Bonnie Charlie

"Bonnie Charlie", also commonly known as "Will ye no come back again?", is a Scots poem by Carolina Oliphant (Lady Nairne), set to a traditional Scottish folk tune. As in several of the author's poems, its theme is the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which ended at the Battle of Culloden. Written well after the events it commemorates, it is not a genuine Jacobite song, like many other songs that were "composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but ... passed off as contemporary products of the Jacobite risings."[1]

Lady Nairne came from a Jacobite family, and Prince Charles had stopped to dine at Nairne House on 4 September 1745, during the march to Edinburgh.[2] Her father was exiled the year after, but the family "hoarded" a number of objects "supposedly given to him by Prince Charles."[3]

The song, especially its melody, is widely and traditionally used as a song of farewell – often in association with Auld Lang Syne, and generally with no particular Jacobite or other political intent.

  1. ^ Murray, Alan V. (1990). "Rev. of William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song. Political Myth and National Identity". Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung. 35: 186–87. doi:10.2307/848236. JSTOR 848236.
  2. ^ Ross, David R. (2001). On the Trail of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Dundurn. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-946487-68-4.
  3. ^ Nicholson, Robin (2002). Bonnie Prince Charlie and the making of a myth: a study in portraiture, 1720–1892. Bucknell UP. p. 108. ISBN 978-0-8387-5495-5.