Froggy Came A-Courting (And So Did I)

There’s an old English folk song I half-remember from childhood — “A Froggy Went A-Courting.” It drifts in with its lilting tune and strange courtly animals: Froggy with his sword and top hat, Miss Mousie blushing in her bower, Uncle Rat wielding political influence like a Tudor privy councillor. It always felt oddly regal for a children's rhyme, as if something murky and grown-up squatted just beneath the surface.

It turns out that’s not far off. Some say the song refers to the courtship of Queen Elizabeth I by Francis, Duke of Anjou — a match that would have sealed an alliance between England and France, if it weren’t for the Queen’s famously elusive approach to matrimony. Elizabeth, twenty years his senior and master of the teasing no, strung poor Anjou along with letters and nicknames. Among them, charmingly and coldly: “Froggy.”

This pleases me immensely.

Partly because it fits. Frogs — slimy, foreign, prone to croaking — were already comic villains in the English imagination. To call a French duke “Froggy” wasn’t just playful; it was imperial and deliciously rude. It smacks of playground cruelty elevated to statecraft. But mostly, it pleases me because I grew up watching Blackadder, and Miranda Richardson’s version of Elizabeth — Gloriana, Queenie, the spoiled darling with blood on her hands and bubblegum in her brain — would absolutely have called him Froggy. With glee. With menace. Possibly while ordering someone’s head removed because they failed to curtsey at the right angle.

I loved that Queen. Still do. Her glittering eyes and shrieks of laughter, the swings between sadism and sulk — she was a monarch with the temperament of a toddler and the cunning of Machiavelli. In her hands, statecraft became farce, and farce became oddly moving. She made tyranny charming and ridiculous. It was brilliant satire — but also, maybe, a little closer to the historical truth than we liked to admit.

And now here I am, centuries later, living just next to Anjou. The region, not the duke. Froggy’s old stomping ground. The name appears on signposts when I drive, next to vineyards and châteaux, as if history had puddled and set around me. Some evenings in summer, when the frogs are out in force along the riverbanks near Nantes, their song rises all around us. I imagine the Duke somewhere among them — hopeful, moist, croaking his proposal into the twilight while a distant Queen listens, smiling.

I find myself oddly fond of him. Poor Froggy.

But what a tale to hop into.