[792b] Ibid.
[796a] Hist. Purit. IV. 270.
[796b] In 1657 and 1658 our reforming magistrates carried on their rigorous measures with so high a hand that not a few of the drawers, or publicans, were heavily fined, and 30 of them, as was said before, actually imprisoned. No less than 300 tickets were also, in the mean time, issued or given out against different defaulters, as we learn from one of the MS. accounts of that period.
[797] They were not all, it seems, the daughters of respectable or opulent families: 200 of them, if we rightly understand one of our MSS. were poor girls, clothed at the expense of Captain Wharton and Mr. Kirby, two newly restored aldermen, and both flaming royalists. It was very natural for the young girls to be then brisk and joyful, if it were only to find themselves unexpectedly, and all of a sudden, so well and gayly clad. The other hundred lasses may be supposed to have been clothed at their own expense, or that of their parents and friends.
[800] The following hints from Kimber may serve to throw some further light on the above Address and the circumstances that led to it.
“Such was the animosity between the court and country parties at this time (1679) that it looked as if the year Forty-One was going to be acted over again; which probably had been the case, if the king’s necessities had occasioned him to make the parliament perpetual, as his father had done—if Scotland had not been so effectually enslaved, by a standing army which the court kept there, that they had not power to stir—and if the bishops and clergy had been as disagreeable to most of the people as they were at that time. Besides, all the staunch episcopalians, fearing the presbyterians might again subvert the established church, forgetting the dangers of popery, joined themselves so firmly with the court, as to make it at last formidable to the other party. During the repeated prorogations of the present parliament abundance of addresses were presented from all parts to petition for its speedy sitting; which being highly distasteful to the court, means were found to have a number of counter-addresses, expressing the greatest abhorrence of such petitions, as an infringement upon the prerogative, which they took care in their expressions to advance as high as possible. And so the nation became divided into two parties, Petitioners and Abhorrers, soon known by the names of Whigs and Tories, which the parties, by way of reproach, gave each other: Tory being the name of an Irish robber, and Whig signifying sour-milk, an appellation first given to the Scotch presbyterians.”
Thus it appears that the Lynn corporation were then rank tories, or Abhorrers—that is, they abhorred liberty and loved slavery. How much things have changed among us for the better since, is a question that we will not now attempt to resolve.
[803] See Mackerell 253, 254.
[805] This prince afterwards, in 1715, made an unsuccessful effort to recover the throne of his ancestors, to which he and many others thought he had so undoubted right.
[806] This was perhaps the expulsion from the Hall of the mayor, town-clerk, five aldermen, and eight common-councilmen, by order of Council, and appointing others who were thought better of (and who were among the present addressers) in their room, by royal mandate. Among the latter was Henry Framingham. This happened in June.