Largely a complaint against the devilish regicides who martyred Charles I, and members of the subsequent tyrannical governments who brought the nation to ignominy, the ballad recalls the plaque that was put up to mark the absence of the king's former statue in Whitehall. It turns to Monk in its closing lines and urges him to bring in the king.

   Thomason dated his copy on Saturday 17 March, the day after the Rump formally dissolved, though the major incident referred to in the verses had occured the previous Thursday (see The Case is Altered). Noting that the tune belongs to Richard Corbet's "Merry Journey into France" of 1618, Ebsworth cites Madame de Witt's edition of the French ambassador's eye-witness report:

It was on the eve of the day when the Parliament was at length to pronounce its own dissolution [15 March] . . . A working painter, accompanied by some soldiers, and carrying a ladder in his hand, approached a wall in the city near the Royal Exchange, where eleven years before an inscription in Latin had been placed, Exit Tyrannus, regum ultimus, anno libertatis Angliæ restitutiæ primo, annoque Domini 1648. The workman effaced the inscription, and threw his cap into the air, exclaiming, `God bless KING CHARLES II!' The crowd joined its acclamations, and bonfires were lighted on the spot.²

    Pepys records the incident, from report, in similar detail, on the 16th, noting that it started at "about 5 a-clock in the afternoon" . Pepys's editors comment: "The man who obliterated the words was later identified as Michael Darby, 'now painter to the Company of Mercers'."³