A Ballad upon the Popish Plot and region (“From Pulpit to Pot / They talk’d of a Plot” [1.5-6]), as well as the fear invoked in the general population (“frighted with Fire-balls, their heads turned round” [1.4]), but then proposes a rational and just correction of these effects. The majority of the rest of the ballad then lists the occupational types, personal characteristics, and machinations of the participants in the plot. The first is a politician “of Body unsound,” who intends to slander the Pope and the current King, Charles II, until both are forced out of power (2.1, 8). The narrator then describes the personal
A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot into Londoners' homes disguised as drivers of goods vehicles, porters, chimney-sweeps, or coal sellers and then sabotaging the homes. The narrator then tells how there was a meeting between the conspirators in April at a place called the White Horse. The English Broadside Ballad Archive at the University of California, Santa Barbara holds three seventeenth-century broadside ballad versions of this tale: two copies in the Huntington Library's "miscellaneous" collection (both numbered 183923) and another in the Crawford collection at the National Library of Scotland. All three of these documents contain cartoon illustrations. A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot