"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.