On Richmond Hill there lives a lass,
More bright than May-day morn,
Whose charms all others maids’ surpass,
A rose without a thorn.

This lass so neat,
With smiles so sweet,
Has won my right good will.

I’d crowns resign
To call thee mine,
Sweet lass of Richmond Hill!

ON October 17, 1766, in a house on Leyburn High Street, a baby called Frances I’Anson was born – that is exactly 200 years ago, almost to the day, and that may be the only fact in this article.

Frances I’Anson grew up to become a great beauty who was the inspiration behind a song that was top of the pops in the late 18th Century, Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.

It is a folksy song which is still popular today in several different forms – the British Army uses it as a march – and its lyrics contain a truly endearing image of Ms I’Anson: she was so beautiful that she was “a rose without a thorn”.

The house in which Frances was born is now a DIY shop, but her grandfather William, who built it himself, etched his initials on the pediment over the door: “WIA 1746.”

Her father was also William, a Wensleydale lawyer, and her mother was Martha, who had grown up in Hill House in Richmond – a mansion which still stands beside the traffic lights at the top of Frenchgate. When Hill House was built in 1586, it was on the highest inhabited spot, although now Gallowgate has crawled up the steep hill behind it.

Frances was baptised in Wensley church on November 11, 1766, but her father was becoming embroiled in a couple of awkward legal cases. In one of them, he represented Lord Pomfret who claimed ownership to lead-workings in Swinnergill in Swaledale from Thomas Smith. The battle turned nasty, and in 1772 William was convicted of inciting and taking part in a riot: he was among 30 men, whom he had recruited, who damaged the lead smelting mill being operated by Mr Smith. It was not the first time Mr Smith’s property had been attacked and William was fined heavily.

He was also deeply embarrassed, and in 1773 he left Leyburn, taking his family with him.

They settled in London, where William quickly re-established himself as a successful attorney – this time without offering additional violent services. The family home in Bedford Row became a venue for fashionable theatrical soirees and it may have been at one of those that Frances, approaching her 20th birthday, met Leonard MacNally.

He was an Irish barrister and writer, who had just had a big hit with his opera based on the story of Robin Hood, and soon he was wooing the sweet lass whose mother came from Richmond Hill House.

The wooing was successful. On January 16, 1787, he and Frances were married in Hanover Square in London. Her father, though, was opposed to the match and wrote her out of his will – there are indications that later they became reconciled.

On August 1, 1789, MacNally published his latest poetic ditty, The Lass of Richmond Hill, clearly inspired by his new wife, in a newspaper where it was spotted by tunesmith, James Hook. Hook turned the line “I’d crowns resign to call thee mine” into a hookline, and when it was sung by Charles Incledon – the Frank Sinatra of his day – it took London by storm.

In 1792, MacNally took his growing family back to Dublin, but their lavish lifestyle caused debts to crowd in on him. To pay them off, he became a double agent, defending Irish patriots in court but passing their details to the English secret service – treachery that only became known decades after his death. Perhaps it was this dark side to his nature that had caused William I’Anson, whose own roguish streak had forced him to leave Wensleydale, to disapprove of the marriage.

Frances never knew of this illicit source of income, as she died in Dublin aged only 29, on September 30, 1795.

Her connection to the biggest hit of her day has enabled her name to live on – although it took a century for her fame to be recognised in North Yorkshire.

Such was the popularity of The Lass of Richmond Hill, theories grew up about the identity of the lass, the songwriter and the Richmond.

The hookline – “I’d crowns resign to call thee mine” – led to the claim that it was written by the Prince of Wales, who became King George IV, but was prepared to give it all up for his married mistress, Maria FitzHerbert, who lived in Richmond in Surrey (where there is a Richmond Hill).

There were other claimants – indeed, in the King’s Head in our own Richmond, there is a portrait entitled “The Lass of Richmond Hill” which actually shows Lady Sarah Lennox, whose illicit relationship with George III is said by some to have inspired the song.

Frances’s claim was only forcefully put forward at the end of the 19th Century, principally by John Bell, the founder of the Ripon and Richmond Chronicle (which, since 1894, has been part of the D&S Times), and even the residents of Surrey came to accept it was the Yorkshire charms that had brought the song into being.

Even though Frances may never have been to Hill House in Richmond at all – it was her mother who had the connection there.

Richmond historian Leslie Wenham researched the song in the 1980s and published his findings in a booklet. As the booklet nears its end, you can feel him reluctantly coming to the conclusion that his town’s claims were as much coincidence as they were fact, and that he could see the commercial reasoning behind the songwriter namechecking the most fashionable part of London in his chorus.

After all, the Girl from Ipanema would not have been so memorable had she hailed from Skinningrove, no matter how tall, tan, young and lovely she might have been.

So perhaps we are factually correct to say that on Monday all we have to celebrate is the 200th anniversary of the birth of a girl in a house in Leyburn.