No. 178. The Church Militant.
The country had now begun to experience the miseries of war, and to smart under them; and the cavaliers were especially reproached for the cruelty with which they plundered and ill-treated people whenever they gained the mastery. Colonel Lunsford was especially notorious for the barbarities committed by himself and his men—to such a degree that he was popularly accused of eating children, a charge which is frequently alluded to in the popular songs of the time. Thus one of these songs couples him with two other obnoxious royalists:—
From Fielding, and from Vavasour,
Both ill-affected men,
From Lunsford eke deliver us,
Who eateth up children.
No. 179. The Sucklington Faction.
In the third compartment of the caricature just mentioned, we see in the background of the picture, behind colonel Lunsford, his soldiers occupied in burning towns, and massacring women and children. The model of the gay cavalier of the earlier period of this great revolution, before the war had broken out in its intensity, was the courtly Sir John Suckling, the poet of the drawing-room and tavern, the admired of “roaring boys,” and the hated of rigid Puritans. Sir John outdid his companions in extravagance in everything which was fashionable, and the display of his zeal in the cause of royalty was not calculated to conciliate the reformers. When the king led an army against the Scottish Covenanters in 1639, Suckling raised a troop of a hundred horse at his own expense; but they gained more reputation by their extraordinary dress than by their courage, and the whole affair was made a subject of ridicule. From this time the name of Suckling became identified with that gay and profligate class who, disgusted by the outward show of sanctity which the Puritans affected, rushed into the other extreme, and became notorious for their profaneness, their libertinism, and their indulgence in vice, which threw a certain degree of discredit upon the royalist party. There is a large broadside among the King’s Pamphlets in the British Museum, entitled, “The Sucklington Faction; or (Sucklings) Roaring Boys.” It is one of those satirical compositions which were then fashionable under the title of “Characters,” and is illustrated by an engraving, from which our cut No. 179 is copied. This engraving, which from its superior style is perhaps the work of a foreign artist, represents the interior of a chamber, in which two of the Roaring Boys are engaged in drinking and smoking, and forms a curious picture of contemporary manners. Underneath the engraving we read the following lines:—
Much meate doth gluttony produce,