BMr.
Facsimile of newspaper page
Who would think, while reading these calm corrections, that the poet knew he was in imminent danger, and that in a couple of months he was to be a proscribed fugitive, hiding in the purlieus of Westminster from Royalty’s myrmidons? Yet it was so, and the degradation to which literature may be submitted is proved by the fact that within the same space of time his works were, in accordance with an order of the House of Commons, burned by the hangman.
The excessive loyalty exhibited about this time by the lawyers, who were then, as now, quite able to look after their own interests, shows in rather a ludicrous light, viewed through the zealous officiousness of Mr Nicholas Bacon, who must have been the fountspring of the following effusion, which appears in a June, 1660, number of the Mercurius Politicus:—
WHEREAS one Capt. Gouge, a witness examined against the late King’s Majesty, in those Records stiled himself of the Honorable Society of Gray’s Inne. These are to give notice that the said Gouge, being long sought for, was providentially discovered in a disguise, seized in that Society, and now in custody, being apprehended by the help of some spectators that knew him, viewing of a banner with His Majesties arms, set up just at the same time of His Majesties landing, on an high tower in the same Society, by Nicholas Bacon, Esq., a member thereof, as a memorial of so great a deliverance, and testimony of his constant loyalty to His Majesty, and that the said Gouge upon examination confessed, That he was never admitted not so much as a Clerk of that Society.
The King does not seem to have enjoyed his own very long before he was subjected to loss by the dog-stealers, who, less ready to revere royalty than the lawyers, led to the publication of the following in the Mercurius Publicus of June 28, 1660:—