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REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE TO GEORGE II. 699 |
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For James I. we have " A song of Praise and Thanksgiving to God,for the King's Majesty's Happy Reigne;" reprinted by Dr. Rimbault in Notes and Queries (2nd S. No. 126), with the burthen:—
" God save King James, and still pull downe, All those that would annoy his crowne :" as well as " A Song or Psalme of Thanksgiving, in remembrance of our great deliverance from the Gun-powder treason, the fift of November, 1605," commencing— " 0 Lord ! we have continuall cause
Thy mercies to remember." Q'his is among the proclamations, &c, in the Library of the Society of Antiquaries. In Naile's Account of the Queen's Entertainment at Bristol, 1613, we find— " The bels most joyously did ring with musick's symphony, And still these words, ' God save our Queene,' re-echoed in the slue." And at James's entertainment at both Universities, 1614-15—
" Oxford cried, ' God save the King,' and ' Bless him,' too, cried some, But Cambridge men, more learnedly, ' Behold, the King doth come.'" For Charles I., in Herbert's Vox Secunda Populi, 4to., 1641— " Have you not seen men holloo forth this straine, God save onr King and the Lord Chamberlaine ? " And in The Last Age's Looking Grlass—
" Let Charles's glorie through England ring, Let subjects say, ' God save the King.'" At Charles the Second's coronation (and perhaps at others preceding it), the anthem sung by the quire, was, " Sadoc the priest and Nathan the prophet anointed Solomon King, and all the people rejoiced and said, God save the King." The favorite national songs for all the Stuarts from Charles I. downwards, wore, " The King shall enjoy his own again " (or, " enjoys his own," according to circumstances), and " Vive le Roy." (Ante 429 and 434.) Before I had seen a copy of the latter, it puzzled me to find such passages, as in Pepys's Diary, where, on May 4, 1660, " The loud Vive le Hogs were echoed from one ship's company to another." I could not understand the sailors' singing out in Norman French; nor why, as on March 28,1660, before Charles II. was proclaimed, " a gentleman was brought as a prisoner, because he called out of a vessel that he went in, Vive le Hog." We have even " God save the King " sung to the tune of Vive le Hog, on Charles the Second's restoration. The following is the chorus:— " Come, let us sing, boys, God save the King, boys,
Drink a good health, and sing Vive le Hoy." Finally, D'tTrfey wrote a "Vive le Roy" for George I. Bee Pills to purge Melancholy, i. 116,1719.
It is certainly a singular fact, that there should be an air of the peculiar metre of " God save the King" in Dr. Bull's manuscript; but there is really nothing to identify it with the words. On the contrary, the very fact of a. " God save the King" being in the same book, and that an imitation of the popular cry, rather than a tune, tends to disprove the connection.
A passage in Lord Macaulay's History of England, on the battle of La Hogue, |
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