Sir John Berkenhead

Sir John Berkenhead (1617–1679) was a royalist journalist and satirist, editor of the Oxford newsbook Mercurius Aulicus during the Civil War, and later a member of Parliament and a knight.

The poem here is the ballad on the St James's Day fight of 1666 against the Dutch, which C. H. Firth prints in Naval Songs and Ballads (Navy Records Society, 1908) with the attribution to Berkenhead.