3 - Popular Politics, Ballads and the Tragic Revolution

Summary

On 5 November 1688, William of Orange landed at Torbay, Devon. By December James II had fled to France and a Convention Parliament was convened shortly afterwards. It was decided that James had abdicated the throne and William and his wife Mary, James’s eldest daughter, would be crowned as joint monarchs. Many of their new subjects rejoiced that Protestant liberties had been rescued from Catholic tyranny. Ballads were sung in celebration, including Thomas Wharton’s infamously sectarian ‘Lilliburlero’. Wharton claimed his ballad ‘sang and whistled King James out of three kingdoms’. The editor of A Pill to Purge State-Melancholy (1715) recollected that ‘Lilliburlero’ had ‘so perfectly struck in with the Humour of the People, that we feel some of the happy Consequences of it to this very day’. Likewise William’s chief propagandist, Gilbert Burnet, recalled that ‘perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect’. From as early as July 1689, ‘Lilliburlero’ became part of a whiggish narrative of the Glorious Revolution, depicted on a deck of engraved playing cards marketed as ‘Orange-Cards’ (Fig. 18). All this gives the impression that celebratory music during the Revolution was an unambiguously positive popular response to the deposition of James II.

There was, however, an alternative musical response to the Revolution, not discussed retrospectively by elite commentators, but just as emotionally resonant with popular audiences. Seven out of seventeen extant ballads celebrating the arrival of William and Mary were sung to melodies that had previously been heard in tragic songs of heartbreak and suicide; the main tune was called ‘Grim King of the Ghosts’. How can we explain this paradoxical use of a tragic melody to celebrate the nation’s deliverance from popery? The foremost cataloguer of ballad tunes, Claude Simpson, supposed that the tune’s ‘musical charm … outweighed the mournfulness of its name’. A similar puzzle is presented by the ballad illustrations accompanying post-Revolution songs. A woodcut that was commonly used to picture tragic and heartbroken lovers came to represent hapless plotting Jacobites in the 1690s. Was this simply the coincidental use of a ‘crude’ illustration with little relevance to the meaning of the song, as some scholars have characterised ballad woodcuts?