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INTRODUCTION |
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accident, or perhaps the craftiness of the printer, attached the name of Ralegh (Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v. 135, reprinted by Stone, Sea Songs and Ballads, p. 74). In much the same way a ballad, first printed in the eighteenth century, Queen Elizabeth's Champion or Great Britain's Glory, commemorates the fact that the second Earl of Essex once commanded Elizabeth's navy by a fictitious account of the capture of the son of the Emperor of Germany by the third earl (Child, v. 145 ; Stone, p. 84). Probably the distinction gained by the third earl in the expedition to Cadiz in 1625 originated the ballad.
The best ballad on the defeat of the Spanish Armada is Thomas Deloney's Joyful New Ballad declaring the happy obtaining of the great Galleazzo, which is printed on p. 18. Deloney also wrote one on, The strange and most cruell Whippes which the Spaniards had prepared to whippe and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish Shippes; and another on The Queenes visiting of the Campe at Tilburie with her entertainment there. Both may be found in The Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 387, 391, but since neither specially relates to the navy it was not thought necessary to reprint them. Mr. Ebsworth, in his introduction to these ballads, has brought together four or five ballads relating to the defeat of the Armada, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries {Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 378-383). Three of them are also to be found in Stone's Sea Songs and Ballads, pp. 80-83.
The entries in the Stationers' Registers give the
titles of several ballads which no longer survive, viz :
The English preparacion of the Spaniards Navi-
gacion ; The late wonderful Dystres which the
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