THE Cavalier Ballads of England, like the Jacobite Ballads of England and
Scotland at a later period, are mines of wealth for the student of the
history and social manners of our ancestors. The rude but often
beautiful political lyrics of the early days of the Stuarts were far more
interesting and important to the people who heard or repeated them, than
any similar compositions can be in our time. When the printing press was
the mere vehicle of polemics for the educated minority, and when the
daily journal was neither a luxury of the poor, a necessity of the rich,
nor an appreciable power in the formation and guidance of public opinion,
the song and the ballad appealed to the passion, if not to the intellect
of the masses, and instructed them in all the leading events of the time.
In our day the people need no information of the kind, for they procure
it from the more readily available and more copious if not more reliable,
source of the daily and weekly press. The song and ballad have ceased to
deal with public affairs. No new ones of the kind are made except as
miserable parodies and burlesques that may amuse sober costermongers and
half-drunken men about town, who frequent music saloons at midnight, but
which are offensive to every one else. Such genuine old ballads as
remain in the popular memory are either fast dying out, or relate
exclusively to the never-to-be-superseded topics of love, war, and wine.
The people of our day have little heart or appreciation for song, except
in Scotland and Ireland. England and America are too prosaic and too
busy, and the masses, notwithstanding all their supposed advantages in
education, are much too vulgar to delight in either song or ballad that
rises to the dignity of poetry. They appreciate the buffooneries of the
“Negro Minstrelsy,” and the inanities and the vapidities of sentimental
love songs, but the elegance of such writers as Thomas Moore, and the
force of such vigorous thinkers and tender lyrists as Robert Burns, are
above their sphere, and are left to scholars in their closets and ladies
in their drawing-rooms. The case was different among our ancestors in
the memorable period of the struggle for liberty that commenced in the
reign of Charles I. The Puritans had the pulpit on their side, and found
it a powerful instrument. The Cavaliers had the song writers on theirs,
and found them equally effective. And the song and ballad writers of
that day were not always illiterate versifiers. Some of them were the
choicest wits and most accomplished gentlemen of the nation. As they
could not reach the ears of their countrymen by the printed book, the
pamphlet, or the newspaper, nor mount the pulpit and dispute with
Puritanism on its own ground and in its own precincts, they found the
song, the ballad, and the epigram more available among a musical and
song-loving people such as the English then were, and trusted to these to
keep up the spirit of loyalty in the evil days of the royal cause, to
teach courage in adversity, and cheerfulness in all circumstances, and to
ridicule the hypocrites whom they could not shame, and the tyrants whom
they could not overthrow. Though many thousands of these have been
preserved in the King’s Pamphlets in the British Museum, and in other
collections which have been freely ransacked for the materials of the
following pages, as many thousands more have undoubtedly perished.
Originally printed as broadsides, and sold for a halfpenny at country
fairs, it used to be the fashion of the peasantry to paste them up in
cupboards, or on the backs of doors, and farmers’ wives, as well as
servant girls and farm labourers, who were able to read, would often
paste them on the lids of their trunks, as the best means of preserving
them. This is one reason why so many of them have been lost without
recovery. To Sir W. C. Trevelyan literature is indebted for the
restoration of a few of these waifs and strays, which he found pasted in
an old trunk of the days of Cromwell, and which he carefully detached and
presented to the British Museum. But a sufficient number of these flying
leaves of satire, sentiment, and loyalty have reached our time, to throw
a curious and instructive light upon the feelings of the men who resisted
the progress of the English Revolution; and who made loyalty to the
person of the monarch, even when the monarch was wrong, the first of the
civic virtues. In the superabundance of the materials at command, as
will be seen from the appended list of books and MSS. which have been
consulted and drawn upon to form this collection, the difficulty was to
keep within bounds, and to select only such specimens as merited a place
in a volume necessarily limited, by their celebrity, their wit, their
beauty, their historical interest, or the light they might happen to
throw on the obscure biography of the most remarkable actors in the
scenes which they describe. It would be too much to claim for these
ballads the exalted title of poetry. They are not poetical in the
highest sense of the word, and possibly would not have been so effective
for the purpose which they were intended to serve, if their writers had
been more fanciful and imaginative, or less intent upon what they had to
say than upon the manner of saying it. But if not extremely poetical,
they are extremely national, and racy of the soil; and some of them are
certain to live as long as the language which produced them. For the
convenience of reference and consultation they have been arranged
chronologically; beginning with the discontents that inaugurated the
reign of Charles I., and following regularly to the final, though
short-lived, triumph of the Cavalier cause, in the accession of James II.
After his ill-omened advent to the throne, the Cavalier became the
Jacobite. In this collection no Jacobite songs, properly so called, are
included, it being the intention of the publishers to issue a companion
volume, of the Jacobite Ballads of England, from the accession of James
II. to the battle of Culloden, should the public receive the present
volume with sufficient favour to justify the venture.
The Editor cannot, in justice to previous fellow-labourers, omit to
record his obligation to the interesting volume, with its learned
annotations, contributed by Mr Thomas Wright to the Percy Society; or to
another and equally valuable collection, edited by Mr J. O. Halliwell.
_December_, 1862.