Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 9.djvu/289

Rh and having been originally contrived by wicked Machiavels to bring in popery, slavery, and arbitrary power, by defeating the protestant succession and introducing the pretender, ought in justice to be here laid open to the world.

About two or three months after the happy revolution, all persons who possessed any employment or office in church or state, were obliged by an act of parliament to take the oaths to king William and queen Mary: and a great number of disaffected persons refusing to take the said oaths, from a pretended scruple of conscience, but really from a spirit of popery and rebellion, they contrived a plot to make the swearing to those princes odious in the eyes of the people. To this end, they hired certain women of ill fame, but loud shrill voices, under pretence of selling fish, to go through the streets with sieves on their heads, and cry buy my soul, buy my soul; plainly insinuating, that all those who swore to king William were just ready to sell their souls for an employment. This cry was revived at the death of queen Anne, and, I hear, still continues in London with much offence to all true protestants; but to our great happiness seems to be almost dropped in Dublin.

But because I altogether contemn the displeasure and resentment of highflyers, tories, and jacobites, whom I look upon to be worse even than professed papists, I do here declare, that those evils which I am going to mention, were all brought in upon us in the worst of times under the late earl of Oxford's administration, during the four last years of queen Anne's reign. That wicked minister was universally known to be a papist in his heart. He Rh