ABSTRACT

London uprising that was itself a common occurrence in Interregnum Britain.2 When groups of boys and young men began assembling on the streets of the city on the morning of 5 December 1659, onlookers could justifiably have seen their gathering as typically mixed-motive, anti-authority discontent, a defence of trade as much as an assault on an unpopular soldiery. In fact, at the start of the month, armed with news that a petition calling for free elections was being drawn up by City apprentices, the Committee of Safety had hastily issued a catch-all proclamation forbidding the petitions of 'ill-disposed persons' .3 Ostensibly it was this that Hewson's troops were in the city to read and enforce, though their numbers indicate that they also anticipated serious opposition. The fighting witnessed by Pepys was also seen by Thomas Rugge, the London barber:

Six months later, of course, the king and his exiled court would be back in the country and the Restoration a confirmed fact. In the apprentice opposition to army-based government in the 1659-60 winter, however, proto-Restoration writing reveals itself as a scurrilous precursor to a sophisticated satire to come. Specific, aggrieved polemics found a taunting voice. At once the language of the heckler, it was a strain of political barracking, cackling laughter edged around with the threat of revenge to come. 'Blind Cobler blind hewson': the apprentices vilified the soldiers - 'with many affronts' - as much as they bombarded them with ready-made missiles and used football as a cover for affray. Rugge reported that the apprentices had guns ('amonge the Rude multetude their ware som did fier a pistoll att the souldiers'), and according to the Monthly Intelligencer newspaper one of Hewson's lieutenants was shot in the knee. But insults themselves were well-aimed and damaging: They very well employed their mouthes.' Heckling the Committee of Safety's hard-pressed soldiers was always more than youthful agitation or the hurly-burly of early football rampaging. In defence of a petition calling for free elections or the return of excluded members, and in defiance of an army whose back pay it nevertheless wanted paid (and therefore disbanded), the apprentices fed into a discourse that would come out the other side of the Restoration as mock-heroic.4