1st Puritan. Sure that was Judas then with the red beard.
Red is the traditional colour of Judas’ hair. cf. Dryden’s lines on Jacob Tonson the publisher:—
With two left legs and Judas-coloured hair.
[p. 414] an act, 24 June. Cromwell’s parliament passed Draconian Acts punishing adultery, incest, fornication, with death; the two former on the first offence, the last on the second conviction. Mercurius Politicus, No. 168. Thursday, 25 August— Thursday, 1 September, 1653 (p. 2700), records the execution of an old man of eighty-nine who was found guilty at Monmouth Assize of adultery with a woman over sixty. It is well known that under the Commonwealth the outskirts of London were crowded with brothels, and the license of Restoration days pales before the moral evils and cankers existing under Cromwell. The officially recognized independent diurnals Mercurius Democritus, Mercurius Fumigosus, have been described as ‘abominable’. In 1660, when the writers of these attempted to circulate literature which had been common in the preceeding decade, they were promptly ‘clapt up in Newgate’.
[p. 414] Peters the first, Martin the Second. Hugh Peters has been noticed before. Henry Martin was an extreme republican, and at one time even a Leveller. He was a commissioner of the High Court of Justice and a regicide. At the Restoration he was imprisoned for life and died at Chepstow Castle, 1681, aged seventy-eight. He was notorious for profligacy and shamelessness, and kept a very seraglio of mistresses.
[p. 415] Tantlings. St. Antholin’s (St. Anthling’s), Budge Row, Watling Street, had long been a stronghold of puritanism. As early as 1599, morning prayer and lecture were instituted, ‘after the Geneva fashion’. The bells began at five in the morning. This church was largely attended by fanatics and extremists. There are frequent allusions to St. Antholin’s and its matutinal chimes. The church was burned down in the Great Fire. Middleton and Dekker’s Roaring Girl (1611): ‘Sha’s a tongue will be heard further in a still morning than Saint Antling’s bell.’
She will outpray
A preacher at St. Antlin’s.
— Mayne’s City Match (1639), iv, v.
Davenant’s News from Plymouth (fol. 1673, licensed 1635), i, I:—