2.
Muscadel Avant, Bloody Alicant,
Shall have no free vote of mine;
Claret is a Prince, And he did long since
In the Royal order shine.
His face, &c., (as in M. D. C. p. 112.)
In sixth verse, “If a Cooper we With a red nose see,” refers to Oliver Cromwell; and proves it to have been written before September, 1658.
Pages 125, 315. Lay by, &c., Law lies a-bleeding.
The date of this ballad seems to have been 1656, rather than 1658. The despotism of the sword here so powerfully described, was under those persons who are on p. 254 of M. D. C. designated “Oliver’s myrmidons,” meaning, probably, chiefly the major-generals of the military districts, into which the country was divided after Penruddock’s downfall in 1655. They were Desborough, Whalley, Goffe, Fleetwood, “downright” Skippon, Kelsey, Butler, Worseley, and Berry; to these ten were added Barkstead. Compare Hallam’s account:—“These were eleven in number, men bitterly hostile to the royalist party, and insolent to all civil authority. They were employed to secure the payment of a tax of ten per cent., imposed by Cromwell’s arbitrary will on those who had ever sided with the King during the late wars, where their estates exceeded £100 per annum. The major-generals, in their correspondence printed among Thurloe’s papers, display a rapacity and oppression greater than their master’s. They complain that the number of those exempted is too great; they press for harsher measures; they incline to the unfavourable construction in every doubtful case; they dwell on the growth of malignancy and the general disaffection. It was not indeed likely to be mitigated by this unparalleled tyranny. All illusion was now gone as to the pretended benefits of the civil war. It had ended in a despotism, compared to which all the illegal practices of former kings, all that had cost Charles his life and crown, appeared as dust in the balance. For what was Ship-money, a general burthen, by the side of the present decimation of a single class, whose offence had long been expiated by a composition and effaced by an act of indemnity? or were the excessive punishments of the Star Chamber so odious as the capital executions inflicted without trial by peers, whenever it suited the usurper to erect his high court of justice [by which Gerard and Vowel in 1654, Slingsby and Dr. Hewit in 1658 fell]? A sense of present evils not only excited a burning desire to live again under the ancient monarchy, but obliterated, especially in the new generation, that had no distinct remembrance of them, the apprehension of its former abuses.” (Constitutional Hist. England, cap. x. vol. ii. p. 252, edit. 1872.) This from a writer unprejudiced and discriminating.