# Poetical Works of John Oldham/Satire upon the Jesuits—Satire I

BY hell 'twas bravely done! what less than this,
What sacrifice of meaner worth, and price
Could we have offered up for our success?
So fare all they, who e'er provoke our hate,
Who by like ways presume to tempt their fate;
Eare each like this bold meddling fool, and be
As well secured, as well dispatched as he:
Would he were here, yet warm, that we might drain
His reeking gore, and drink up every vein!
That were a glorious sanction, much like thine,
Great Roman! made upon a like design:
Like thine; we scorn so mean a sacrament,
To seal and consecrate our high intent,
We scorn base blood should our great league cement:
Thou didst it with a slave, but we think good
To bind our treason with a bleeding god.
Would it were his (why should I fear to name,
Or you to hear 't?) at which we nobly aim! Lives yet that hated enemy of our cause? Lives he our mighty projects to oppose? Can his weak innocence, and heaven's care
Be thought security from what we dare?
Are you then Jesuits? are you so for nought,
In all the Catholic depths of treason taught,
In orthodox, and solid poisoning read? In each profounder art of killing bred? And can you fail, or bungle in your trade? Shall one poor life your cowardice upbraid?
Tame dastard slaves! who your profession shame,
And fix disgrace on our great founder's name.
Think what late sectaries (an ignoble crew,
Not worthy to be ranked in sin with you)
Inspired with lofty wickedness, durst do:
How from his throne they hurled a monarch down,
And doubly eased him of both life and crown:
They scorned in covert their bold act to hide,
In open face of heaven the work they did, And braved its vengeance, and its powers defied.
This is his son, and mortal too like him;
Durst you usurp the glory of the crime, And dare ye not? I know, you scorn to be
By such as they outdone in villany, Your proper province; true, you urged them on, Were engines in the fact, but they alone
Shared all the open credit and renown. But hold! I wrong our church and cause, which need
No foreign instance, nor what others did.
Think on that matchless assassin, whose name
We with just pride can make our happy claim;
He, who at killing of an emperor,
To. give his poison stronger force and power
Mixed a god with't, and made it work more sure:
Blessed memory! which shall through age to come
Stand sacred in the lists of hell and Rome.
Let our great Clement and Ravaillac's name,
Your spirits to like heights of sin inflame;
Those mighty souls, who bravely chose to die, To have each a royal ghost their company. Heroic act! and worth their tortures well, Well worth the suffering of a double hell, That, they felt here, and that below, they feel. And if these cannot move you as they should, Let me and my example fire your blood: Think on my vast attempt, a glorious deed, Which durst the fates have suffered to succeed, Had rivalled hell's most proud exploit and boast, Even that, which would the king of fates deposed. Cursed be the day, and ne'er in time enrolled, And cursed the star, whose spiteful influence ruled The luckless minute, which my project spoiled; Curse on that power, who, of himself afraid, My glory with my brave design betrayed; Justly he feared, lest I, who strook so high In guilt, should next blow up his realm and sky; And so I had; at least I would have durst, And failing, had got off with fame at worst. Had you but half my bravery in sin, Your work had never thus unfinished been; Had I been man, and the great act to do, He had died by this, and been what I am now, Or what his father is: I would leap hell To reach his life, though in the midst I fell, And deeper than before,——— Let rabble souls, of narrow aim and reach, Stoop their vile necks, and dull obedience preach; Let them with slavish awe (disdained by me) Adore the purple rag of majesty, And think 't a sacred relic of the sky: Well may such, fools a base subjection own, Vassals to every ass that loads a throne;
Unlike the soul, with which proud I was born, Who could that sneaking thing a monarch scorn, Spurn off a crown, and set my foot in sport Upon the head that wore it, trod in dirt. But say, what is't that binds your hands? does fear From such a glorious action you deter? Or is't religion? but you sure disclaim That frivolous pretence, that empty name— Mere bugbear word, devised by us to scare The senseless rout to slavishness and fear, Ne'er known to awe the brave, and those that dare. Such weak and feeble things may serve for checks To rein and curb base mettled heretics; Dull creatures, whose nice boggling consciences Startle, or strain at such slight crimes as these; Such, whom fond inbred honesty befools, Or that old musty piece the Bible gulls: That hated book, the bulwark of our foes, Whereby they still uphold their tottering cause. Let