Recalling Sir John Suckling's celebrated "Ballad upon a Wedding," this dialogue extends the trope of "vox populi." It uses rural voices describing the hopes of ordinary folk in terms of an idealized countryside at a time when word is being brought to the country from the city that the people have declared for the king. Talk of tigers devastating the English countryside during the king's absence, though fanciful, is entirely in keeping with the ballad's use of pastoral conventions to engage imaginatively with contemporary issues, switching back and forth between country hopes and city events. On the other hand, the requisitioning of horses by soldiers had been a major problem facing farmers during the years of civil war. As so often, the pastoral here is a formal literary gesture mingling fact with fiction and addressed to a learned audience. The ballad ends cryptically with Jack declaiming a quatrain in Latin and English that contrasts king-killers Judas and Cromwell in order, presumably, to advocate punishment of the regicides.

    Judging by line 26 and the tense of the final wishes in lines 97-100, this ballad claims to be dated early May, just before the king actually arrived in England.