unfounded rumour that, while under arrest, they had been treated with cruelty.[1] Public feeling did not then manifest itself by those signs with which we are familiar, by large meetings, and by vehement harangues. Nevertheless it found a vent. Thomas Wharton, who, in the last Parliament, had represented Buckinghamshire, and who was already conspicuous both as a libertine and as a Whig, had written a satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In this little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman, in a barbarous jargon, on the approaching triumph of Popery and of the Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant officers will be broken. The Great Charter and the praters who appeal to it will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English. These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of England to the other all classes were constantly singing this idle rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than seventy years after the Revolution, a great writer delineated, with exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur. One of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of whistling Lillibullero.[2]
Wharton afterwards boasted that he had sung a King out of
- ↑ History of the Desertion, 1689; compare the first and second editions; Barillon, Sept. 8/18, 1688; Citters of the same date; Clarke's Life of James the Second, ii. 168. The compiler of the last mentioned work says that Churchill moved the court to sentence the six officers to death. This story does not appear to have been taken from the King's papers; I therefore regard it as one of the thousand fictions invented at Saint Germains for the purpose of blackening a character which was black enough without such daubing. That Churchill may have affected great indignation on this occasion, in order to hide the treason which he meditated, is highly probable. But it is impossible to believe that a man of his sense would have urged the members of a council of war to inflict a punishment which was notoriously beyond their competence.
- ↑ The song of Lillibullero is among the State Poems, to Percy's Relics the first part will be found, but not the second part, which was added after William's landing. In the Examiner and in several pamphlets of 1712 Wharton is mentioned as the author.
