JAMES THE SECOND.

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much as one with which they had, a few years before, been chap.familiar, and which they now, after a long interval, enjoyed j^ 88>once more, the burning of the Pope. This once familiarpageant is known to our generation only by descriptions andengravings. A figure, by no means resembling those ruderepresentations of Guy Faux which are still paraded on thefifth of November, but made of wax with some skill, andadorned at no small expense with robes and a tiara, wasmounted on a chair resembling that in which the Bishopsof Rome are still, on some great festivals, borne throughSaint Peter’s Church to the high altar. His Holiness wasgenerally accompanied by a train of Cardinals and Jesuits.

At his ear stood a buffoon disguised as a devil with horns andtail. No rich and zealous Protestant grudged his guinea onsuch an occasion, and, if rumour could be trusted, the costof the procession was sometimes not less than a thousandpounds. After the Pope had been borne some time in stateover the heads of the multitude, he was committed to theflames with loud acclamations. In the time of the popularityof Oates and Shaftesbury this show was exhibited annually inFleet Street before the windows of the Whig Club on theanniversary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth. Such was thecelebrity of these grotesque rites, that Barillon once riskedhis life in order to peep at them from a hiding place.* But,from the day when the Rye House Plot was discovered, tillthe day of the acquittal of the Bishops, the ceremony hadbeen disused. Now, however, several Popes made their ap-pearance in different parts of London. The Nuncio was muchshocked; and the King was more hurt by this insult to hisChurch than by all the other affronts which he had received.

The magistrates, however, could do nothing. The Sundayhad dawned, and the bells ofthe parish churches were ringingfor early prayers, before the fires began to languish and thecrowds to disperse. A proclamation was speedily put forth* See a very curious narrative published among olher papers, in1110, by Danby, then Duke of Leeds. There is an amusing account ofthe ceremony of burning a Pope in North’s Examen, 570. See also thenote on the Epilogue to the Tragedy of OEdipus in Scott’s edition ofDrydeu.