THE END.
JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This stanza is omitted in most collections. Walker was a colonel in the parliamentary army; and afterwards a member of the Committee of Safety.
[2] The Directory for the Public Worship of God, ordered by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster in 1644, to supersede the Book of Common Prayer.
[3] The Earl of Thomond.
[4] The Excise, first introduced by the Long Parliament, was particularly obnoxious to the Tory party. Dr Johnson more than a hundred years later shared all the antipathy of his party to it, and in his Dictionary defined it to be “a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.”
[5] Henry the Eighth. The comparison is made in other ballads of the age. To play old Harry with any one is a phrase that seems to have originated with those who suffered by the confiscation of church property.
[6] The Marquis of Winchester, the brave defender of his house at Basing, had been made prisoner by Cromwell at the storming of that house in 1645. Waller had been foiled in his attempt on this place in the year preceding.—T. W.
[7] Sir John Ogle, one of the Royalist commanders, who was intrusted with the defence of Winchester Castle, which he surrendered on conditions just before the siege of Basing House.—T. W.