22  The Spanish Ladies Love [Euing 340]

Thomas Deloney's Spanish Ladies Love was reprinted on numerous occasions during the seventeenth century and also appeared in the many editions of his Garland of good-will. References to the song can also be found in other forms of literature. On the stage, characters sang the opening lines of the ballad in Cupids whirligig by Edward Sharpham (1607), William Cavendish’s The triumphant widow (1677) and Aphra Behn’s The second part of The rover (1681).  A little more cryptically, Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) includes a reference to ‘fine high shoes, like the Spanish Lady!’ and the eponymous character in Richard Brome’s The northern lasse (1632) declares at one point that she would not swap her current situation, even ‘for the Spanish Ladies Joincture’ (perhaps an ironic reference to the riches sent by the ballad heroine to the Englishman’s wife).

The appeal of the ballad to seventeenth-century consumers was probably complex and varied. The possibility of a romance that connected England and Spain, the great Elizabethan enemies, presumably felt somewhat transgressive. The Spanish Lady was exotic and desirable but also untouchable. The hierarchical contradictions of the scene were no less stimulating: the soldier is in charge because he is male and also the Lady’s gaoler but she is his social superior by some distance and is therefore licensed to ‘woo’ (line 2).

Further tension is generated by the listener’s uncertainty over the Englishman’s response to his current situation. He is far away from home and a beautiful, wealthy Spanish aristocrat is declaring her love for him. The fact that he waits so long before mentioning his wife at home suggests that his eventual decision to do the right thing was never quite a foregone conclusion. Interestingly, a line in the second verse – ‘Cupids bands did tye her faster’ was changed in later editions to ‘Cupids bands did tye them faster’ (italics added), thus heightening the impression that this was a two-way attraction. By implication, the soldier is not quite flawless, though he eventually proves himself not only ‘kind’ but virtuous too. He is thus a model Englishman, and the song’s nationalistic lessons are drawn out, perhaps to our surprise, by the Spanish Lady herself. There is patriotic humour at work as she begs her captor, ‘Leave me not unto a Spaniard’.

In seeking to understand the song’s success, we might also mention the high drama of the Lady’s final, dramatic withdrawal from the world and the implication that there was an international and cross-denominational code of honour among morally upright women that barred them from falling in love with one another’s husbands. The ballad is built to appeal to men and women alike, and an extra frisson must have been generated for everyone by the editions of the mid-1620s, which hit the streets around the time of Prince Charles’ ill-fated and unpopular journey to Madrid in 1623 to seek a marriage contract with the infanta, daughter of Philip III. In the same year, Edmund Garrard confronted popular opinion by defending the proposed match in print, and he referred to the infanta as ‘the Spanish Lady’. Was this merely coincidental? During this tense period, we should also note that the ballad was capable of appealing both to enemies and supporters of the match: the former could emphasise the failure of the song’s love affair and the latter could draw attention to its highly romantic qualities.

Unlike some of our hit songs, The Spanish Ladies Love clearly maintained its popularity into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (though it does not seem to have survived strongly as a folk song). As a broadside, it continued to be published regularly, and the ballad also appeared in various song collections (see, for example, Percy and Waller). In the mid-1760s, the Theatre-Royal in Covent Garden staged performances of The Spanish Lady, a musical entertainment in two acts; founded on the plan of the old ballad. The writer, Thomas Hull, drew extensively on the vocabulary of the original, though his instinct for topicality was also aroused by a recent British victory over the Spanish (see Related texts).

Around the same date, William Shenstone’s poem, ‘Love and honour’, was inspired by the ballad, and, in 1830-35, Wordsworth’s ‘The Armenian Lady’s love’ opened with the lines, ‘You have heard “a Spanish Lady/ How she wooed an English man’. In 1846, Lady Dalmeny (Wilhelmina Powlett) revealed her taste for history and romance by providing sentimental illustrations for an elaborate eight-page edition of the ballad with its text in gothic lettering. A flurry of sycophantic press coverage greeted this publication, revealing in passing the satisfaction that Victorians found in a ballad that revealed the quintessential components of ‘the English national character’ (see Anon, ‘The Spanish lady’s love’). One contributor to The quarterly review, presumably male, noted the appeal of the song to women but explained it in terms of the qualities possessed by its leading man: ‘The whole interest of this ballad to a woman turns on the actual spotlessness of the knight’s fidelity’ (by 1846, the soldier of the original song had been re-imagined as a knight).

