“_I will get a good Master, if any good Master wou’d_ _Get me; I cannot tell what to do else, by my soul, that_ _I cannot; for I have went and gone to one LILLY’S;_ _He lives at that house, at the end of another house,_ _By the ~May-pole~ house; and tells every body by one_ _Star, and t’other Star, what good luck they shall have._ _But he cou’d not tell nothing for poor ~Teg~._”
Verse 12. The Master of the Rolls. This was Sir Dudley Digges, builder of Chilham Castle, near Canterbury, Kent, who had in 1627 moved the impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham, and been rewarded with this Mastership.
Verse 18. Alludes to the rigorous suppression of the Play-houses (_vide ante_ p. 285, for a descriptive Song); and as we see from verse 17, the Bear-garden, like Rope-dancers and Tumblers, met more tolerance than actors (except from Colonel Pride). Not heels were feared, but heads and hands. Bears, moreover, could not stir up men to loyalty, but tragedy-speeches might. One Joshua Gisling, a Roundhead, kept bears at Paris Garden, Southwark.
23. “Goodman _Lenthall_,” “neither wise nor witty,” (“that creeps to the house by a backdoor,” _Rump_, ii. 185,) the Speaker of the Commons from 1640 to 1653; Alderman _Allen_, the dishonest and bankrupt goldsmith, both rebuked by _Cromwell_, when he forcibly expelled the Rump. (See the ballad on pp. 62-5 of _M. D., C._, verses 9 and 10, telling how “_Allen_ the coppersmith was in great fear. He had done as [i.e. _us_] much hurt,” &c.; also 2, 15, for the dumb-foundered “Speaker without his Mace.”) This Downfall of the Rump had been on April 20th, 1653, not quite three months before the funeral of _Dean_. Whoever may have been the writer of this spirited ballad, we believe, wrote the other one also: judging solely by internal evidence.
24. _Henry Ireton_, who married Bridget Cromwell in January, 1646-7, and escaped from the Royalists after having been captured at Naseby, proved the worst foe of Charles, insatiably demanding his death, died in Ireland of the plague, 15th November, 1651. His body was brought to Bristol in December, and lay in state at Somerset House. Over the gate hung the “hatchment” with “_Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori_”—which one of the Cavaliers delightedly translated, “Good it is for his country that he is dead.” Like Dean’s, two years later, Ireton’s body was buried with ostentatious pomp in Henry VII.’s Chapel, (Feb. 6 or 7;) to be ignominiously treated at Tyburn after the Restoration. The choice of so royal a resting-place brought late insult on many another corpse. His widow was speedily married to Charles Fleetwood, before June, 1652.