Time (Jan. 27, 1936):

"How is the Crown to answer on Judgment Day why there was never created Sir Rudyard Kipling or Lord Kipling? To his grave without a ribbon to stick in his coat or a peerage which would have died with him, the Empire sent last week a man whom an Empire poll even now would doubtless choose as the supreme poet of Empire.

"Rudyard Kipling had his own explanation for why he was not made Poet Laureate and it had no reference to the Widow at Windsor. Some years ago an admirer involuntarily exclaimed, 'I always had thought you were Sir Rudyard!'

"'Perhaps I would have been — who knows?' answered plain Mr. Kipling in one of the rare moments when he permitted himself to be caught off guard. 'But one day long ago, in an exhilarated and irresponsible moment, I wrote a little song. Possibly you know it?'

"This little song,The Bastard King of England, sturdy Kipling friends claim he never wrote, and it is omitted from his Collected Works. A better reason and more probable for not making him Poet Laureate was that in such an official post it is safer for the United Kingdom to have someone who confines himself to ‘poetic themes’ and does not lash out with infuriated honesty at Boches, the Yankees and the cinema."

Probative value of the anonymously sourced, second (or further)-hand, undated "Kipling" quote: nil.