The THIRD of November the Duke of Vandosm was under water, the fourth of November the Queen was delivered of a daughter, the fifth of November we were like to have a great slaughter, and the sixth of November was the next after

Insights

Satire of news

The verse mimics a street ballad or newsbill, piling notable tidings into a jingle. By ending with the tautology that the sixth follows the fifth, it mocks the breathless reporting that treats trivia as headlines.

Portents deflated

Royal births and plots sound like omens, yet the last line collapses grandeur into banality. Fate’s ‘signs’ resolve into the obvious: days simply follow one another.

Memory device

The stepped dates and chiming rhymes (‘daughter / slaughter / after’) show how communities mnemonicize events, turning public history into portable doggerel.

Court and continent

‘Duke of Vandosm’ (Vendôme) and ‘under/past the water’ hint at cross-Channel affairs—embassy, campaign, or transit—compressing foreign politics into a comic postcard.

Public danger normalized

The fifth of November’s ‘great slaughter’ evokes the Gunpowder Plot; placing it amid everyday tidings domesticates catastrophe into calendar routine, a folk way of mastering fear.

Ray’s variant

Seventeenth-century collections gloss the opening as ‘past the water,’ consistent with a travel or crossing note; the rhyme’s flexibility—‘under/past’—shows oral transmission adapting sense to sound.

Gunpowder resonance

The ‘fifth of November’ line echoes the annual memory of 1605; by yoking it to a nursery cadence, the culture file-shares high treason as festive recollection (bonfires, verses), half solemn, half playful.

Probable court birth

‘The Queen was delivered of a daughter’ fits the dynastic chronicle mode; listeners would plug in a known November royal birth (e.g., a Stuart princess) without needing precise year—content is less the exact referent than the trope of courtly tidings.

Bathos as critique

The final line’s mere tautology is deliberate bathos: after mounting drama, the rhyme falls flat to lampoon credulous appetite for ‘great matters’ in the news market.

Temporal stitching

By quilting disparate events into consecutive dates, the verse imitates how rumor and broadside knit politics, court life, and public peril into a single narrative fabric.

Folk chronicle

This is chronicle verse—history reduced to a singsong reel—revealing how popular culture archived elite affairs through cadence rather than archival precision.

Rhetorical Devices

Anaphora

The repeated ‘the third… the fourth… the fifth… the sixth’ drums a calendrical march, aiding memorization and comic expectation.

Rhyme and chiming

Near-rhyme links ‘daughter / slaughter / after,’ binding unlike events with sound and turning news into chant.

Bathos

After escalating from duke to queen to near-massacre, the close—‘the next after’—deflates the build-up, producing comic anticlimax.

Parataxis

Clauses are simply stacked with commas, mimicking breathless report without analysis—part of the satire on newsy narration.

Cataloging

A list of tidings in quick succession creates the sense of a news-ticker, compressing heterogeneous items into a single reel.