(Pick A Letter to Choose a Rhyme!)

Notes

Here's another version from The Nursery Rhymes of England 4th Edition (1846), edited by James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps:

The King of France, with twenty thousand men,
Went up the hill, and then came down again;
The king of Spain, with twenty thousand more,
Climbed the same hill the French had climbed before.

Here's another one about the King of France from The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang and illustrated by L. Leslie Brooke (1897):

The King of France, and four thousand men,
They drew their swords, and put them up again.

Comments

Halliwell wrote: "In a tract, called 'Pigges Corantoe, or Newes from the North,' 4to Lond. 1642, p. 3, this is called 'Old Tarlton's Song.' It is perhaps a parody on the popular epigram of 'Jack and Jill.' I do not know the period of the battle to which it appears to allude, but Tarlton died in the year 1588, so that the rhyme must be earlier."

Thanks and Acknowledgements

The first version of this rhyme can be found in The Real Mother Goose (1916), illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright and in Halliwell's The Nursery Rhymes of England 4th Edition (1846).