Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all!

Those are certainly some graphic words, huh?  Just what I want to sing my little ones at bed time, a fable about strapping a young child to the limb of a tree, only to have a windstorm break the branch, and send the child falling to a violent death!  Sleep tight, little one!

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Go back about 320 years.  In England, the Stuart dynasty may be coming to an end.  Never a very popular ruling family, the first Stuart, James I, came to power in the early seventeenth century when his distant cousin, Queen Elizabeth, died childless.  James was a very ambitious man, with visions of royal grandeur that were anathema to the English noblemen in Parliament.  Worse than that, many suspected James of being a closet Catholic.  His mother, after all, was openly devout, and harbored delusions of returning England to the Catholicism from which the country had strayed since the time of Henry VIII.  Of course, Mary Queen of Scots would literally lose her head before those dreams could become reality.  Her young son, James, was supposedly raised as a Protestant, but many doubted that his professed Anglicanism was very sincere.

Suspicions of religious duplicity on the part of the Stuarts were not mollified at James's death.  His son, Charles I, as a result of several factors of which insincere Protestantism was just one, followed in his grandmother's footsteps to the Executioner's Block in 1649. 

Things went better for the next Stuart king, Charles II.  Restored to power after the humorless years of Cromwellian dictatorship, Charles II was a welcome change of pace.  Not particularly concerned with religious matters, whether Catholic or Protestant, he was perhaps the most religiously tolerant of any European monarch of the seventeent century.   He was far more concerned with enjoying the pleasures of the flesh in this world, than the pleasures of an afterlife in Heaven.  When he died, he had many children, but none legitimate.  No bastard would be crowned in Westminster Abbey!  The throne, instead, went to Charles' brother, the staunchly Catholic James II.

Some in Parliament wanted to deny James II the throne.  However, James was growing old.  His deceased first wife had been a devout Protestant, and had raised their children, now adult women (no sons), also as Protestants.   James had married again, this time to a Catholic princess from Italy, but after 12 years their marriage was childless.  The next in line to the throne was James's Protestant daughter, Mary, the wife of William of Orange.  Surely, England could survive a few years under an aging Catholic king, until Mary succeeded him.

Of course, things often turn out differently than planned.  Two years after James became king, there was an annoucement that his wife of 12 years was pregnant.  Nine months later, James and his Catholic wife announced the birth of a son, also named James, the new Catholic heir to the English throne.  Suddenly, what had been planned as only a brief Catholic interlude now had the appearance of a stable Catholic dynasty, and one that looked to the Absolutism of France's Louis XIV as its model.  

Many doubted that the infant James was really the king's son at all.  Many suspected he was an imposter, a baby who had been smuggled into the birthing room to provide a Catholic heir to the throne.  Even those who believed the child was the legitimate heir viewed the birth with great dread.  Plots were devised to dispose of the child, and perhaps the parents as well. 

 And that brings us back to the lullaby.  There are several theories concerning the origins of "Rock-a-bye Baby".  It may have been written in America as a description of the way Native American women on the East Coast sometimes suspended makeshift baby cradles from the limbs of trees to rock children to sleep.   But I prefer another widely held view.  Many believe the song and its gruesome lyrics originated in 1687 or 1688, and the baby in question is James, the infant son of James II.  The original lyrics are:

Hush-a-bye baby, in the treetop.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall

Down tumbles baby, cradle and all.

The metaphor's translation:

Hush-a-bye James, heir to the throne,

A Revolution is coming, and the dynasty will rock.

When the Revolution succeeds, the dynasty will fall

Down with James, and the entire Stuart dynasty!

Of course, the song could simply express the wish that someone would string baby James to a sabotaged tree limb and watch him tumble to his death at the first strong wind.  Regardless, times were tough for those Stuarts, and the song of their downfall has remained with us all of these years as a beloved lullaby.  Go figure.