Loveless is brought to Lady Lambert at night. She endeavours to dazzle him by showing the regalia richly set out and adorned with lights. He puts by, however, crown and sceptre and rebukes her overweening ambition. Suddenly the Committee, who have been drinking deep, burst in upon them dancing a riotous dance. Loveless is hurriedly concealed under the coverlet of a couch, and Lady Lambert sits thereon seemingly at her devotions. Her husband takes his place by her side, but rolls off as the gallant slips to the ground. The lights fall down and are extinguished, the men fly howling and bawling ‘A Plot! A Plot!’ in drunken terror. Lambert is cajoled and hectored into believing himself mistaken owing to his potations. The ladies hold a council to correct and enquire into women’s wrongs, but on a sudden, news is brought that Lambert’s followers have turned against him and that he is imprisoned in the Tower. The city rises against the Parliament and the Rump is dissolved. Loveless and Freeman rescue Lady Lambert and Lady Desbro’, whose old husband has fallen down dead with fright. The parliamentarians endeavour to escape, but Wariston, Goggle, and Hewson—a leading member of the Committee—are detected and maltreated by the mob. As they are haled away to prison the people give themselves up to general merry-making and joy.

[SOURCE.]

The purely political part of The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause was founded by Mrs. Behn on John Tatham’s The Rump; or, The Mirror of the Late Times (4to, 1660, 4to, 1661, and again 1879 in his collected works,) which was produced on the eve of the Restoration, in February, 1660, at the Private House, i.e. small theatre, in Dorset Court. The company which played here had been brought together by William Beeston, but singularly little is known of its brief career and only one name has been recorded, that of George Jolly, the leading actor. Tatham was the author of the Lord Mayor’s pageants 1657-64. His plays, four in number, together with a rare entertainment, London’s Glory (1660), have been well edited by Maidment and Logan.

The Rump met with great success. It is certainly a brisk and lively piece, and coming at the juncture it did must have been extraordinarily effective. As a topical key-play reflecting the moment it is indeed admirable, and the crescendo of overwhelming satire, all the keener for the poet’s deep earnestness, culminating in the living actors, yesterday’s lords and law-givers, running to and fro the London streets, one bawling ‘Ink or pens, ink or pens!’, another ‘Boots or shoes, boots or shoes to mend!’, a third ‘Fine Seville oranges, fine lemons!’, whilst Mrs. Cromwell exchanges Billingsgate with a crowd of jeering boys, must have caused the house absolutely to rock with merriment.

With all its point and cleverness The Rump, however, from a technical point of view, is ill-digested and rough. The scenes were evidently thrown off hastily, and sadly lack refining and revision. Mrs. Behn has made the happiest use of rather unpromising material. The intrigues between Loveless and Lady Lambert, who in Tatham is very woodeny and awkward, between Freeman and Lady Desbro’, which give The Roundheads unity and dramatic point, are entirely her own invention. In the original Rump neither cavaliers nor Lady Desbro’ appear. Ananias Goggle also, the canting lay elder of Clements, with his subtle casuistry that jibs at ‘the person not the office,’ a dexterous character sketch, alive and acute, we owe to Mrs. Behn.

Amongst the many plays, far too numerous even to catalogue, that scarify the puritans and their zealot tribe, The Cheats (1662), by Wilson, and Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), which long kept the stage, and, in a modified form, The Honest Thieves, was seen as late as the second half of the nineteenth century, are pre-eminently the best. Both possess considerable merit and are worthy of the highest comic traditions of the theatre.

As might have been expected, the dissolution of the Rump Parliament let loose a flood of political literature, squibs, satires and lampoons. Such works as The famous Tragedie of the Life and Death of Mrs. Rump ... as it was presented on a burning stage at Westminster, the 29th of May, 1660 (4to, 1660), are of course valueless save from a purely historical interest. A large number of songs and ballads were brought together and published in two parts, 1662, reprint 1874. This collection (The Rump), sometimes witty, sometimes angry, sometimes obscene, is weighty evidence of the loathing inspired by the republicans and their misrule, but it is of so personal and topical a nature that the allusions would hardly be understood by any one who had not made a very close and extended study of those critical months.

[THEATRICAL HISTORY.]

The Roundheads; or, The Good Old Cause was produced at the Duke’s Theatre in 1682. They were unsettled and hazardous times. The country was convulsed by the judicial murders and horrors which followed in the train of the pseudo-Popish Plot engineered by the abominable Gates and his accomplices. King and Parliament were at hopeless variance. The air was charged with strife, internecine hatreds and unrest. In such an atmosphere and in such circumstances politics could not but make themselves keenly felt upon the stage. The actors were indeed ‘abstracts and brief chronicles of the time’, and the theatre became a very Armageddon for the poets. As A Lenten Prologue refus’d by the Players (1682) puts it:—

’Plots and Parties give new matter birth
And State distractions serve you here for mirth!
.......
The Stage, like old Rump Pulpits, is become
The scene of News, a furious Party’s drum.’