Nero the Second

"Nero the Second" or "Nero II" is a traditional ballad that was popular amongst Jacobites in Great Britain and Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Composed around 1715, the year of a major Jacobite rising, it was considered a seditious libel by the authorities. The Nero of the title, a reference to the tyrannical Roman Emperor Nero, is a thinly disguised version of George I the Hanoverian who had come to the throne in 1714. Jacobites supported a rival Stuart claimant the English-born James Francis Edward Stuart, styled James III by his followers, who was now living in exile.