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 A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot is a seventeenth-century English broadside ballad telling the story of the contemporary anti-Catholic scare in England known as the Popish Plot. The narrator of the ballad begins by placing him-/herself firmly on the side of the anti-Catholics by declaring to tell how the Jesuit, Devil, and POPE did agree, Our STATE to destroy, and Religion so old. To murder our KING, A most Horrible Thing! (S)he then goes on to tell the murder of the knight Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a member of