Bawds shall turn nuns, salt duchesses grow chaste,[1]
And paint, and pride, and lechery detest;
Popes shall for kings' supremacy decide,
And cardinals for Huguenots be tried;
Sooner (which is the greatest impossible)
Shall the vile brood of Loyola and hell
Give o'er to plot, be villains, and rebel;
Than I with utmost spite, and vengeance cease
To prosecute, and plague their cursèd race.
The rage of poets damned, of women's pride
Contemned and scorned, or proffered lust denied;
The malice of religious angry zeal,
And all cashiered resenting statesmen feel;[2]
What prompts dire hags in their own blood to write,
And sell their very souls to hell for spite;
All this urge on my rank envenomed spleen,
And with keen satire edge my stabbing pen,
That its each home-set thrust their blood may draw,
Each drop of ink like aquafortis gnaw.
Red hot with vengeance thus, I'll brand disgrace
So deep, no time shall e'er the marks deface;
Till my severe and exemplary doom
Spread wider than their guilt, till it become
More dreaded than the bar, and frighten worse
Than damning Pope's anathemas and curse.
- ↑ Of the many duchesses to whom this allusion might with propriety apply, the Duchess of Portsmouth, Louise de Quérouaille, is the one directly referred to. She had just supplanted the Duchess of Cleveland at Whitehall, and was at this time Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen!
- ↑ The Lord Treasurer Darnley, charged with being concerned in an application from the Court of Whitehall to the Court of Versailles for the loan of a sum of money, had just been removed from his office by the King in the hope of saving him from the vengeance of the Commons. Parliament, however, was not to be diverted from its prey. A bill of attainder was brought in against him, and at last, chased for his life, he surrendered, and appeared on his knees at the bar of the House of Lords, from whence he was committed to the Tower.
