Introduction to the Second Series of the Ballad Society's Roxburghe-Ballads. "No dismal stall escapes his eye, He turns o'er tomes of low degrees, Each tract that flutters in the breeze For him is charged with hopes and fears: In mouldy novels Fancy sees Aldines, Budonis, Elzevirs." -Andrew Lang's XXII Ballades in Blue China. HE CLOSE OF A PRECEDING VOLUME brought The Borburghe Ballads under a fresh EDITOR, at the direct invitation of Mr. WILLIAM CHAPPELL, whose name and gratuitous labour had made The Ballad Society popular; his vast knowledge of English Music giving assurance of competent guidance. Without his generous help the Society could never have hoped to successfully produce so large a representative portion of the fugitive literature from old times. To emulate his achievements, and to fulfil his friendly wishes, the EDITOR of the other chief series of the Society's reprint-volumes, The Bagford Ballads, who had previously declared his love for this department of literature when editing The Drolleries' of the Restoration, now lays before his Fellow Members and Readers this first volume of the Second Series. He hopes to press on vigorously and single-handedly, to the speedy completion of the entire work. He had independently examined and catalogued for his own private use, long ago, all the accessible collections of Old Ballads and Old Songs of England and of Scotland; and thus came tolerably well prepared for an undertaking which requires a much wider 6 acquaintance with the literature of the olden days than the new race of magazine-men can understand or acknowledge. A certain innovation on the original routine of republication, which had hitherto followed rigidly the alphabetical arrangement of ballads, by the leading word in titles, he has deemed necessary. To explain the amount of change from original plan, and the cause of such change being made, is one chief object of this Preface. Scattered throughout the four volumes of irregular bulk, known familiarly as "The Roxburghe Collection of Ballads," in the British Museum Library, are many political ballads on broadsides, for the greater part belonging to the troubled time between 1678 and 1689. These ten years, of immense historical importance, inferior only to the ten years before the execution of Charles the First, are illustrated with a fullness of detail which no other collection of similar documents has surpassed, and which scarcely the far-famed Pepysian Ballads can parallel: while the latter have the disadvantage of being virtually concealed from the view of students. In the Roxburghe Ballads Collection, until they are reproduced in the present edition, the value of each and all had been seriously diminished by the unhappy blundering of former curators, both in Major Pearson's and in John Duke of Roxburghe's time; people who arranged and bound them, with frequent mutilation, in order to make them fit inside of Pearson's fantastic printed-border. These cruel step-fathers totally disregarded all connection of subjects, dates, authors, historical sequels. Nearly all the ballads, it is true, are absolutely devoid of any printed statement of publication-date, and also of manuscript annotation such as Wood and Luttrell gave. This fact serves to account for, but not to excuse the heterogeneous confusion. Chronological arrangement would have been the most useful, if it could have been deemed practicable: it was possible, but not easy to be made. It required more skill and patient industry than usually go to direct the bookbinders (merciless foes of ballad-lovers), who cannot be expected to devote time to multitudinous inquiries, that need considerable scholarship of specialists. An ordinary librarian knows literally next to nothing of the lore which alone can determine such nice questions, whether of internal or external evidence. When one sees the stupendous ignorance displayed regarding old The Editor's aim in Grouping the Political Ballads. xi ballads by the hack writers of the day, whom publishers delight to honour, who toss off editorial pancakes with a light heart and squeeze dead Authors dry like lemons, one cannot wonder that cataloguers and even collectors are left to their own devices. They may fall into mistakes, but they cannot surpass the blunders of cheap professors of English Literature. The difficulty of the undertaking seems to have hitherto hindered every one from attempting a chronological arrangement of undated ballads; and yet this is the only good system for those of historical importance. An examination of the original Roxburghe Collection, the Halliwell-Phillipps=the Euing, the Wood, the Rawlinson, the Bagford, the Huth, the Madden, even (although better assorted than the rest) the Luttrell and the Pepysian, has shown that political ballads had been interspersed promiscuously among the amatory ditties, the broadly humourous and the convivial songs, as they happened to be regulated by the Initial-letter of their titles. Macedon and Monmonth once more came together, by such "apt alliteration's artful aid," with or without "salmons in both." A greater variety of subject was thus gained, no doubt, for idle loungers who turned the pages; but the damage to the historical materials was immense, and, in consequence, the Roxburghe Ballads failed to take their fair position in the mind of the student. To remedy this unlucky mistake the present Editor has, on his own single responsibility, grouped together from their scattered positions, such ballads as he knows to have been originally in close connection. By bringing once more into the exact order of their publication the