no such toys mislead you from the road Of glory, nor infect your souls with good; Let never bold encroaching virtue dare With her grim holy face to enter there, No, not in very dream: have only will Like fiends and me to covet, and act ill; Let true substantial wickedness take place, Usurp, and reign; let it the very trace (If any yet be left) of good deface. If ever qualms of inward cowardice (The thing which some dull sots call conscience) rise, Let them in streams of blood and slaughter drown, Or with new weights of guilt still press them down. Shame, faith, religion, honour, loyalty, Nature itself, whatever checks there be To loose and uncontrolled impiety, Be all extinct in you; own no remorse But that you’ve balked a sin, have been no worse, Or too much pity shown,——
Be diligent in mischief's trade, be each Performing as a devil; nor stick to reach At crimes most dangerous; where bold despair, Mad lust, and heedless blind revenge would ne’er Even look, march you without a blush or fear, Inflamed by all the hazards that oppose, And firm, as burning martyrs to your cause. Then you're true Jesuits, then you’re fit to be Disciples of great Loyola and me; Worthy to undertake, worthy a plot, Like this, and fit to scourge a Huguenot. Plagues on that name! may swift confusion seize, And utterly blot out the cursèd race; Thrice damned be that apostate monk, from whom Sprung first these enemies of us and Rome; Whose poisonous filth, dropt from engendering brain, By monstrous birth did the vile insects spawn, Which now infest each country, and defile With their o'erspreading swarms this goodly isle. Once it was ours, and subject to our yoke, Till a late reigning witch the enchantment broke: It shall again: hell and I say it: have ye But courage to make good the prophecy, Not fate itself shall hinder.—— Too sparing was the time, too mild the day, When our great Mary bore the English sway! Unqueenlike pity marred her royal power, Nor was her purple dyed enough in gore. Four or five hundred, such like petty sum Might fall perhaps a sacrifice to Rome, Scarce worth the naming: had I had the power, Or been thought fit to have been her counsellor, She should have raised it to a nobler score. Big bonfires should have blazed, and shone each day, To tell our triumphs, and make bright our way;
And when 'twas dark, in every lane and street
Thick flaming heretics should serve to light,
And save the needless charge of links by night;
Smithfield should still have kept a constant fire,
Which never should be quenched, never expire,
But with the lives of all the miscreant rout,
Till the last gasping breath had blown it out.
So Nero did, such was the prudent course
Taken by all his mighty successors, To tame like heretics of old by force:
They scorned dull reason, and pedantic rules
To conquer and reduce the hardened fools;
Racks, gibbets, halters were their arguments,
Which did most undeniably convince;
Grave bearded lions managed the dispute,
And reverend bears their doctrines did confute;
And all, who would stand out in stiff defence,
They gently clawed, and worried into sense;
Better than all our Sorbonne dotards now,
Who would by dint of words our foes subdue.
This was the rigid discipline of old, Which modern sots for persecution hold;
Of which dull annalists in story tell
Strange legends, and huge bulky volumes swell
With martyred fools that lost their way to hell.
From these, our church's glorious ancestors,
We’ve learned our arts, and made their methods ours;
Nor have we come behind, the least degree,
In acts of rough and manly cruelty;
Converting faggots, and the powerful stake,
And sword resistless our apostles make.
This heretofore Bohemia felt, and thus
Were all the numerous proselytes of Huss
Crushed with their head: so Waldo's cursèd rout,
And those of Wickliffe here were rooted out,
Their names scarce left.—Sure were the means we chose,
And wrought prevailingly; fire purged the dross
Of those foul heresies, and sovereign steel
Lopped off the infected limbs the church to heal.
Renowned was that French brave, renowned his deed, A deed for which the day deserves its red
Far more than for a paltry saint that died:
How goodly was the sight! how fine the show
When Paris saw through all its channels flow
The blood of Huguenots; when the full Seine,
Swelled with the flood, its banks with joy o'erran!
He scorned like common murderers to deal
By parcels and piecemeal; he scorned retail
In the trade of death; whole myriads died by the great,
Soon as one single life; so quick their fate,
Their very prayers and wishes came too late.
This a king did: and great and mighty 'twas,
Worthy his high degree, and power and place,
And worthy our religion and our cause.
Unmatched 't had been, had not Maguire arose,
The bold Maguire (who read in modern fame,
Can be a stranger to his worth and name?)
Born to outsin a monarch, born to reign
In guilt, and all competitors disdain:
Dread memory! whose each mention still can make
Pale heretics with trembling horror quake!
To undo a kingdom, to achieve a crime
Like his, who would not fall and die like him?
Never had Rome a nobler service done,
Never had hell; each day came thronging down
Vast shoals of ghosts, and mine was pleased and glad,
And smiled, when it the brave revenge surveyed.
Nor do I mention these great instances
For bounds, and limits to your wickedness:
Dare you beyond, something out of the road
Of all example, where none yet have trod,
Nor shall hereafter: what mad Catiline
Durst never think, nor's madder poet feign; Make the poor baffled pagan fool confess, How much a Christian crime can conquer his;
How far in gallant mischief overcome,
The old must yield to new and modern Rome.
Mix ills past, present, future, in one act;
One high, one brave, one great, one glorious fact.
Which hell, and very I may envy —— Such as a god himself might wish to be
Accomplice in the mighty villany,
And barter his heaven, and vouchsafe to die.
Nor let delay (the bane of enterprise)
Mar yours, or make the great importance miss.
This fact has waked your enemies, and their fear;
Let it your vigour too, your haste and care.
Be swift, and let your deeds forestall intent,
Forestall even wishes, ere they can take vent,
Nor give the fates the leisure to prevent.
Let the full clouds, which a long time did wrap
Your gathering thunder, now with sudden clap,
Break out upon your foes; dash, and confound,
And spread avoidless ruin all around.
Let the fired city to your plot give light; You razed it half before, now raze it quite. Do 't more effectually; I'd see it glow
In flames unquenchable as those below;
I'd see the miscreants with their houses burn,
And all together into ashes turn.
Bend next your fury to the cursed divan;
That damned committee, whom the fates ordain
Of all our well-laid plots to be the bane.
Unkennel those state foxes where they lie
Working your speedy fate and destiny.
Lug by the ears the doting prelates thence,
Dash heresy together with their brains
Out of their shattered heads. Lop off the lords
And commons at one stroke, and let your swords
Adjourn them all to the other world.—— Would I were blest with flesh and blood again,
But to be actor in that happy scene!
Yet thus I will be by, and glut my view,
Revenge shall take its fill, in state I'll go
With captive ghosts to attend me down below.
Let these the handsels of your vengeance be, But stop not here, nor flag in cruelty.
Kill like a plague or inquisition; spare
No age, degree, or sex; only to wear
A soul, only to own a life, be here
Thought crime enough to lose 't; no time nor place
Be sanctuary from your outrages;
Spare not in churches kneeling priests at prayer,
Though interceding for you, slay even there;
Spare not young infants smiling at the breast,
Who from relenting fools their mercy wrest;
Rip teeming wombs, tear out the hated brood
From thence, and drown them in their mother's blood;
Pity not virgins, nor their tender cries, Though prostrate at your feet with melting eyes
All drowned in tears; strike home, as 'twere in lust,
And force their begging hands to guide the thrust;
Ravish at the altar, kill when you have done,
Make them your rapes, and victims too in one;
Nor let grey hoary hairs protection give To age, just crawling on the verge of life;
Snatch from its leaning hands the weak support,
And with it knock 't into the grave with sport; Brain the poor cripple with his crutch, then cry,
You've kindly rid him of his misery.
Seal up your ears to mercy, lest their words
Should tempt a pity, ram them with your swords
(Their tongues too) down their throats; let them not dare
To mutter for their souls a gasping prayer,
But in the utterance choked, and stab it there.
'Twere witty handsome malice (could you do 't)
To make 'em die, and make 'em damned to boot.
Make children by one fate with parent die, Kill even revenge in next posterity;
So you'll be pestered with no orphans' cries,
No childless mothers curse your memories.
Make death and desolation swim in blood
Throughout the land, with nought to stop the flood
But slaughtered carcasses; till the whole isle
Become one tomb, become one funeral pile;
Till such vast numbers swell the countless sum,
That the wide grave, and wider hell want room.
Great was that tyrant's wish, which should be mine,
Did I not scorn the leavings of a sin;
Freely I would bestow 't on England now, That the whole nation with one neck might grow, To be sliced off, and you to give the blow.
