A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot

A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish Plot is also the title of an early picture-story and prototypical comic strip with speech balloons, created by Francis Barlow in c. 1682 and based on the same historical event.

[2][1] The narrator of the ballad begins by placing himself firmly on the side of the anti-Catholics by declaring to tell How the Jesuit, Devil, and POPE did agree, Our STATE to destroy, and Religion so old.

[3] They then go on to tell the murder of the knight Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a member of Parliament and a staunch Protestant.

The narrator may even be attributing blame for the Great Fire of London of 1666 to the plotters: Y'have seen how they once set the Town all in flame; And divers times since have attempted the same.

The work is an early example of a comic strip, where the characters use speech balloons and narration is told underneath each image.