BY the time you read this I shall be embroiled in the economic travails of Ethiopia; when, that is, not preoccupied by a possible resurgence of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru, or anxiously awaiting the outcome of a recount in the Anguillan elections.

Minutia on all these great issues will flow, crystal clear, around our camp fire on the shores of Lake Garda, especially at the time when, in the coarse grass at the foot of the olive trees, the glow worms are at their brightest. For it is in the deep twilight hours that short-waves, rippling out from Bush House past its engraved piety about nation speaking peace unto nation, seem best to surmount the Italian Dolomites to our north.

Come tomorrow tea-time, though, when there is something every far-flung Englishman really needs to know, the scores from such as mighty St James' Park and humble Feethams, reception will be bad enough to provoke a re-telling of the old joke about the peculiar English spoken by a jungle aboriginal. His accent was faultless but his words were interspersed with whistles, sussuration and fading; he had, it turned out, learned the language via BBC World Service.

It is all very frustrating. But never quite annoying enough for me to deny myself the periodic fix of Lillibullero. They have been cutting back on the use of this stirring signature tune of the World Service: it no longer precedes every hourly news bulletin and Carruthers, he who often remarks over dinner that the natives are restless tonight, has written to The Times from his colonial fastness to complain.

The BBC, however, insists that it is not going to phase out the rousing old tune, so redolent of empire and the stiff upper lip.

We don't get the words of the old ballad, of course. It would be political incorrectness sufficient to provoke a renewal of the Battle of the Boyne, let alone end the Northern Ireland peace process, to broadcast them a dozen times a day around the world. For the song was written in mockery of Irish Catholics and its author claimed to have "sung James II out of three kingdoms".

What makes all this topical for Past Lives is the fact that the song was written by Thomas Wharton, son of the Lord Wharton whose 1696 bequest of bibles for children of the deserving poor is still being financed by the income from land in Swaledale, as detailed here last month. Thomas, who became Marquess of Wharton, matched the insulting lyrics to an existing tune, so the BBC is able to disclaim any intention to offend.

The Swaledale angle is doubly there because Thomas Wharton's rather puerile lyrics were intended in 1687 to discredit the administration in Ireland of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell. Centuries later it was a Lord Tyrconnell and his family who owned Kiplin Hall, the Jacobean mansion whose parkland near Scorton, Richmond, is brushed by the Swale.

The story of Kiplin and its extensive refurbishment courtesy of a huge national lottery grant, has also been told in this column, with special reference to Miss Bridget Talbot; her convuluted family tree included the above Richard Talbot, whose brief period as James II's lord deputy in charge of Ireland was ended when the Protestant ascendancy was reasserted on the Boyne in 1690.

These are two of the many verses that the Bad Lord Wharton - he was a notorious and lifelong debauchee - wrote to the tune that until then had existed as a pretty piece for flute or recorder:

Dare was an old prophesy found in a bog,

Lilli burlero, bullen a-la

'Ireland shall be ruled by an ass and a dog.'

Lero, lero, lilli burlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.

Lero, lero, lilli burlero, lero, lero, bullen a-la.

And now dis prophesy is come to pass,

Lilli burlero, etc.

For Talbot's de dog and James is de ass,

Lilli burlero, etc.

Talbot had come to London from Ireland at the Restoration in 1660 and the new royal family quickly recruited him to do some dirty work. James II - pictured below - gave him the Tyrconnell title and command of the troops in Ireland. The Glorious Revolution in 1688 brought to nought all his schemes to undo Protestantism and he tried in vain to intrigue with the incoming king, William of Orange.

Most sources give no provenance for the Lillibullero tune, but the Dictionary of National Biography's piece about Wharton says it was a quickstep by Purcell (1659-95), that most English of composers. One contemporary commentator said of the song's impact on Ireland: "The whole army and at last all people in city and country were singing it perpetually. Perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect."

Nor did the words die with the passing of the immediate crisis in Ireland. By 1765 Thomas Percy thought them important enough to be included in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. And just before that, Laurence Sterne, writing The Adventures of Tristram Shandy at Coxwold near Thirsk, made Lillibullero the favourite air of "my Uncle Toby" who had served on the Boyne.

Bad Lord Wharton himself briefly became viceroy (lord lieutenant, actually) of Ireland towards the end of his life and he claimed he then "did more towards rooting out popery there" than any of his predecessors had done in three years. That's as maybe, but in most spheres of his life he was an adept exponent of the Big Lie.

Goebbels could hardly have put it better: "Are you such a simpleton," Wharton once asked a critic aghast at the fluency and insolence of his lying, "as not to know that a lie well believed is as good as if it were true?"

The DNB says that to win parliamentary elections, as he routinely did before he became a peer, "he spared no expense, took a pride in making his constituents drunk on the best ale, and knew all the electors' children by name."

He was a serial litigant and, given his reputation as a liar, we can probably take it for granted that in a case that lasted from 1702 until near his death in 1715 he was never the wronged party in a dispute over ownership of lead mines in Yorkshire.

Dean Swift, of Gulliver's Travels fame, even published a book devoted to the character assassination of Wharton, whom he summed up as wholly occupied by "vice and politics, so that bawdy, prophaneness and business fill up his conversation".

He married twice, both times reaping a huge dowry. His first wife brought him £10,000 plus £2,500 a year, but we are told that the lady's person "was not so agreeable to the bridegroom as to secure his constancy".

All in all, I'd say, a man who was a classic example of a son reacting against the lifelong virtue of his father, the pioneering Nonconformist whose legacy still helps support the United Reformed Church at Low Row in Upper Swaledale. The URC minister annually conducts a service in the ruins of the fellside chapel at nearby Smarber that the Good Lord Wharton built for his lead miners