various ballads and squibs which mark the Anti-Papal disturbance of 1678-89, in which the iniquitous Titus Oates and other salaried perjurers for awhile triumphed over the national reason, he does his best here to show the evils of the popular phrensy, the malignity mingled with folly of what is at any time called "a religious cry" of "Protestantism in danger!" and the evil results which almost necessarily followed upon it; so soon as ever the Romanists gained power, for a short time, to "better the instruction of tyranny and intolerance, learnt from their own unscrupulous foes. Thus reproducing the illustrated broadsides, which were the popular annals or newspapers of their day, the Editor might have felt tempted to include within the same "Group of Anti-Papal Ballads" the not less interesting and valuable Group of Ballads on the Duke of Monmouth's Protestant Insurrection. It connects itself with the former Group, in logical sequence to the earlier ballads, or in simultaneous movement of the same political wire-pulling by the "little Machiavel," Shaftesbury. But it seemed far better to avoid making one unwieldy group out of the two, keeping readers too long a time from the variety of miscellaneous ballads which now afford temporary relief and amusement. Choice was made to let the separate interests be fairly represented in the same volume, under these two distinct headings-even though the second contemporary group became necessarily broken, by being continued into the early pages of a succeeding volume, through their giving place to the miscellaneous ballads already mentioned. The one Group gives the changing fortunes of the Anti-Papal strife: the other narrates the warfare between the two Dukes, Monmouth and York, as representative of unscrupulous but plausible sedition, and of legitimate monarchy on the defensive. Incidentally is displayed the bitter rancour of the Sectaries, with their unwise support of pretensions advanced by a weak adventurer; whose ultimate defeat and punishment encouraged the bigotry of the victor, to attempt by the worst means what he might never have deemed possible of achievement, had it not been for the Western Insurrection and its closing fight at Sedgemore. To the best of his ability the Editor would fain hope that he has accomplished satisfactorily a somewhat difficult task: one that had been hitherto without precedent or example. Under these circumstances, and with a close dependence on the speedily-following volume, which is almost entirely ready now in manuscript, the present New Series is offered as a self-complete undertaking. It has its own distinct character, as an elaborately introduced and annotated set of Historical Ballads: gathered congruously from amid the Roxburghe Collection, and here separated from those which were of earlier or later publication, besides being of more miscellaneous variety. Military and Naval Ballads, belonging to the time of William and Mary, have still to reappear, in Volume Sixth; but, being of later date than almost all now presented for perusal, they lose nothing by not being issued alongside of the double Group, here marking the strife in Charles the Second's reign, between the aggressive The real character of " True-Blue Protestantism." xiii Popery on one side and noisy Protestantism on the other; between the seditious discontent of sectaries and the stern self-defence of those who maintained Prerogative. Some readers of weak digestion and of narrow prejudices may resent our uncompromising exposure of Shaftesbury's "brisk boys," and our unhesitating condemnation of the intriguers, the hired informers, greedy for blood-money, and the lying traducers whom "Jehu or "Achitophel delighted to enlist as his tools, while advancing his own ambitious schemes. There are still many persons of impaired intellect but vicious temper who become intensely indignant whenever it is proved that the Church of England has systematically withheld her support from such sanguinary fanaticism as we find exemplified in the Anti-Papal madness and bigotry hereafter described. There is not a statement advanced, not a single paragraph written in the introductory remarks or the annotations following, that cannot be amply substantiated by documentary evidence within our possession. Those who try to defend the "sharp practices" of Shaftesbury against the condemnation which posterity had rightly pronounced, from the time of his death in 1682 to the present bicentenary of the event, display their own partizan spirit and their willingness to condone any unprincipled action, so long as it promises to injure their political antagonists. Had Shaftesbury been a Tory, no language would have been deemed too harsh for the use of the late W. D. Christie, in rebuke of his manifold turn-coat changes, his hunting for popularity, his self-seeking, and his hypocritical assumption of "true-blue Protestantism" as a religious man, at Wapping, while his theological views were exactly— what they were. 66 Although, after the early pages in which he is coarsely and indefensibly lampooned as a wretched Wine-Cooper," he does not openly appear in many ballads of the present volume (we see more of him in the next, before discovery of the Rye-House Plot), there are few with which he is not connected indirectly; he being the subtle spider who sits hidden at the centre of the web, feeling every thread vibrate, and with a keen appetite for flies. To the intellectual activity of the wily statesman, superior in cunning and multitudinous resources above most men in his age, we give our acknowledgement ungrudgingly; but with his standard |