The song was among the very first that Sharp collected, being taken down in Hambridge in September 1903, the same month that he began his epic collection. The singer was Tom (Theodore) Spracklan (or Sprachan, Sprachlan, a dairyman. Three years later, and also in Somerset, he found two more fine variant melodies for the song. One of them was from 74 year-old John Cully of Farrington Gurney, and the third was sung by Capt. Lewis of Minehead. All of their three tunes seem to be related, and presumably are derived from the original Irish melody to which it was sung, 'The Bunch of Rushes'.

George Gardiner also found the song in Dorset (his informant was Mr Charles Windebank), but there it was sung to 'The Rose Tree', a tune recommended in some broadsides and presumably being chosen merely to agree with the title. In 1905 Henry Hammond heard 'The Bonny Bunch of Rushes-o' sung by Robert Barrett of Piddletown in Dorset. Frank Purslow published this version in Marrowbones on the next page to Mr Windebank's 'The Bonny Bunch of Roses-o'.

Steve Roud, in The New Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (2012), revealed that the song was the work of a prolific broadside writer, George Brown of London. Unusually, Brown's name appears on one of the earliest print runs for the song, produced by William Taylor of Waterloo Road in Lambeth, where 'The Bunch of Rushes' is named as the preferred tune. Another broadside with the author's name, by J. Hill of London, is on the Bodleian Broadside Ballads website. Taylor's business finished no later than 1837, but Roud's reasonable surmise is that Brown wrote the song soon after the death of François Bonaparte in 1832.

'The Bunch of Rushes' might well be the same song as 'The New Bunch of Loughero' [i.e. rushes] from which Brown took some lines, or it could be a related melody, such as 'An Bins?n Luachra', a song found in Connacht and Munster, which is usually translated as “the bunch of rushes”; however, bins?n really means a bench or (as in the song) a bed.

It seems that Brown found the Napoleonic theme useful as he wrote at least two other songs about Bonaparte, one of which again included the “bonny bunch of roses” phrase.

François Charles Joseph Bonaparte (1811 – 32), styled Napoleon II by the Bonapartists although he was never crowned, was the son of Napoleon I and Marie Louise of Austria. After 1814 he was kept in Austria and being the unwilling cause of numerous Bonapartist conspiracies was under constant surveillance. His health was always poor, and his existence lonely and unhappy. Contrary to the sentiments in the song he never showed the slightest interest in renewing the military glories of his father, and his mother ignored him until he lay dying of consumption.

The father of Marie Louise was Francis I of Austria who had made three alliances against France by 1809, which explains the fanciful line about her begging for his life.

While the French contingent in Napoleon’s Grande Armée of 1812 is thought to have approximated 300 000, his allies brought its total strength up to at least 500 000, and I have seen an estimate of up to 750 000. It is thought that about a tenth eventually returned from Russia.