FOOTNOTES:
[102] Scott says at the end, “I will not swear to the accuracy of the above.”
287
CAPTAIN WARD AND THE RAINBOW
Bagford Ballads, I, 65.
Other black-letter copies are Pepys, IV, 202, No 195; Roxburghe, III, 56; Euing, No 108; British Museum, 112. f. 44 (19). This copy is printed in Halliwell’s Early Naval Ballads, p. 59, Bell’s Early Ballads, p. 167, Ebsworth’s Roxburghe Ballads, VI, 426.
There are Aldermary Churchyard copies, as Roxburghe Ballads, III, 652, 861; Scottish stall-copies, as Greenock, W. Scott, Stirling, M. Randall; English, by Pitts, Seven Dials, one of which is printed in Logan’s Pedlar’s Pack, p. 1.
A copy in Buchan’s MSS, II, 245, is nearly the old broadside; another, II, 417, is the stall-copy. Kinloch, MSS, V, 109, II, 265, has the stall-copy from oral transmission (with Weir for Ward). Rev. S. Baring-Gould has recently taken down this ballad (much changed by tradition) in the west of England.
Captain Ward, a famous rover, wishes to make his peace with the king, and offers thirty ton of gold as “ransom” for himself and his men. The king will not trust a man who has proved false to France and to Spain, and sends the Rainbow, with five hundred men, against Ward. The Rainbow has easy work with Dutch, Spaniards, and French, but her fifty brass pieces have no effect on Ward; though the Rainbow is brass without, he is steel within, 82 (suggested by ‘Sir Andrew Barton,’ A 271, B 251, ‘He is brass within and steel without).’ The Rainbow retires, and reports to the king that Ward is too strong to be taken. The king laments that he has lost three captains, any one of whom would have brought Ward in: George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, †1605, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, †1606 (both of whom had a part in the defeat of the Armada), and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, †1601.
The Rainbow was the name of one of Drake’s four ships in his expedition against Cadiz in 1587. The Rainbow is mentioned very often from 1589; as in The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, vol. i, Hist. MSS Commission, XIIth Report, Appendix, Part I; Index in Part III of the same, p. 296.