But all in vain; Bird ransacked his pockets, and from them extracted fifteen shillings, took a new hat from his head, and requested him, as he had now given him cause, to canonise him also.
"Ay!" exclaimed Poor Robin grimly, "that will I, when you have suffered martyrdom at Tyburn, which will not be long hence."
"Poor Robin's" publications, it may be said, in this connection, are well worth examination. In an age when Lilly, Perkins, and a host of others issued prophetic almanacs, divining future events from the stars, and were extensively believed in, "Poor Robin's" almanac, year by year, made much fun out of those pretensions; fun that sometimes reads curiously modern. Seventeenth-century humour is, as a rule, as flat to the modern taste as champagne opened and left to stand, but much of "Poor Robin's" wit and humour still sparkles. While Perkins, with a provoking solemnity, would give a chronological table of events from the Year One and would proceed by degrees from "Adam, created 1, B.C., 3962," and would continue by way of "Methuselah, born 687, B.C., 2306," to "The Tyrant Oliver began his government, December 16th, 1653"; "Poor Robin" would devote his attention largely to the days when highwaymen were hanged, and would draw farcical conclusions from planetary dispositions. Thus we find him saying:
"Now the effects of the conjunction of Saturn and Mars will much operate: such conjunctions are always attended with remarkable accidents. There was one in the year 1672, and the German Princess rode up Holborn Hill; another in 1673, and Du Vail visited the three-legged tenement at Hyde Park Corner. I might instance in divers other examples, but these shall suffice."
The so-called "German Princess" was an adventuress, really a native of Canterbury, and a daughter of one of the choristers in the Cathedral there, named Moders. She was hanged at Tyburn, in 1678 (not in 1672), and so was Du Vall (not at Hyde Park Corner, and not in 1673).
In his burlesque monthly forecasts of the weather and public events, he evidently reflects upon his serious contemporaries, whose predictions would occasionally go wrong, and who, like our modern "Old Moore," would in consequence grow less cocksure and more cautious, and would then more or less cleverly tell readers to "expect" something or other, together with such eminently safe remarks for February and March as, "Wind and rainstorms are to be looked for by the farmer."
In February 1664, for example, "Poor Robin," in burlesque of this kind of thing, warns his readers to "expect some showers of rain, either this month or the next, or the next after that, or else we shall have a very dry spring.... The twenty-seventh day of this month died Cardinal Mazarine, and if you would know the reason why he died, then, I answer, it was because he could live no longer."
Under June, he declares that, "If the frost nips the fruit trees, there will be no apples." In July, "Fleas will grow troublesome, and will lie with you without leave," and elsewhere we find that "Tyburn shall be a great eye-sore to Highway men and cut-purses," and that "The leafless tree betwixt London and Paddington will this month bear fruit, but it will be only Medlers, and they are stark naught until they are rotten." The which extracts fully illustrate the allusions in the short life of Jack Bird.
Made bold by a long series of successes, Bird procured a good horse and determined never again to stoop to robbing for mere shillings. A meeting with the Earl of ——, rolling along in his carriage, accompanied by his chaplain, and attended by two servants, gave him his first opportunity of putting this excellent determination into practice.
"You must stop, my lord!" exclaimed Bird, threatening him with one pistol, and the coachman with the other.