Of Ten grand infamous Traytors, who, for their horrid murder and
detestable villany against our late soveraigne Lord King Charles the
First, that ever blessed martyr, were arraigned, tryed, and executed in
the moneth of October, 1660, which in perpetuity will be had in
remembrance unto the world’s end.
This is one of the Six Ballads of the Restoration found in a trunk, and
sent by Sir W. C. Trevelyan to the British Museum. “No measure threw
more disgrace on the Restoration,” says Mr Wright, “than the prosecution
of the regicides; and the heartless and sanguinary manner in which it was
conducted tended more than any other circumstance to open the eyes of the
people to the real character of the government to which they had been
betrayed.” Pepys observes on the 20th Oct., “A bloody week this and the
last have been; there being ten hanged, drawn, and quartered.”
The tune is “Come let us drinke, the time invites.”
HEE that can impose a thing,
And shew forth a reason
For what was done against the King,
From the palace to the prison;
Let him here with me recite,
For my pen is bent to write
The horrid facts of treason.
Since there is no learned scribe
Nor arithmaticion
Ever able to decide
The usurp’d base ambition,
Which in truth I shall declare,
Traytors here which lately were,
Who wanted a phisitian.
For the grand disease that bred
Nature could not weane it;
From the foot unto the head,
Was putrefacted treason in it;
Doctors could no cure give,
Which made the squire then beleeve
That he must first begin it.
And the phisick did compose,
Within a pound of reason;
First to take away the cause,
Then to purge away the treason,
With a dosse of hemp made up,
Wrought as thickly as a rope,
And given them in due season.
The doctors did prescribe at last
To give ’um this potation,
A vomit or a single cast,
Well deserved, in purgation;
After that to lay them downe,
And bleed a veine in every one,
As traytors of the nation.
So when first the physicke wrought,
The thirteenth of October, {101}
The patient on a sledge was brought,
Like a rebell and a rover,
To the execution tree;
Where with much dexterity
Was gently turned over.