Page:Explanatory notes of a pack of Cavalier playing cards.djvu/12

6 designed; greatness, wealth and command were the inducements of the most hypocritical persons in the world to profane the name of God to murder many innocent persons  to ruin many noble families, etc.,  but let destruction be the reward of our destroyers, let the prey be torn out of their teeth, let the blood they have shed fall upon their own heads, and let their names be detested and infamous to all posterity!"

3. Ace of Spades.

Bradshaw, the jaylor and y$e$ hangman, keepers of the liberty of England.

Bradshaw was appointed president of the High Court of Justice in 1648, a year "of reproach and infamy above all years which had passed before it; a year of the highest dissimulation and hypocrisy, of the deepest villany and most bloody treasons, that any nation was ever cursed with or under: a year, in which the memory of all transactions ought to be erased from all records, lest, by the success of it, atheism, infidelity and rebellion, should be propagated in the world." (Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, vol. iii. p. 154, Oxford 1726, folio). He was born in 1586, died in 1659, an d his body exhumed and hung in chains at the Restoration. He was a cousin of Milton, who has written a Eulogy of him in his Second Defense of the People of England.

4. Ace of Diamonds.

The High Court of Justice or Oliver's Slaughter-House.

"The charge and accusation, upon which they resolved to proceed against the King, being thus settled and agreed upon, they began to consider in what manner and form to proceed, that there might be