The Bastard King of England is a song misattributed to the Poet Laureate during whose reign?
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. Also, it would be quite impossible to drag anyone from France to England behind a horse before the Channel Tunnel was dug.
Englands Helicon Englands Helicon is an anthology of Elizabethan pastoral poems compiled by John Flasket, and first published in 1600. There was an enlarged edition in 1614. The poets involved cannot all be identified, since there are a number of poems marked as 'anonymous': they do include Edmund Bolton, William Byrd, Henry Chettle, Michael Drayton, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Anthony Munday, George Peele, Walter Raleigh, Henry Constable, William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Wootton, William Smith. The most celebrated poem is Marlowe's 'Come live with me and be my love'. This and several other lyrics have musical settings extant, in this case by William Corkine.