ABSTRACT

A broadside folio ballad song, in sixty-four lines organized in eight numbered stanzas of eight lines each, with a four-line evolving refrain. The ballad was intended to be sung ‘To the tune of Lilli-burlero’, the enormously popular melody that was the signature song of the Williamite Protestants after 1688. Bishop Burnet’s History of his own time (1724–34) said of ‘Lilli-burlero’ that it was ‘a foolish ballad… treating the papists, and chiefly the Irish, in a very ridiculous manner… The whole army, and at last all the people both in city and country, were singing it perpetually’ (6 vols (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1823), vol. III, p. 319). The tune was composed as early as 1686, and some early manuscript copies are attributed to Henry Purcell, albeit doubtfully. A great many ballads and songs were set to ‘Lilli-burlero’ in the 1690s and thereafter: each retains its implicit allegiance to the Williamite cause (see Claude Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1966), pp. 449–55).