2340. Lillibullero (Traditional Loyalist Irish)

This song was requested by John Best. “Lillibullero“, also spelled “Lillibulero“ or “Lilliburlero“, probably began as an Irish jig, well before it was first published in 1661 in a collection called “An Antidote Against Melancholy.“ The best known version is about the Williamite war in Ireland (1689-91), when the Catholic King James II fled England after an invasion by Dutch forces under the Protestant William III. James II tried to reclaim the crown with the help of France and his Catholic supporters in Ireland led by Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, but his hopes of using Ireland to reconquer England were thwarted at the Battle of Aughrim in 1691. The song was an extremely successful piece of propaganda, satirising the sentiments of Irish Catholic Jacobites. Swift, in 1712, attributed the song to Whig leader, Thomas Wharton, and quoted him as claiming to have whistled James II out of three kingdoms. The word “Teague“ was a derisive term f