A is printed also in Evans's Old Ballads, 1777, II, 110, with slight variations from both Douce and Roxburghe.
No printer's name is given in either copy of A. From the use of a peculiar ornament between the columns in a (and perhaps in b), such as occurs in ballads printed at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, by John White, the broadside may plausibly be attributed to him. White died in 1769.
A. Queen Elizabeth fits out a powerful fleet to go in search of a vast navy under command of the emperor of Germany. The fleets sight each other after a week or ten days. The emperor, amazed at the splendid show made by the English, asks his officers who this can be that is sailing toward him, and is told that it is the young Earl (third earl) of Essex, the queen's lieutenant. The emperor has heard enough of the father to make him fear a fight with the son, and proposes to tack and sail away; but the son asks his father to put the ships into his hands and let him fight with Essex. The emperor consents with a warning; if the young Essex shall prove like his father, farewell to their honor. Young Essex takes the emperor's son prisoner; the emperor offers as a ransom three keys of gold, one of which shall be the key of High Germany. Essex cares not for the three keys; the emperor's son must go to England and be exhibited to the queen. The emperor declares that, if it must be so, his fifty good ships shall go as well for company.
All this is, no doubt, as foolish as it is fictitious, but the ballad-maker's independence, in fact unconsciousness, of history and common sense, beginning with the title, in which young Essex is made Queen Elizabeth's champion, is amusing and not unpleasing. The ballad belongs undoubtedly to the eighteenth century, when High Germany had become familiar to the humble English.
B. The traditional copy begins with a prologue of half a dozen stanzas in the form of a colloquy between Billy, who is to be of the expedition, and Nelly, his sweetheart. This prologue must be derived from some other ballad or song. Nelly reminds her lover of the fate of old Benbow, who lost at least one of his legs in a fight with a French fleet in 1702, and died of the consequences, and of that of "proud Shawfield, that honoured knight," under which name is disguised Sir Cloudesley Shovell, "who came with his navy to the Spanish shore" in 1705, and whose ship went on the rocks off the Scilly Isles ('Salem'), and sank with all on board, some eight hundred men, in 1707. We then make connection with the broadside.
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