In his sleevenotes to Lizzie's Princess of the Thistle (Topic 1969, reissued by Springthyme, 1987), Peter Hall commented "...there are a number of pieces like the present song which is from the time of the Old Pretender." I don't know if he had any evidence for that statement, which appears with hindsight to have been based on a misunderstanding. James Porter and Herschel Gower (Jeannie Robertson: Emergent Singer, Transformative Voice, Tuckwell Press 1995) had the benefit of a great deal of personal contact with Jeannie and her daughter, together with archival material, and were able to go into greater detail:
"Hamish Henderson learned this song from Jock MacShannon while engaged in fieldwork in Kintyre (ref. Stephanie Smith, A Study of Lizzie Higgins as a Transitional Figure in the Oral Tradition of Northeast Scotland, M.Litt. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1975). He then taught it to Jeannie, who substituted "James" for MacShannon's "George" in the first stanza, presumably because of the number of Stuart kings of Scotland with that name. She subsequently taught it to Lizzie, who has recorded the song on disc. Smith has suggested that the change of names was to make the text more Scottish, or more local, and the presence of words like "mavis" (thrush) hints at a nineteenth-century reworking and localisation of a text such as that recorded by Sam Henry (1923-29, 2:282) from a County Antrim informant. The last line of verse 2 has "When the lark and the linnet and the nightingale sing". Henry's first stanza runs:
I once was a ploughboy but a soldier I'm now; I courted lovely Molly, a milkmaid I vow; I courted lovely Molly; I delight in her charms, For many's the long night I rolled in her arms.
No king is mentioned in Henry's five stanzas, the last of which introduced the "rue and thyme" motif familiar from various texts of "Green Grow the Laurels". It is probable that Jock MacShannon came by the song from Kintyre-Ulster contact."
Although this doesn't establish the song's original provenance (a lot of Ulster song derives from the Scottish repertoire), it does demonstrate that Lizzie's own set was likely to have come from Ireland and that it was not, as Hall had supposed, a Jacobite piece.