaffold. The archbishop was the author of a work entitled "Canons and Institutions Ecclesiastical," in which he gave expression to his extreme High-church opinions. In 1640 the victorious House of Commons canceled the canons adopted from this work, and fined the clergy who had sat in the Convocation. A caricature quickly appeared, called "Archbishop Laud firing a Cannon," in which the cannon is represented as bursting, and its fragments endangering the clergymen standing near. Laud's committal to the Tower was the occasion of many broadsheets, one of which exhibits him fastened to a staple in a wall, with a long string of taunting stanzas below:

"Reader, I know thou canst not choose but smile

To see a Bishop tide thus to a ring!

Yea, such a princely prelate, that ere while

Could three at once in Limbo patrum fling;

Suspend by hundreds where his worship pleased,

And them that preached too oft by silence eas'd;

"Made Laws and Canons, like a King (at least);

Devis'd new oaths; forc'd men to sweare to lies!

Advanc'd his lordly power 'bove all the rest.

And then our Lazie Priests began to rise;

But painfull ministers, which plide their place

With diligence, went downe the wind apace.

"Our honest Round heads too then went to racke;

The holy sisters into corners fled;

Cobblers and Weavers preacht in Tubs for lacke

Of better Pulpits; with a sacke instead

Of Pulpit-cloth, hung round in decent wise,

All which the spirit did for their good devise.

"Barnes, Cellers, Cole-holes, were their meeting-places,

So sorely were these babes of Christ abus'd,

Where he that most Church-government disgraces

Is most esteem'd, and with most reverence us'd.

It being their sole intent religiously

To rattle against the Bishops' dignity.

"Brother, saies one, what doe you thinke, I pray,

Of these proud Prelates, which so lofty are?

Truly, saies he, meere Antichrists are they.

Thus as they parle, before they be aware,

Perhaps a Pursuivant slips in behind,

And makes 'em run like hares before the wind.

"A yeere agone 'tad been a hanging matter

T'ave writ (nay, spoke) a word 'gainst little Will;

But now the times are chang'd, men scorne to flatter;

So much the worse for Canterbury still,

For if that truth come once to rule the roast,

No mar'le to see him tide up to a post.

"By wicked counsels faine he would have set

The Scots and us together by the eares;

A Patriark's place the Levite long'd to get,

To sit bith' Pope in one of Peter's chaires.

And having drunke so deepe of Babels cup,

Was it not time, d'ee think, to chaine him up?"

In these stanzas are roughly given the leading counts of the popular indictment against Archbishop Laud. Other prints present him to us in the Tower with a halter round his neck; and, again, we see him in a bird-cage, with the queen's Catholic confessor, the two being popularly regarded as birds of a feather. In another, a stout carpenter is holding Laud's nose to a grindstone, while the carpenter's boy turns the handle, and the archbishop cries for mercy:

"Such turning will soon deform my face;

Oh! I bleed, I bleed! and am extremely sore."

But the carpenter reminds him that the various ears that he had caused to be cut off were quite as precious to their owners as his nose is to him. A Jesuit enters with a vessel of holy water with which to wash the extremely sore nose. One broadsheet represents Laud in consultation with his physician, who administers an emetic that causes him to throw off his stomach several heavy articles which had been troubling him for years. First, the "Tobacco Patent" comes up with a terrible wrench. As each article appears, the doctor and his patient converse upon it:

"Doctor. What's this? A book? Whosoever hath bin at church may exercise lawful recreations on Sunday. What's the meaning of this?

"Canterbury. 'Tis the booke for Pastimes on the Sunday, which I caused to be made. But hold! here comes something. What is it?

"Doctor. 'Tis another book. The title is, 'Sunday no Sabbath.' Did you cause this to be made also?

"Canterbury. No; Doctor Pocklington made it; but I licensed it.

"Doctor. But what's this? A paper 'tis; if I be not mistaken, a Star-Chamber order made against Mr. Prinne, Mr. Burton, and Dr. Bastwicke. Had you any hand in this?

"Canterbury. I had. I had. All England knoweth it. But, oh, here comes up something that makes my very back ake! O that it were up once! Now it is up, I thank Heaven!

"Doctor. 'Tis a great bundle of papers, of presentations and suspensions. These were the instruments, my lord, wherewith you created the tongue-tied Doctors, and gave them great Benefices in the Country to preach some twice a year at the least, and in their place to hire some journeyman Curate, who will only read a Sermon in the forenoone, and in the afternoone be drunke, with his parishioners for company."

By the same painful process the archbishop is delivered of his "Book of Canons," and finally of his mitre; upon which the doctor says, "Nay, if the miter be come, the Divell is not far off. Farewell, my good lord."

There still exist in various collections more than a hundred prints relating directly to Archbishop Laud, several of which give burlesque representations of his execution. There are some that show him asleep, and visited by the ghosts of those whom he had persecuted, each addressing him in turn, as the victims of Richard III. spoke to their destroyer on Bosworth Field. One of the print-makers, however, relented at the spectacle of an old man, seventy-two years of age, brought to the block. He exhibits the archbishop speaking to the crowd from the scaffold:

"Lend me but one poore teare, when thow do'st see

This wretched portraict of just miserie.

I was Great Innovator, Tyran, Foe

To Church and State; all Times shall call me so.

But since I'm Thunder-stricken to the Ground,

Learn how to stand: insult not ore my wound."

This one poor stanza alone among the popular utterances of the time shows that any soul in England was touched by the cruel fanatic's bloody end.

