[459] Other writers did their best to raise riots among the labouring people.
For the doctrine of the Jacobites was that disorder, in whatever place or in whatever way it might begin, was likely to end in a Restoration.
A phrase which, without a commentary, may seem to be mere nonsense, but which was really full of meaning, was often in their mouths at this time, and was indeed a password by which the members of the party recognised each other: "Box it about; it will come to my father." The hidden sense of this gibberish was, "Throw the country into confusion; it will be necessary at last to have recourse to King James." [460] Trade was not prosperous; and many industrious men were out of work.
Accordingly songs addressed to the distressed classes were composed by the malecontent street poets.

Numerous copies of a ballad exhorting the weavers to rise against the government were discovered in the house of that Quaker who had printed James's Declaration.

[461] Every art was used for the purpose of exciting discontent in a much more formidable body of men, the sailors; and unhappily the vices of the naval administration furnished the enemies of the State with but too good a choice of inflammatory topics.

Some seamen deserted; some mutinied; then came executions; and then came more ballads and broadsides representing those executions as barbarous murders.

Reports that the government had determined to defraud its defenders of their hard earned pay were circulated with so much effect that a great crowd of women from Wapping and Rotherhithe besieged Whitehall, clamouring for what was due to their husbands.