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.
F. W. Harvey Frederick William Harvey DCM (26 March 1888 – 13 February 1957), often known as Will Harvey, and dubbed "the Laureate of Gloucestershire", was an English poet, broadcaster and solicitor whose poetry became popular during and after World War I.