Bad news has come to the town,
For a rich merchant vessel is cast away,
And all her brave seamen drown.
“Bad news! bad news through London street,
Bad news has come to the King,
For all the brave lives of his mariners lost,
That sunk in the watery main.”
Now there is sad confusion here. The ballad as it now exists is a mere fragment. Clearly the “bad news” belongs to an earlier portion of the ballad, and it induces the King to send against the pirate and to sink his vessel. This “Henry Martyn” is, in fact, Andrew Barton. In 1476, a Portuguese squadron seized a richly laden vessel, commanded by John Barton, in consequence of which letters of reprisal were granted to Andrew, Robert, and John Barton, sons of John, and these were renewed in 1506. The King of Portugal remonstrated against reprisals for so old an offence, but he had put himself in the wrong four years before, by refusing to deal with a herald sent by the Scottish King for the arrangement of the matter in dispute. Hall, in his Chronicle, says: “In June, 1511, the King (Henry VIII.) being at Leicester, tidings were brought him that Andrew Barton, a Scottish man, and a pirate of the sea, did rob every nation, and so stopped the King’s streams that no merchants almost could pass, and when he took the Englishmen’s goods, he said they were Portingale’s goods, and thus he haunted and robbed at every haven’s mouth. The King, moved greatly with this crafty pirate, sent Sir Edward Howard, Lord Admiral of England, and Lord Thomas Howard, son and heir to the Earl of Surrey, in all haste to the sea, which hastily made ready two ships, and without any more abode, took the sea, and by chance of weather, were severed. The Lord Howard lying in the Downs, perceived when Andrew blew his whistle to encourage the men, yet, for all that, the Lord Howard and his men, by clean strength, entered the main deck; then the Englishmen entered on all sides, and the Scots fought sore on the hatches, but, in conclusion, Andrew was taken, which was so sore wounded that he died there; then all the remainder of the Scots were taken with their ship, called the Lion.”
Buchanan, about twenty years after Hall—i.e., in 1582—also tells the story. Barton he calls Breton with further details. He says that Andrew Breton, though several times wounded, and with one leg broken by a cannon ball, seized a drum and beat a charge to inspirit his men to fight, until breath and life failed.
Now a ballad relative to Sir Andrew Barton has been given by Percy; it is found among the Douce, the Pepysian, the Roxburghe, the Bagford, and the Wood collection of old English ballads. In the Percy MS. the ballad consists of eighty-two stanzas, but there is something lost between the thirty-fifth and the next. It begins:—