The nineteenth century also saw several attempts to root the original ballad in actual historical events. The original song avoids all specific details of time and place but the Victorians decided that the story was all about the English raid on Cadiz, led by the Earl of Essex, in 1596. In fact, the song may have been published rather earlier than this: in August 1586, the Stationers’ Company had registered a ballad ‘betwene a Spanish gent and an English gentlewoman’ and there is a strong suspicion that, despite the accidental sex-switch, this was a reference to our song (and Deloney’s Garland of good will was first registered 1593, though surviving copies are all later).

Nineteenth-century commentators settled, however, upon Cadiz, and worked hard to establish which of Essex’s men was the faithful soldier of the song. Suggestions included Sir Richard Leveson, Sir Urias Legh and Sir John Popham, but the most elaborate speculation centred on Sir John Bolle of Thorpe Hall in Lincolnshire (see Anon, ‘The Spanish ladye’s love’). In 1810, Cayley Illingworth published an account that presented as factual the story of Bolle’s entanglement with the Spanish Lady, remarking in passing that the story had become the subject of a ballad.

In fact, it was almost certainly the other way round, with the Lincolnshire legend evolving as an attempt to claim and explain the song’s narrative. Illingworth went further than the ballad, however, noting that the goods sent by the Spanish Lady to Bolle’s wife included a portrait of herself in a green dress. This had led to ‘a traditionary superstition among the vulgar’ that the woman in a green dress who had been sighted repeatedly over the ensuing centuries, often seating herself in a tree that grew outside Thorpe Hall, was the Spanish Lady herself, driven by love to haunt the home of her sweetheart. The story of this ghostly ‘green lady’ is still told today and now serves to attract tourists to Lincolnshire.

Christopher Marsh

References

Anon, A complete collection of old and new English and Scotch songs (1736), pp. 132-35.

Anon, ‘The Spanish lady’s love’, The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, no. 167 (January 1846), pp. 179-85.

Anon, ‘The Spanish ladye’s love’, The quarterly review, vol. 78 (1846), pp. 323-46.

Aphra Behn, The second part of The rover (1681), p. 21.

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

Richard Brome, The northern lasse (1632), D3v.

William Cavendish, The triumphant widow (1677), p. 52.

Thomas Cogswell, ‘The politics of propaganda: Charles I and the people in the 1620s’, Journal of British Studies 29.3 (1990), pp. 187-215.

Thomas Deloney, The garland of good will (registered 1593; the English Short Title Catalogue lists extant editions in 1628, 1630-50, 1631, 1659, 1678, 1685-93, 1685, 1688 and 1690).

English broadside ballad archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/

Edmund Garrard, The countrie gentleman moderator. Collections of such intermarriages, as have been betweene the two royall lines of England and Spaine (1624), pp. 62-66.

Thomas Hull, The Spanish Lady, a musical entertainment in two acts; founded on the plan of the old ballad (c. 1765).

Cayley Illingworth, A topographical account of the parish of Scampton (1810), pp. 54-60.

Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair (written c. 1614; published 1631), B1r.

Louth Museum: https://www.louthmuseum.org.uk/

Madden Collection, Garlands, vol. 3, nos. 715-17, Cambridge University Library.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry  3 vols. (1765), vol. 2, pp. 227-31.

Wilhelmina Powlett [Lady Dalmeny], The Spanish Ladyes Love. Illustrated by Lady Dalmeny (1846).

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), no. 188.

Edward Sharpham, Cupids whirligig (1607), H2v.

William Shenstone, The works in verse and prose, 2 vols. (1764), vol. 1, pp. 321-32.

Edmund Waller, Ballads and songs chiefly taken from Dr. Percy’s Reliques of ancient poetry (1794), pp. 213-18.

William Wordsworth, The poetical works of William Wordsworth, 6 vols. (1836), vol. 1, pp. 240-48.

We have not found other seventeenth century texts that share significant material with the ballad, apart from the various plays mentioned in the Song history. The titles set out in chronological order below therefore date from the eighteenth century. William Shenstone’s poem, ‘Love and honour’, was clearly based squarely on the ballad narrative, though there are few echoes of the original’s language. Thomas Hull’s The Spanish Lady (c. 1765) is a different matter, for it was not only ‘Founded on the Plan of the Old Ballad’ but full of verbal references to the source that inspired it. In Hull’s preface, he explains that ‘Wherever I could, I have used the very Words of the Ballad’ (and he printed the original song at the end of the printed edition of his play). This was clearly an attempt to use the popularity of the ballad in order to boost the success of his play, and audience members will have been struck by the familiarity of many expressions, including ‘by the liking alone of an Eye’ and ‘Right gentle have you been’.

Christopher Marsh

Texts (in chronological order)

William Shenstone, The works in verse and prose, 2 vols. (1764), vol. 1, pp. 321-32.

Thomas Hull, The Spanish Lady, a musical entertainment in two acts; founded on the plan of the old ballad (c. 1765).