"England's Wolfe with Eagle's Clawes" (Prince Rupert), 1647.

During the civil war and the government of Cromwell, 1642 to 1660, nine in ten of all the satirical prints that have been preserved are on the Puritan side. A great number of them were aimed at the Welsh, whose brogue seems to have been a standing resource with the mirth-makers of that period, as the Irish is at present. The wild roystering ways of the Cavaliers, their debauchery and license, furnished subjects. The cruelties practiced by Prince Rupert suggested the annexed illustration, in which the author endeavored to show "the cruell Impieties of Blood-thirsty Royalists and blasphemous Anti-Parliamentarians under the Command of that inhumane Prince Rupert, Digby, and the rest, wherein the barbarous Crueltie of our Civill uncivill Warres is briefly discovered." Beneath the portrait of England's wolf are various narratives of his bloody deeds. One picture exhibits the plundering habits of the mercenaries on the side of the king in Ireland. A soldier is represented armed and equipped with the utensils that appertain to good forage: on his head a three-legged pot, hanging from his side a duck, a spit with a goose on it held in his left hand as a musket, a dripping-pan on his arm as a shield, a hay-fork in his right hand for a rest, with a string of sausages for a match, a long artichoke at his side for a sword, bottles of canary suspended from his belt, slices of toast for shoe-strings, and two black pots at his garters. This picture may have been called forth by an item in a news-letter of 1641, wherein it was stated that such "great store of pilidges" was daily brought into Drogheda that a cow could be bought there for five shillings and a horse for twelve.

Charles II. and the Scotch Presbyterians, 1651.

"Presbyter. Come to the grinstone, Charles; 'tis now too late

To recolect, 'tis presbiterian fate.

"King. Yon Covenant pretenders, must I bee

The subject of your Tradgie Comedie?

"Jockey. I, Jockey, turne the stone of all your plots,

For none turnes faster than the turne-coat Scots.

"Presbyter. We for our ends did make thee king, be sure,

Not to rule us, we will not that endure.

"King. You deep dissemblers, I know what you doe,

And, for revenges sake, I will dissemble too."

The abortive attempt of Charles II., after the execution of his father, to unite the Scots under his sceptre, and by their aid place himself upon the throne of England, called forth the caricature annexed, in which an old device is put to a new use. A large number of verses explain the picture, though they begin by declaring:

"This Embleme needs no learned Exposition;

The World knows well enough the sad condition

Of regal Power and Prerogative.

Dead and dethron'd in England, now alive

In Scotland, where they seeme to love the Lad,

If hee'l be more obsequious than his Dad,

And act according to Kirk Principles,

More subtile than were Delphic Oracles."

In the verses that follow there is to be found one of the few explicit justifications of the execution of Charles I. that the lighter literature of the Commonwealth affords:

"But Law and Justice at the last being done

On the hated Father, now they love the Son."

The poet also taunts the Scots with having first stirred up the English to "doe Heroick Justice" on the late king, and then adopting the heir on condition of his giving their Church the same fell supremacy which Laud had claimed for the Church of England.

The Ironsides of Cromwell soon accomplished the caricaturist's prediction:

"But this religious mock we all shall see,

Will soone the downfall of their Babel be."

We find the pencil and the pen of the satirist next employed in exhibiting the young king fleeing in various ludicrous disguises before his enemies.

An interesting caricature published during the civil wars aimed to cast back upon the Malignants the ridicule implied in the nickname of Roundhead as applied to the Puritans. It contained figures of three ecclesiastics, "Sound-head, Rattle-head, and Round-head." Sound-head, a minister sound in the Puritan faith, hands a Bible to Rattle-head, a personage meant for Laud, half bishop and half Jesuit. On the other side is the genuine Round-head, a monk with shorn pate, who presents to Rattle-head a crucifix, and points to a monastery. Rattle-head rejects the Bible, and receives the crucifix. Over the figures is written:

"See heer, Malignants Foolerie

Retorted on them properly,

The Sound-head, Round-head, Rattle-head,

Well placed, where best is merited."

Below are other verses in which, of course, Rattle-head and Round-head are belabored in the thorough-going, root-and-branch manner of the time, Atheist and Arminian being used as synonymous terms:

"See heer, the Rattle-heads most Rotten Heart,

Acting the Atheists or Arminians part."

In looking over the broadsheets of that stirring period, we are struck by the absence of the mighty Name that must have been uppermost in every mind and oftenest on every tongue-that of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. A few caricatures were executed in Holland, in which "The General" and "Oliver" and "The Protector" were weakly satirized; but as most of the plates in that age were made to serve various purposes, and were frequently altered and redated, it is not certain that any of them were circulated in England during Cromwell's life-time. English draughtsmen produced a few pictures in which the Protector was favorably depicted dissolving the Long Parliament, but their efforts were not remarkable either with pen or pencil. The Protector may have relished, and Bunyan may have written, the verses that accompanied some of them:

"Full twelve years and more these Rooks they have sat

to gull and to cozen all true-hearted People;

Our Gold and our Silver has made them so fat

that they lookt more big and mighty than Paul's Steeple."

The Puritans handled the sword more skillfully than the pen, and the royalists were not disposed to satire during the rule of the Ironside chief. The only great writer of the Puritan age on the Puritan side was Milton, and he was one of the two or three great writers who have shown little sense of humor.

Chapter 9 IN THE PURITAN PERIOD.

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