The Bastard King of England

"The Bastard King of England" is a bawdy English folk song commonly misattributed to Rudyard Kipling, or less commonly Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, and 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.

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. [1]

A very similar song (though with clean lyrics), called "The Phony King of England", appeared in Disney's 1973 animated film Robin Hood. [2]

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/20/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.