"The Bastard King of England" is a bawdy English
folk song
Folk music is a music genre that includes #Traditional folk music, traditional folk music and the Contemporary folk music, contemporary genre that evolved from the former during the 20th-century folk revival. Some types of folk music may be c ...
commonly falsely attributed to
Rudyard Kipling
Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
...
, or less commonly
Lord Tennyson,
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...
,
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman (; May 31, 1819 – March 26, 1892) was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among t ...
, or
Charles Whistler. The earliest known appearance of the song was in 1927. The song depicts various sexual escapades involving the title character, an unnamed Queen of Spain, a French king named Phillip, and the "Duke of Zippity-Zap" who gives the King a case of
the clap. The song has a number of historical inaccuracies, since the last French king to bear the name Phillip died in the 14th century, but Spain would not become a united kingdom until the 15th, while the last King of England to be illegitimate was William I (reigned 1066-1087), although it was alleged during the reign of Edward IV (1461-1483) that Edward was illegitimate. Also, it would be quite impossible to drag anyone from France to England behind a horse before the Channel Tunnel was dug.
According to Ed Cray, author of ''Bawdy Ballads'', "As the story goes, Rudyard Kipling wrote 'The Bastard King of England' (pronounced En-ga-land') and that authorship cost him his poet laureate's knighthood. It is too bad that the attribution is apparently spurious; 'The Bastard King' would undoubtedly be Kipling's most popular work" if he had actually written it.
In the first episode of ''
Z: The Beginning of Everything'',
Zelda Fitzgerald sings a verse from the ballad before diving off a dock.
[Z: The Beginning of Everything. Internet Movie Database. 2015-2017. Retrieved August 31, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4878612/]
A very similar song with family-friendly lyrics, called "The Phony King of England", appeared in Disney's 1973 animated film ''
Robin Hood''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bastard King Of England
English folk songs
Songs about kings
Songs about fictional male characters
Songs about England