The common meter text of “The British Lamentation,” is now known as “The Dying [British] Sergeant” although there is no indication that the narrator was a non-commissioned officer (Laws 29).[1] It is probably an American composition written as though by a mortally wounded British soldier on September 17, 1776 (see verse 11).
After the evacuation from Boston in March 1776, the British went to Halifax and then returned to New York in June. Washington quickly moved his army from Boston to defend New York, and soon the battles began. September 17 was the day after the battle of Harlem Heights. By the end of November, the American army was retreating across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. The writer’s claim that 15,000 British soldiers died is a gross overstatement.
The description of Americans as “bold Columbian sons” suggests later composition, as does the semireligious benediction of the final verse. The song combination on this broadside lingered in popular appeal. Three later broadsides with these two texts were printed in Boston, one by William Rutter (between 1829 and 1834), another by Leonard Deming (between 1829 and 1831), and a third by J. G. & H. Hunt (possibly in the 1840s).
On each of these, while the second text, “Green on the Cape,” is virtually unchanged, “British Lamentation” is a variant text repeating much of the text of the Coverly broadside but written retrospectively many years later. The opening two verses are
Come all you heros, whereever you be,
That walk by land or sail by sea,
Come hear the words of a dying man,
I’m sure you will remember them.
In seventy-five, that fatal year,
As by the record doth appear.
‘Twas on the fourteenth day of May,
Our fleet set sail for America.
The text is still in the words of a British soldier but it is even more favorable to the American cause than that on Coverly’s sheet. Two verses critical of Great Britain are added at the end, and the final line is “While proud Old England sinks in shame.”
While the story of “Green on the Cape” is probably fictitious, this protest song reflects a specific point in Irish history. After the French Revolution, many downtrodden Irish Catholics were inspired to look to the French for moral support as well as military assistance. In the north, the British militia suppressed all signs of insurrection and men and women were beaten or even shot for wearing a ribbon of the “revolutionary green.” In the south, full-scale rebellion broke out in 1798 as a powerful French fleet threatened to land troops on the Irish coast to support the Irish Catholics. Storms drove the French off and the British army under Lord Cornwallis soon put down the poorly equipped Irish rebels (T. O’Connor 22-23). Printed on a few broadsides and in a garland in the early nineteenth century, this text survived in Irish tradition and in Scotland (Roud #50545; Fleischmann, Sources #6187, #6367; Zimmerman 167-70; Shuldham-Shaw, Lyle, and Hunter 1:351; Moylan 25-27). It is an ancestor of the well-known “Wearing of the Green.”
The tune for that song, and probably this text as well, was originally written by James Oswald as “The Tulip,” the first section of number twelve in his Airs for the Spring (1747). This melody was reused in the comic opera The Reprisal (1757) for an aria beginning “From the man whom I love,” with lyrics possibly by Tobias Smollett, and gained an alternate title from the burden of that text, “Balance a Straw” (Lambert 1:22). It was widely known by both titles but did not appear in print with the title “Wearing of the Green” until 1841.
