Artist: Harry Cox
Author: traditional
Label: EFDSS
Year: 1945

BBC recording; see also: The Fowler. The Bonny Bunch Of Roses is what Napoleon so desperately craved for: stands for the British Isles and symbolizes the bond between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The song is probably Irish originally. There's a version mentioned in Chicago by piper and flute player John Ennis, who followed up Chief O'Neill at the head of the influential Chicago Irish Music Club (1903). Sometimes crediting George Brown who wrote broadsides in the 1830s. That's the period wherein the action takes place: the song is a conversation between the son of Napoleon who intends to re-conquer the world at the head of a new army after his father's death and his stepmother who tempers the ambition by praising the strength of the British army.