78  John ARMSTRONG's Last Good-Night [Pepys 2.133]

The earliest surviving version of this highly successful ballad may be the one that appears in John Mennes’ song-collection, Wit restord (1658). The first surviving broadside dates from around the same time, making it difficult to say with certainty which of the two texts is the older (of course, there may also have been earlier versions, now lost). Numerous editions of the ballad were published in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It continued to appear regularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in songbooks, and it has also been noted as a folk-song in Scotland, England and America (the ballad is Child number 169).

A sense of the ballad’s prominence in early-modern culture is conveyed by two eighteenth-century anecdotes. James Boswell reported that he once heard his companion, Samuel Johnson, mutter repetitively a line from the ballad– ‘And ran him through the fair body’ – while the two toured the Hebrides in 1773. At the time, they were visiting the room in which a famous stabbing had occurred in the 1560s, and Boswell remarked that contemplation of this historical killing had brought the song into Johnson’s mind, ‘by association of ideas’. And in 1759, Oliver Goldsmith recalled with great fondness the time in his childhood when ‘an old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johny Armstrong’s Last Good Night’. In comparison to this, he considered the singing of the great opera singers of his adult years to be nothing but ‘dissonance’. The fact that Goldsmith was raised in Ireland demonstrates how widely the song had travelled by this date.

John Armstrong was a well-documented historical figure from the parish of Canonbie in what is now the county of Dumfries (the ballad’s reference to Westmorland, an English county some way to the south, appears to be unfounded). This places Armstrong right in the politically problematic border country between England and Scotland, and it was here that he was executed by James V of Scotland in 1530. In his lifetime, Armstrong was widely considered an outlaw, and he led a large lawless gang that terrorised the region. George Buchanan, a Scottish historian who died in 1582, described Armstrong as the chief thief of the borders and a man to whom even the powerful English paid ‘a certain Tribute’ (effectively protection money).

The Armstrong of the song forms a dramatic contrast to this menacing figure, being admirably brave and gallant. In the ballad, he died not because he was a thorn in the side of all authority, whether Scottish of English, but because he was duped by a dishonourable monarch. The ballad revises the historical record in several ways: it places the meeting between Armstrong and the king in Edinburgh, though it actually occurred at Caerlanrig in Teviotdale, close to Armstrong’s home patch; it exaggerates the size of Armstrong’s retinue and states that he and his men were killed in combat, when in actual fact they were captured and executed; and it implies that Armstrong’s force only lost the fight because thousands of Edinburgh’s citizens rose up to reinforce the royal troops, a suggestion for which there seems to be no basis. Commenting on Armstrong’s brave death as described in the ballad, one eighteenth-century commentator wrote, ‘Our Poet, I suppose, thought the Gallows was too low a Death for his Heroe’.

The decision of the ballad-makers to view Armstrong through a heroicising filter was, of course, questionable, but the success of the song indicates that it was also a stroke of genius. The possibility that this was a clear-headed and purposeful strategy is suggested by a verse that appears in the songbook version of the ballad, published in 1658, but not in the broadside itself. This verse explains that the king felt the need to deal with Armstrong because he was a ‘bold out-law’ who had ‘robbed all the north country’. By concealing Armstrong’s offences, the ballad-makers magnified his heroism.

The song, like its hero, criss-crosses the Anglo-Scottish border, reflecting the uncertain medieval history of Dumfriesshire as part of the ’Debateable Land’. Armstrong, a ’reiver’ who stole goods and extorted money wherever he could, is an ambivalent figure and thus highly malleable. Some part of the song’s success may rest on the fact that it reflects this ambivalence, rather than trying to fix Armstrong’s identity. The first verse seems to set the scene in Scotland, but the second verse describes Armstrong as ‘a man in Westmorland’. At no point is England mentioned in the ballad, though the man who kills Armstrong from behind is described as ‘A cowar[d]ly Scot’. The hero is not clearly identified in terms of nationality, and listeners or readers can therefore pull him in either direction, according to taste. The absence of information about Armstrong’s alleged crimes and the grounds for the king’s decision to execute him adds to this strategic vagueness. Although Johny fronts up as a gallant hero, he has no back-story.

