"Oxford and Cambridge make poore Preachers;
Each shop affordeth better Teachers:
Oh blessed Reformation!"
Among the "mechannick spirits" presented in this sheet we remark "Barbone, the Lether-seller," who figures in many later prints as "Barebones." There are also "Bulcher, a Chicken man;" "Henshaw, a Confectioner, alias an Infectioner;" "Duper, a Cowkeeper;" "Lamb, a Sope-boyler," and a dozen more.
Such pictures, however, were few and far between during the twenty years of Puritan ascendency. But when the rule of the Sound-head was at an end, and Rattle-head had once more the dispensing of preferment in Church and State, the press teemed with broadsheets reviling the Puritan heroes. The gorgeous funeral of the Protector—his body borne in state on a velvet bed, clad in royal robes, to Westminster Abbey, where a magnificent tomb rose over his remains—was still fresh in the recollection of the people of London when they saw the same body torn from its resting-place, and hung on Tyburn Hill from nine in the morning until six in the evening, and then cast into a deep pit. Thousands who saw his royal funeral looked upon his body swinging from the gallows. The caricatures vividly mark the change. Cromwell now appears only as tyrant, antichrist, hypocrite, monster. Charles I. is the holy martyr. His son's flight in disguise, the hiding in the oak-tree, and other circumstances of his escape are no longer ignominious or laughable, but graceful and glorious.
A cherished fiction appears frequently in the caricatures that no man came to a good end who had had any hand in the king's execution, not even the executioner nor the humblest of his assistants. On one sheet we read of a certain drum-maker, named Tench, who "provided roapes, pullies, and hookes (in case the king resisted) to compel and force him down to the block." "This roague is also haunted with a Devill, and consumes away." There was the confession, too, of the hangman, who, being about to depart this life, declared that he had solemnly vowed not to perform his office upon the king, but had nevertheless dealt the fatal blow, trembling from head to foot. Thirty pounds had been his reward, which was paid him in half-crown pieces within an hour after the execution—the dearest money, as he told his wife, that he had ever received, for it would cost him his life, "which propheticall words were soon made manifest, for it appeared that, ever since, he had been in a most sad condition, and lay raging and swearing, and still pointing at one thing or another which he conceived to appear visible before him."
Shrove-tide in Arms against Lent, A.D. 1660.
Richard Cromwell was let off as easily by the caricaturist as he was by the king. He is depicted as "the meek knight," the mild incapable, hardly worth a parting kick. In one very good picture he is a cooper hammering away with a mallet at a cask, from which a number of owls escape, most of which, as they take their flight, cry out, "King!" Richard protests that he knows nothing of this trade of cooper, for the more he hammers, the more the barrel breaks up. Elizabeth, the wife of the Protector, figured in a ludicrous manner upon the cover of a cookery-book published in the reign of Charles II., the preface of which contained anecdotes of the kitchen over which she had presided.
