The ballads treat facts with the customary freedom and improve upon them greatly. In A, B, English ballads, Johnie is oddly enough a Westmorland man,[[238]] though in B 11 he admits himself to be a subject of the Scots king. The king writes John a long letter promising to do him no wrong, A 4; a loving letter, to come and speak with him speedily, B 4, C 2. Johnie goes to Edinburgh with the eight-score men that he keeps in his hall, all in a splendid uniform, asks grace, and is told that he and his eight-score shall be hanged the next morning. They are not unarmed, and resolve to fight it out rather than be hanged. They kill all the king’s guard but three, B 16, but all Edinburgh rises; four-score and ten of Johnie’s men lie gasping on the ground, A 14. A cowardly Scot comes behind Johnie and runs him through; like Sir Andrew Barton, he bids his men fight on; he will bleed awhile, then rise and fight again. Most of his company are killed, but his foot-page escapes and carries the bad news to Giltnock Hall. His little son, by or on the nurse’s knee, vows to revenge his father’s death.
C differs extensively from A, B, indeed resembles or repeats the English ballad only in a few places: C 2==A 4, B 4; C 6==B 10; C 7==A g, B 11; C 223,4==A 113,4, B 133,4. The Eliots go with the Armstrongs according to C 3, and it is the intention to bring the king to dine at Gilnockie. In C 9–17 Johnie offers twenty-four steeds, four of them laden with as much gold as they can carry, twenty-four mills, and as much wheat as their hoppers can hold, twenty-four sisters-sons, who will fight to the utterance, tribute from all the land between ‘here’ and Newcastle,—all this for his life. The king replies to each successive offer that he never has granted a traitor’s life, and will not begin with him. Johnie gives the king the lie as to his being a traitor; he could make England find him in meal and malt for a hundred years, and no Scot’s wife could say that he had ever hurt her the value of a fly. Had he known how the king would treat him, he would have kept the border in spite of all his army. England’s king would be a blithe man to hear of his capture. At this point the king is attracted by Johnie’s splendid girdle and hat, and exclaims, What wants that knave that a king should have! Johnie bids farewell to his brother, Laird of Mangerton (Thomas, here called Kirsty), and to his son Kirsty, and to Gilnock-Hall, and is murdered at Carlenrig with all his band.
It will be observed that the substance, or at least the hint, of C 213,4, 173,4, 26, 15, 223,4, 23, 241,2, is to be found in Lindsay’s narrative.
In the last stanza of A and of B, Johnie Armstrong’s son (afterwards known as Johnie’s Christy) sitting on his nurse’s knee, B (cf. C 30), or standing by his nurse’s knee, A, vows, if he lives to be a man, to have revenge for his father’s death.[[239]] Not infrequently, in popular ballads, a very young (even unborn) child speaks, by miracle, to save a life, vindicate innocence, or for some other kindly occasion;[[240]] sometimes again to threaten revenge, as here. So a child in the cradle in ‘Frændehævn,’ Grundtvig, I, 28, No 4, B 34 (==C 63), and in ‘Hævnersværdet,’ I, 351, No 25, sts 29, 30; and Kullervo in his third month, Kalevala, Rune 31, Schiefner, p. 194, vv. 109–112.[[241]]
Johnie’s plain speech to the king in C 19, ‘Ye lied, ye lied, now, king!’ is such as we have often heard before in these ballads: see I, 427, No 47, A 14; I, 446, No 50, A 8, 9; I, 452 f, No 52, C 10, D 7; II, 25 f, No 58, G 7, H 10; II, 269 ff, No 83, D 13, E 16, F 22; II, 282, No 86, A 6; III, 62, 67, No 117, sts 114, 222. It is not unexampled elsewhere. So Sthenelus to Agamemnon, II. iv, 204; Ἀτρεΐδη, μὴ ψεύδε’, ἐπιστάμενος σάφα εἰπεῖν; and Bernardo del Carpio, on much the same occasion as here,
Mentides, buen rey, mentides,
que no decides verdad,
que nunca yo fuí traidor,
Wolf & Hofmann, Primavera, I, 38 and 41; see also I, 186, II, 100, 376.
This ballad was an early favorite of Goldsmith’s: “The music of the finest singer is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairymaid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen.” Essays, 1765, p. 14.