Hi Jag,

Dunn's version is a slower version than Frank Harte's but they have the same text (with variations), phrasing, form etc-- so I'd say they are the same. It's Henry in Motherwell's Manuscript, p. 69 (c. 1827). From the recitation of Margaret Bain, in the parish of Blackford, Perthshire.

1 'What's become of your hounds, King Henrie, my son?
What's become of your hounds, my pretty little one?'

Of the Henry name Gilchrist comments (1907 JFSS): "The occurrence of the name "King Henry" in the ballad more commonly known as "Lord Rendal" is perhaps due to a reminiscence of Henry I's death from eating a dish of lanmpreys, on his return from a hunting expedition. It seems quite possible that a story arose that the dish had been tampered with, or that the "lampreys" were euphemistically named, and hence that the king died of poison, not simple gluttony. A somewhat similar poisoning circumstance in connection with the death of King John is recorded in the old chronicle which relates that a certain monk poisoned, with the venom from a toad, a wassail-cup, of which the king drank and thereafter swelled and died. See Scott's Bordler Minstrelsy, note to "Lord Rendal."

It is also imaginable that the "King Henry" referred to may have been the "Young King Henry" who was crowned in the lifetime of his father, Henry II, and died of "a violent fever and flix" while fighting against him, in France. There is a possibility that poison was suspected in his case, also; but it seems much more likely that the person who first introduced the name of Henry into the ballad had in mind the monarch who succumbed to the dish of lampreys."

It's Henry in Germany late 1700s, early 1800s. See: the A version in Deutscher Liederhort by Ludwig Christian Erk, 1856, it begins:

A. Schlangenköchin. [Snake- cook]

"Wo bist du denn so lang gewesn, Heinerich, mein lieber Sohn?" ["Where have you been for so long, Henry, my dear son?"]
"Ich bin bei meinem Feinslieb chen gewesn, Frau Mutter mein, o weh!" ["I've been to my sweetheart's, my mother, oh my!"]

* * * *

Richie