1820
Britons Claim Her As Your Queen
| Tune: | Scots Wha Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled |
| Lyrics: | Unknown |
BRITONS! who have ever been
In Honour’s cause the foremost seen,
Welcome home your Royal Queen,
To England once again!
Now’s the day and now’s the hour,
Chase away the clouds that low’r,
Crush at once the villain’s pow’r
Who dares insult his Queen
Who will be a treach’rous knave?
Who will be a perjur’d slave?
Let him sink into his grave,
Never more to rise!
Who, for injur’d innocence,
Will not stand in her defence?
Banish persecution hence,
Virtue is her shield!
By the conduct she has shown,
By her right to share the throne,
Britons claim her as your own!
Claim her as your Queen!
Lay calumny and falsehood low,
Justice strikes th’[...]anging blow!
Rid Caroline of every foe,
For ever may she reign!
Few topics can have generated so many protest songs in so short a time as the Queen Caroline affair of 1820, when the king used Parliament to divorce his estranged wife. This song is exemplary: published for a mass audience by a radical north-east printer and set to the perennial protest tune of ‘Scots Wha Hae’, it adapts Burns’ lines into a staunch defence of Caroline of Brunswick as a pan-British heroine, and attacks the ‘villain’ and ‘knave’, George IV.
| Cause: | Loyalist | Nationalist |
| Theme: | Political Process |
| Addressed to: | Britons |
| Target of Protest: | The Ruler | Sin (specified) |
| Proposal/Solution: | Restoration/Succession | Individual Responsibility |