Not easily was the book obtained; every copy at that time being hunted after, and destroyed when found, by ruthless minions of the Commonwealth. A Parliamentary injunction had been passed against it. Commands were given for it to be burnt by the hangman. Few copies escaped, when spies and informers were numerous, and fines were levied upon those who had secreted it. Greedy eyes, active fingers, were after the Choyce Drollery. Any fortunate possessor, even in those early days, knew well that he grasped a treasure which few persons save himself could boast. Therefore it is not strange, two hundred and twenty years having rolled away since then, that the book has grown to be among the rarest of the Drolleries. Probably not six perfect copies remain in the world. The British Museum holds not one. We congratulate ourselves on restoring it now to students, for many parts of it possess historical value, besides poetic grace; and the whole work forms an interesting relic of those troubled times.
Unlike our other Drolleries, reproduced verbatim et literatim in this series, we here find little describing the last days of Cromwell and the Commonwealth; except one graphic picture of a despoiled West-Countryman ([p. 57]), complaining against both Roundheads and “Cabbaleroes.” The poems were not only composed before hopes revived of speedy Restoration for the fugitive from Worcester-fight and Boscobel; they were, in great part, written before the Civil Wars began. Few of them, perhaps, were previously in print (the title-page asserts that none had been so, but we know this to be false). Publishers made such statements audaciously, then as now, and forced truth to limp behind them without chance of overtaking. By far the greater number belonged to an early date in the reign of the murdered King, chiefly about the year 1637; two, at the least, were written in the time of James I. (viz., [p. 40], a contemporary poem on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; and, [p. 10], the Ballad on King James I.), if not also the still earlier one, on the Defeat of the Scots at Muscleborough Field; which is probably corrupted from an original so remote as the reign of Edward VI. “Dowsabell” was certainly among the Pastorals of 1593, and “Down lay the Shepherd’s swain” ([p. 65]) bears token of belonging to an age when the Virgin Queen held sway. These facts guide to an understanding of the charm held by Choyce Drollery for adherents of the Monarchy; and of its obnoxiousness in the sight of the Parliament that had slain their King. It was not because of any exceptional immorality in this Choyce Drollery that it became denounced; although such might be declared in proclamations. Other books of the same year offended worse against morals: for example, the earliest edition known to us of Wit and Drollery, with the extremely “free” facetiæ of Sportive Wit, or Lusty Drollery (both works issued in 1656), held infinitely more to shock proprieties and call for repression. The Musarum Deliciæ of Sir J[ohn] M[ennis] and Dr. J[ames] S[mith], in the same year, 1656, cannot be held blameless. Yet the hatred shewn towards Choyce Drollery far exceeded all the rancour against these bolder sinners, or the previous year’s delightful miscellany of merriment and true poetry, the Wit’s Interpreter of industrious J[ohn] C[otgrave]; to whom, despite multitudinous typographical errors, we owe thanks, both for Wit’s Interpreter and for the wilderness of dramatic beauties, his Wit’s Treasury: bearing the same date of 1655.
It was not because of sins against taste and public or private morals, (although, we admit, it has some few of these, sufficient to afford a pretext for persecutors, who would have been equally bitter had it possessed virginal purity:) but in consequence of other and more dangerous ingredients, that Choyce Drollery aroused such a storm. Not disgust, but fear of its influence in reviving loyalty, prompted the order of its extermination. Readers at this later day, might easily fail to notice all that stirred the loyal sentiments of chivalric devotion, and consequently made the fierce Fifth-Monarchy men hate the small volume worse than the Apocrypha or Ikon Basilike. Herein was to be found the clever “Jack of Lent’s” account of loyal preparations made in London to receive the newly-wedded Queen, Henrietta Maria, when she came from France, in 1625, escorted by the Duke of Buckingham, who compromised her sister by his rash attentions: Buckingham, whom King Charles loved so well that the favouritism shook his throne, even after Felton’s dagger in 1628 had rid the land of the despotic courtier. Here, also, a more grievous offence to the Regicides, was still recorded in austere grandeur of verse, from no common hireling pen, but of some scholar like unto Henry King, of Chichester, the loyal “New-Year’s Wish” ([p. 48]) presented to King Charles at the beginning of 1638, when the North was already in rebellion: wherein men read, what at that time had not been deemed profanity or blasphemy, the praise and faithful service of some hearts who held their monarch only second to their Saviour. Referring to their hope that the personal approach of the King might cure the evils of the disturbed realm, it is written:—
“You, like our sacred and indulgent Lord,
When the too-stout Apostle drew his sword,
When he mistooke some secrets of the cause,
And in his furious zeale disdained the Lawes,
Forgetting true Religion doth lye
On prayers, not swords against authority:
You, like our substitute of horrid fate,