Singing to the king : the politics of songs in eighteenth-century Britain c. 1723-1795

Abstract

This study analyses the importance of songs in British eighteenth-century culture with specific reference to their political meaning. Traditionally marginalized in accounts of the ballad and the role of the ballad in literary culture, the political song will be situated as a multivalent phenomenon. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, combining the perspectives of literary studies and cultural history and deploying a neo{u00AD}Platonic framework which highlights the utilitarian power of songs, the argument is focused on four major case-studies, covering the period 1723-1795. Its organizing theme derives from the story of the rescue of King Richard the Lionheart from imprisonment by the singing of his minstrel Blondel, which emerges in eighteenth{u00AD}century ballad and music scholarship, and again in the context of the French Revolution. The thesis traces the various manifestations of this theme as a way of establishing the interconnections between topical songs, political songs, classical songs, hymns, psalms and ballads as way of illustrating the complexity of political song culture in this period. The first case-study recovers the 'Old Whig' identity of the anonymous editor of A Collection of Old Ballads (1723-25) in an analysis of the transmission and interpretation of 'A Princely Song of Richard Cordelion', which appears in the Collection. The chapter explores the politicization of song in the scholarship of Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson and how song registered in various forms of print culture, including newspapers in 1786 when the Richard trope re-emerged. The role of the 'Old Hundredth' psalm as a national anthem alongside 'God Save the King' forms the second case-study. The 'Old Hundredth' came from a culturally entrenched version of the psalms known as 'Sternhold and Hopkins' which were implicated in questions of literary value at the formative moment of the ballad revival, and have rarely been considered as a context for the ballad revival. These two songs were sung in the second episode of singing to the King, in 1788, in thanks for King George Ill's recovery from illness. Psalmody as political song is also implicated in the third case-study from 1789 which recovers the role of songs in the ceremonies of elite political-reform associations and the classical song tradition of the 'Harmodium Melos'. The musical imagery in Edmund Burke's The Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), is used to conceptualise the danger that songs could pose in the revolutionary context by circulating beyond the political elite to the lower orders. The final case-study examines songs in radical Sheffield and the1795 imprisonment of James Montgomery for printing a political song. Montgomery's fate is analysed as the outcome of a set of connections between the songs of the United Irishmen and the use of songs as evidence in the trial of Thomas Muir for sedition, in Scotland, and the London treason trials of 1794. The role of song in the crisis of the 1790s, the thesis argues, is not only produced by its immediate contexts, but can best be understood as part of a resonant cultural politics with a long and complex history. Show more