LADY ANNE BOTHWELL'S LAMENT.
The unhappy lady into whose mouth some unknown poet has put this lament, is now ascertained to have been Anne, daughter to Bothwell, Bishop of Orkney. Her faithless lover was her cousin, Alexander Erskine, son to the Earl of Mar. Lady Anne is said to have possessed great beauty, and Sir Alexander was reputed the handsomest man of his age. He was first a colonel in the French army, but afterwards engaged in the service of the Covenanters, and came to his death by being blown up, with many other persons of rank, in Douglass Castle, on the 30th of August, 1640. The events which occasioned the ballad seem to have taken place early in the seventeenth century. Of the fate of the lady subsequent to this period nothing is known. See Chambers, Scottish Ballads, p. 150, and The Scots Musical Museum, (1853,) iv. 203*.
In Brome's comedy of The Northern Lass, or the Nest of Fools, acted in 1632, occur the two following stanzas. They are, perhaps, a part of the original Lament, which certainly has undergone great alterations in its progress down to our times.
"Peace, wayward barne! Oh cease thy moan!
Thy farre more wayward daddy's gone,
And never will recalled be,
By cryes of either thee or me:
For should wee cry
Until we dye,
Wee could not scant his cruelty.
Ballow, ballow, &c.
"He needs might in himselfe foresee
What thou successively might'st be;
And could hee then (though me foregoe)
His infant leave, ere hee did know
How like the dad
Would be the lad,
In time to make fond maydens glad?
Ballow, ballow, &c."
The first professed edition of this piece is in the Third Part of Watson's Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems, p. 79; the next in the Tea-Table Miscellany, i. 161. Both of these copies have been modernized, but Ramsay's is the better of the two, and equally authentic. We therefore select Ramsay's, and add to it [Percy's], which contains three stanzas not found in the others, and preserves somewhat more of the air of antiquity. There is a version extending to fifteen stanzas, arranged in a very different order, in Evans's Old Ballads, i. 259. Herd, Ritson, &c., have followed Ramsay.
Balow, my boy, ly still and sleep,
It grieves me sore to hear thee weep: