Although strictly an anti-Rump satire, this piece directly calls for the king's return and has been included here in order to keep the collection of "trunk" ballads intact. The text is defective in many places but the ballad evidently belongs to the moment between the collapse of the Rump Parliament on 16 March, and the sitting of the Convention Parliament on 25 April. Where the text is currently unreadable, I have sometimes supplied, in brackets, readings from Ebsworth's edition as marked in the notes.

   John Andrews, the stationer who produced this broadside, issued a satiric 8to pamphlet in August with a similar title: The Case is Altered; or, Dreadful news from Hell. In a discourse between the Ghost of this grand Traytor and Tyrant Oliver Cromwel, and Sir reverence my Lady Joan his wife, at their late meeting neer the Scaffold on Tower Hill. With His Epitaph written in hell, on all the grand Traytors, now in the Tower.²

   Like many anti-Rump satires, this ballad names a selective catalogue of the MPs and military leaders defeated by recent events, thereby providing an oblique and cryptic history of the final days of the Rump. After the collapse of Richard Cromwell's protectorate in May 1659, the case begins to alter. In late December 1659, Colonel Charles Fleetwood, Commander in Chief of the army, authorized Bulstrode Whitelocke to begin negotiating the return of Charles Stuart, and immediately ran into opposition from two mutually hostile directions: Sir Henry Vane, who was holding out against monarchy at any cost, and from the Council of Officers, who voted to dissolve themselves and approved the return of the Rump. On the day after Christmas, when the remaining forty-nine members of the Rump entered the House behind Speaker William Lenthall and the mace, both Fleetwood and Vane were politically finished.

   This ballad links Fleetwood with the meetings of the Rump during January, when William Say, M.P., carried the mace during Lenthall's illness, but the association is obscure. Somewhat clearer are the comments on Vane, who (along with Desborough and Lambert) had been ordered out of London during those first weeks of January, but did not finally leave until General Monk -- "Presbiter George" as he appears in this ballad -- ordered him to be escorted to his house in Lincolnshire on 13 February. The ballad recalls Vane's early years in Massachusetts, recommending that he be exiled there, since he would be certain of being hanged.³

   The second part of the ballad imagines the Rump, under Arthur Haslerig's leadership, playing a losing game of cards with Monk, who "turnd up the King for Trump." Invective is then directed at William Lenthall, William Prynne, Hugh Peters, and Colonel John Hewson, familiar targets of royalist invective at this time.