What neither Saxon rage could here inflict, Nor Danes more savage, nor the barbarous Pict;
What Spain or Eighty-eight could e'er devise, With all its fleet, and freight of cruelties;
What ne'er Medina wished, much less could dare, And bloodier Alva would with trembling hear;
What may strike out dire prodigies of old, And make their mild and gentler acts untold;
What heaven's judgments, nor the angry stars,
Foreign invasions, nor domestic wars,
Plague, fire, nor famine could effect or do;
All this, and more be dared, and done by you.
But why do I with idle talk delay
Your hands, and while they should be acting, stay? Farewell——— If I may waste a prayer for your success, Hell be your aid, and your high projects bless!
May that vile wretch, if any here there be,
That meanly shrinks from brave iniquity;
If any here feel pity or remorse, May he feel all I've bid you act, and worse!
May he by rage of foes unpitied fall,
And they tread out his hated soul to hell.
May his name and carcass rot, exposed alike to be
The everlasting mark of grinning infamy.
* ↑ [[w:Henry Garnet|]], a provincial of the Jesuits, who was executed in 1606, for being concerned in the Gunpowder Plot.
* ↑ 'Three or four schemes had been formed for assassinating the King. He was to be stabbed. He was to be poisoned in his medicine. He was to be shot with silver bullets.'—Macaulay's Hist. of England, i. 233. These schemes were only a part of what Mr. Macaulay calls ’the hideous romance’ of Titus Oates.
* ↑ Jacques Clement, a Dominican monk, who assassinated Henry III. at St. Cloud, in 1589, in the same chamber, it is said, where Henry, as Duke of Anjou, assented to the massacre of the Huguenots. Having obtained admission under the pretext of business of importance, Clement, whose fanaticism was stimulated by the Duchess de Montpensier, put a letter in the King's hand, and stabbed him while he was reading it. The regicide was killed on the spot by the attendants. Clement was almost deified for this deed. His portrait was placed on the altars of Paris beside the Eucharist; a statue was erected to him in Notre Dame; the Sorbonne demanded his canonization; and Pope Sextus V. pronounced a panegyric upon his memory.
* ↑ François Ravaillac, executed in 1610 for the murder of Henry IV. It was effected in the streets of Paris, where the assassin, taking advantage of a temporary stoppage, mounted the step, and, leaning into the carriage which contained the King and several of his suite, stabbed his majesty twice.
* ↑ Luther.
* ↑ Queen Elizabeth.
* ↑ The Society of the Sorbonne (so called from the name of the village near Paris, where it was established) was founded in 1264, by St. Louis IX., and Ralph de Sorbonne, his confessor.
* ↑ Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, and one of the earliest reformers, erroneously supposed by some writers to be the founder of the Waldenses. He was anathematized by Alexander III. for his opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation; and, after living in concealment for three years, he retired into Dauphiny, and preached there with great success. He afterwards settled in Bohemia, where he died in 1179.
* ↑ Dr. John Wickliffe. He died in 1385, and his body was dug up forty years afterwards and burned.
* ↑ En gros—by wholesale.
* ↑ Charles IX., who ordered the massacre at Paris in 1572.
* ↑ Garnet is here made to refer to Ben Jonson's opening to Catiline, upon the model of which this first Satire is founded.
* ↑ Having enumerated some of the past deeds of papal persecution, the heads of the plot, as communicated by Oates, are next disclosed. London was to be fired, the Council, Bishops, and Ministers of State, were to be assassinated, and Lords and Commons to be destroyed, or, as Oldham has it, to be adjourned to the other world.
* ↑ The great fire of London took place in 1666, 'begun,' says the inscription on the monument, ’and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction;' which inscription, says Ned Ward, ’is at ignorant of the matter as myself, for the monument was neither built then nor I born; so I believe we are equally as able to tell the truth of the story,' &c.—London Spy.
* ↑ The proceedings of Parliament against the Roman Catholics, during the excitement that ensued upon the murder of Godfrey, were of the most stringent character. The Roman Catholic lords were for the first time excluded from the Upper House; the Duke of York driven from the Privy Council; strong resolutions were adopted against the Queen; and, adds Macaulay, they even attempted to wrest the command of the militia out of the King's hands.
* ↑ The Duke of Medina-Sidonia, who commanded the Spanish Armada in 1588.
* ↑ The Duke of Alva, employed by Philip of Spain in the Netherlands, and distinguished in history by his merciless wholesale massacres. He boasted that he had himself consigned 18,000 persons to the executioner. Amongst these were the two popular leaders Counts Egmont and Horn.