The Song
The song is said to relate the story of how he broke the heart of Bridget Belasyse of Brancepeth Castle, County Durham, where his brother Thomas was rector, when he married Anne Duncombe of Duncombe Park in Yorkshire. Bridget Belasyse is said to have died two weeks after hearing the news, although other sources claim that she died a fortnight before the wedding of pulmonary tuberculosis. Even if the song was not composed about him, his supporters almost certainly added a verse for the 1761 elections with the lyrics:
- Bobby Shafto's looking out,
- All his ribbons flew about,
- All the ladies gave a shout,
- Hey for Bobby Shafto!
Thomas and George Allan, in their Tyneside Songs and Readings (1891), argued that the "Bobby Shafto" of the song was in fact a relative, Robert Shafto (1760–1781) of Benwell. It is likely that his grandson, Robert Duncombe Shafto, also used the song for electioneering in 1861, with several of the later verses being added around this time.
Read more about this topic: Bobby Shafto
Famous quotes containing the word song:
“Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky—
So this winged hour is dropped to us from above.
Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,
This close-companioned inarticulate hour
When twofold silence was the song of love.”
—Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)
“A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape, I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)