Note 6 — LETTER XV.

It chanced by the appointment of the third Fors,6 to which, you know, I am bound in these letters uncomplainingly to submit, that, just as I had looked out this letter for you, given at Florence in the year 1396, I found in an old bookshop two gazettes, nearly three hundred years later, namely, Number 20 of the ‘Mercurius Publicus,’ and Number 50 of the ‘Parliamentary Intelligencer,’ the latter comprising the same “foraign intelligence, with the affairs now in agitation in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for information of the people. Publish’d by order, from Monday, December 3rd, to Monday, December 10th, 1660.” This little gazette informs us in its first advertisement, that in London, November 30th, 1660, was lost, in or about this city, a small paper book of accounts and receipts, with a red leather cover, with two clasps on it; and that anybody that can give intelligence of it to the city crier at Bread Street end in Cheapside, “shall have five shillings for their pains, and more if they desire it.” And its last paragraph is as follows:—“On Saturday (December 8), the Most Honourable House of Peers concurred with the Commons in the order for the digging up the carkasses of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, John Bradshaw, and Thomas Pride, and carrying them on an Hurdle to Tyburn, where they are to be first hang’d up in their Coffins, and then buried under the Gallows.”