Lilliburlero

"Lillibullero" (also spelled Lillibulero, Lilliburlero) is a march that seems to have been known at the time of the English Civil War. According to the BBC, it "started life as a jig with Irish roots, whose first appearance seems to be in a collection published in London in 1661 entitled 'An Antidote Against Melancholy', where it is set to the words 'There was an old man of Waltham Cross'." The lyrics, generally said to be by Thomas, Lord Wharton, were set to the tune of an older satirical ballad.

The most popular lyrics refer to the Williamite war in Ireland 1689–91, a result of the Glorious Revolution. In this episode the Catholic King James II, unsure of the loyalty of his army, fled England after an invasion by Dutch forces commanded by the Protestant William III. William was invited by Parliament to the throne. James II then tried to reclaim the crown with the help of France and his Catholic devotees in Ireland led by Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell. His hopes of using Ireland to reconquer England were thwarted at the Battle of Aughrim in 1691. The song Lillibullero puts words into the mouths of Irish Catholic Jacobites and satirises the sentiments of the devotees of the Catholic King James. It was said to have 'sung James II out of three kingdoms'. Such was its dramatic success as propaganda that by 17 November an anti-Dutch parody of the original, "A New Song Upon the Hogen Mogens" was in circulation, drawing on popular animosity against the Dutch, who had been the national enemy for a generation, in order to counter the appeal of the original.

The two broadsheet versions of the song current in October 1688 are attributed to the Whig politician Thomas Wharton, who had composed the words two years earlier in 1686 on the Earl of Tyrconnell's becoming Lord Deputy of Ireland. The refrain has been interpreted as simply mock Irish nonsense words, but Professor Breandán Ó Buachalla has claimed that they are a garbled version of the Irish sentence "Leir o, Leir o, leir o, leiro, Lilli bu leir o: bu linn an la, " which he translates as "Manifest, manifest, manifest, manifest, Lilly will be manifest, the day will be ours" referring to a possible prophecy of Irish victory by the English seventeenth century astrologer William Lilly.

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Wikipedia