The consequences of this indeterminacy in the subsequent history of the song are mixed and intriguing. A chapbook version of the tale presents Armstrong clearly as a patriotic Englishman and sworn enemy of the Scots (see Related texts). On the other hand, a remodelled version of the ballad, first visible to us in the early eighteenth century, portrays him unmistakably as a Scot. In this version of our song, the spurious reference to Westmorland is dropped and the language is heavily Scotticised. A skilful new opening line – ‘Sum speiks of Lords, sum speiks of lairds’ – sets the tone nicely. When Armstrong dies, we are told clearly that Scotland grieves deeply for him and his brave men because ‘they savd their Country deir,/ Frae Englishmen’.

The appeal of all this to eighteenth-century Scots was presumably intensified by the claim of the text’s editor, Allan Ramsay, that he had copied it down from the mouth of one of Armstrong’s direct descendants. Ramsay’s reciter also insisted that his song was ‘the genuine Ballad’ while the ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’ ballad – in other words the one we have recorded – was ‘false’. In truth, the two texts share many details and much language, and they are more like variants of the same song than separate compositions. Not surprisingly, Joseph Ritson included the ballad both in his Select collection of English songs (1783) and in his Scottish songs (1794). Logically enough, the English broadside appeared in the first book and the Scottish version in the second.

This tussle goes on to the present day, though a quick search of the internet seems to indicate that Scottish claims to the song are nowadays stated more forcefully than English ones. A decisive yank in this cultural tug-of-war was administered by Walter Scott and others, who worked hard to further romanticise and Scotticise Armstrong and his ballad during the nineteenth century. The strength of the Scottish claim today is reflected in the fact that a play about Armstrong, written by John Arden and first staged in 1964, was written in a lowland Scottish dialect.

Other factors in the song’s early modern popularity might also be considered. The ballad presents some strong writing and several compelling moments that appear in all versions and that also infiltrated more ‘respectable’ prose accounts of this historical episode (these moments include the hero’s realisation that, in negotiating with the king, he has ‘asked grace of a graceless face’).

There are also some interesting connections to other hit ballads: Armstrong’s madly brave declaration that ‘I will lay me down for to bleed a while’ before fighting again comes straight from A True Relation of the Life and Death of Sir Andrew Barton; and the curious references in the final verses to ‘Little Musgrove’, the footpage, and his horse, ‘Grissel’, seem to nod towards The lamentable Ditty of Little Mousgrove and An Excellent Ballad of Patient Grissel (though quite what consumers made of these nods is anybody’s guess).

The authors’ construction of a colourful, swash-buckling, borderland brand of masculinity is also striking, suggesting further connections with titles such as A Memorable Song on the unhappy hunting in Chevy-Chase. In the Armstrong ballad, the extent to which this manliness is bound up with sartorial finery and public display is very striking (Johny’s ‘merry men’ are no strangers to velvet, lace and feathers).

Finally, we might wonder how the ballad played out during the long background to the English and Scottish Acts of Union in 1706-07. Cromwell’s attempts to achieve union in the 1660s, abandoned at the Restoration, were followed by almost fifty years of sporadic negotiations, and the ballad was popular throughout this period. Presumably, Armstrong might have served either as a cautionary example of the dangers of lawless disunity or as a nostalgic symbol of the old, chivalric heroism that was in danger of being lost. The ballad’s combination of escapism and topicality was presumably a factor in its appeal.

Christopher Marsh

References

John Arden, Armstrong’s last goodnight (Glasgow, 1965).

James Boswell, The journal of a tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (revised 2^nd edn., 1785), p. 37.

Broadside ballads from the Bodleian Library: http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

George Buchanan, The history of Scotland (1582; translated from Latin, 1690), p. 57.

Francis James Child, The English and Scottish popular ballads, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1882-94), vol. 3, pp. 367-72.

William Drummond, The history of the lives of the five James’s (Edinburgh, 1711), p. 99.

English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

English Short Title Catalogue.

Oliver Goldsmith, The bee (1759), p. 51.

James Kinsley, The Oxford book of ballads (Oxford, 1969), pp. 520-25.

Madden Collection, Garlands, vol. 2, nos. 443-45, Cambridge University Library.

Maureen Meikle, ‘Armstrong, John [Johnie], of Gilnockie (d. 1530)’, Oxford dictionary of national biography.

John Mennes, Wit restord in several select poems not formerly publish’t (1658), pp. 30-33.

Ambrose Philips, A collection of old ballads (1723), pp. 170-74.

Allan Ramsay, The ever green, 2 vols. (1724), vol. 2, pp. 190-96.

Joseph Ritson, A select collection of English songs, 3 vols. (1783), vol. 2, pp. 322-26, and Scottish song in two volumes (1794), vol. 2, pp. 7-13.

Hyder E. Rollins, An analytical index to the ballad-entries (1557-1709) in the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London (1924; Hatboro, Pennsylvania, 1967), nos. 1300 and 1301.

Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish border, 3 vols. (3^rd edn., 1806), vol. 1, pp. 105-30.

Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, https://www.vwml.org/ (Roud no. 76).

As with a number of other successful songs, John Armstrong’s Last Good-Night is closely related to a chapbook that told the same story. This was The pleasant and delightful history of Johny Armstrong, and the earliest surviving edition was published around 1700. It is very obviously related directly to the ballad, and the full text of John Armstrong’s Last Good-Night is included in the closing pages. It seems probable that the chapbook was an expansion of the ballad, though we cannot rule out the possibility that there was an earlier, now lost, edition of the chapbook and that the relationship actually worked the other way round.

In comparison to the ballad, the prose version presents Armstrong much more decisively and consistently as a ‘bold English man’. He is a friend to the English crown and a rebel against the Scottish king. Armstrong’s problems with the latter arise when the Scottish victory at Bannockburn means that, very reluctantly, he must become a subject of the Scottish crown. The king is equally unhappy about the situation, given Armstrong’s record as an enemy of Scotland, and the fate of our hero is therefore sealed. The fact that the Battle of Bannockburn actually occurred in 1314, two centuries before Johny roamed the borderlands, is not something that troubles the authors.

The chapbook also presents a much more expansive account of Armstrong’s alleged virtues than is found in the ballad. He is not only brave but jolly, charitable, beloved and even industrious. The problem of explaining how Armstrong acquired immense wealth with minimal income from lands or rents runs through all accounts of his life, and the chapbook insists that he worked legitimately in the timber and cattle trades, rather than as an intimidating outlaw.

The chapbook fills out the ballad-narrative in other ways too, and all the changes are designed to reflect well on Armstrong. His military prowess, for example, was honed against Turks and Saracens in the Holy Land. He chooses a wife for her virtue rather than her wealth, and then helps her impoverished father out by bringing twenty of his own cooks and scullions to the enormously grand wedding. And even a temporary failure of his manliness – he weeps when bidding farewell to his wife and child – serves to humanise the hero rather than undermine him.

The chapbook’s authors thus play fast and loose with all aspects of Armstrong’s history, situating his story in the vague, distant, medieval past that was evidently beloved by the consumers of cheap print. We should not be too scornful of this, for the chapbook was sufficiently successful to be issued repeatedly during the eighteenth century. The writers knew their audience, and they also showed considerable skill in contextualising certain rather cryptic verses from the ballad. In particular, the song’s opening lines are spoken in the chapbook by the king and, for this reason, they seem to make rather more sense (this might also indicate, of course, that the ballad was based on the chapbook rather than vice versa).

In addition to the chapbook, we might consider another song of the Restoration period as a spin-off from John Armstrong’s Last Good-Night. This was A pleasant new ballad, shewing how Sir John Armstrong and Nathaniel Musgrave fell in love with the Lady Dacres Daughter of the North. It retains the borderland setting but transfers our hero to a new scenario involving conflict and tragedy in love. The texts of the two songs are entirely different, though the reference in A pleasant new ballad to Armstrong’s ‘merry men’ may have been designed to hint at a connection. Of course, there is a consistency problem here, for Armstrong dies differently in the second song, slain by a romantic rival rather than by forces supporting the Scottish king.

Christopher Marsh

Texts (in approximate chronological order)

Anon, John ARMSTRONG’s Last Good-Night... To a pretty Northern Tune, called, Fare you well guilt Knock-hall (registered 1658; earliest extant edition, c. 1658).

Anon, A pleasant new ballad, shewing how Sir John Armstrong and Nathaniel Musgrave fell in love with the Lady Dacres Daughter of the North... To a new Northern Tune (1663-74).

Anon, The pleasant and delightful history of Johny Armstrong (c. 1700).