Indications of a coming conflict were visible. The people divided into two parties, and gave signs by hoisting colours. Tawny ribbons were mounted in the hats of the Royalists,[295] the Parliamentarians wore orange. Cavaliers insulted roundheads, and roundheads retaliated on cavaliers. The latter, it was reported, put the former to the test by requiring them to swear "a round oath." Pamphlets were published in vindication of taking up arms. In one of these publications, bearing the title of "Powers to be Resisted," it is declared, that if it be lawful in any case to contend with the sword it is in this; and, in reply to the objection, "No, not with the sword, but with prayer," comes the curious _reductio ad absurdum_, "contend against swine and dogs with prayer! I never heard the like since I was born; a vain thing, it is sure, to pray the swine not to trample the pearl under foot, to pray the dogs not to rend you."[296] Disturbance and insecurity appeared already. The quaint little newspapers of the day make complaints of assaults and pillage. The Kent waggoners, for example, were stopped on the road to London, and the well-laden wains robbed by cavalier banditti. [Sidenote: 1642.] Fearful times had already come, and times still more fearful were at hand. The people of England trembled at the idea of a civil war; the insurrection of Wyat, and Kett's rebellion, had left grave recollections in London and Norfolk; but the blood shed in the wars of the Roses--a more terrible memory--now rose before peaceful households in crimson colour. Mental agitation increased at the sight of natural phenomena, which that agitation interpreted as supernatural portents; omens were detected in slightly unusual incidents, with a feeling akin to ancient Greek and Roman hope or terror under the augur's divination. Signs blazed in heaven--noises burst through the air--people talked of "a celestial beating of drums," and "discharging of muskets and ordnance for the space of an hour and more." Not satisfied with a recognition in the skies of the excitements on the earth, each of the two parties claimed the Divine Being on their own side, and had wonders to tell of judgments smiting opponents. Royalist churchmen related a story of a certain Puritan churchwarden who had taken down a painted glass window, and within two days his wife was exceedingly tormented in her limbs, raging and crying most fearfully. Parliamentary Puritans, with equal extravagance, declared how some wicked Royalist had stuck on the top of a pole a man in a tub to be shot at, and soon afterwards the Royalist was seized with convulsions. One who drank to the confusion of Roundheads, on beginning to dance, broke his leg. The divine indignation on account of setting up May-poles was equally apparent.[297] [Sidenote: _The Coming Struggle._]