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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2020
Two legal documents recently discovered among The National Archives at Kew in London provide new information about Henry Purcell's final years. The only known instances of the composer's involvement with the law, these rare archival finds shed light on his familial relations and financial circumstances at that point in his career when he was turning his attention to the London stage. The first case involves Purcell's sister-in-law Amy Howlett, who owed him £40; and the second concerns his unpaid bill at an exclusive West End retailer's. The new material confirms beyond doubt the identity of Purcell's in-laws, and shows that he was not just short of money in the 1690s, but that he was actually in debt at the time of his death. Other areas of enquiry include the élite social milieu in which the Purcells increasingly moved, and their possible place of residence in 1691–3. These aspects are discussed in relation to Purcell's enhanced public profile at that time, and within the wider context of the culture of consumption and credit in late seventeenth-century England. The two lawsuits are transcribed and translated in full, and their legal implications explicated.
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Professors Helen Berry, Robert D. Hume and Judith Milhous who have given generously of their time and expertise in the course of this paper's preparation. I should also like to thank Professor Michael Burden and Drs Margaret Laurie and David Mateer for their advice on specific matters. Any errors that occur are my responsibility alone.
1 Franklin B. Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, 1659–1695: His Life and Times (2nd rev. edn, Philadelphia, 1983), xvii.
2 Michael Burden, ‘“He had the Honour to be Your Master:” Lady Rhoda Cavendish's Music Lessons with Henry Purcell’, Music & Letters, 76 (1995), 532–39, at 532; see also Curtis A. Price, ‘In Search of Purcell's Character’, in Curtis Price (ed.), Purcell Studies (Cambridge, 1995), 1–5.
3 According to this story, Purcell died from complications arising from a cold that he caught after returning home late and inebriated, only to find that the servants, acting on his wife's instructions, had locked him out; see Sir John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols. (London, 1776), iv. 507–8. The issue is explored in greater detail in Maureen Duffy, Henry Purcell (London, 1994), 67–8.
4 The obstacles faced by anyone using these documentary classes are outlined in Amanda Bevan (ed.), Tracing your Ancestors in The National Archives (7th rev. edn, London, 2006), 499.
5 As an example, see Figure 1.
6 See Documents 1 and 2.
7 Duffy, Henry Purcell, 62–3, et passim; Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, 283.
8 The National Archives (henceforth TNA): Prerogative Court of Canterbury (henceforth PCC) Inventories; PROB 5/5023.
9 See London, Lambeth Palace Library (henceforth Llp): Vicar General's Marriage Allegations VM I/10 (5 February 1677 to 16 May 1679), and the transcription in George J. Armytage (ed.), Allegations for Marriage Licences Issued by the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Harleian Society, 34 (London, 1892), 218.
10 Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London, 1989), 32.
11 TNA: PCC Wills; PROB 11/351/475.
12 London Metropolitan Archives (henceforth LMA): COL/CHD/LA/03/011/024.
13 Surrey History Centre, Woking. Registers of St Mary Magdalene, Richmond upon Thames (1657–1682): P7/1/2; see also J. Challenor C. Smith (ed.), The Parish Registers of Richmond, Surrey, Publications of the Surrey Parish Register Society, 1 (London, 1903), 73. In the seventeenth century, the title ‘Mr’. generally denoted the status of a gentleman; see Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London, 1983), 24–9.
14 LMA: Registers of All Hallows the Great, MS 5159 (Baptisms and Christenings).
15 Ibid., MS 5159 (Burials), under the dates 6 and 22 February.
16 LMA: DL/AL/C/003/MS09052/024, (1684 A-H), will 86. This precise arithmetic division of his effects into equal shares conformed with the requirements both of ecclesiastical law and the ‘Custom of London’; see Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London and New York, 1993), 28.
17 Anonymous, Reasons Humbly offered by the Soapmakers of the City of London (London, c.1695).
18 See Documents 1 for a transcription and translation.
19 For more on the use of the cognovit as security for a debt, and judgments suffered by consent, see Joshua Williams, Principles of the Law of Personal Property (16th edn, London, 1906), 209–11.
20 The average annual household income in 1688 was approximately £39; see Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘Revising England's Social Tables, 1688–1812′, Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 385–408; and idem, ‘Reinterpreting Britain's Social Tables, 1688–1913′, Explorations in Economic History, 20 (1983), 94–109. According to a private communication from Robert D. Hume, £40 had the purchasing power of well over £8,000 in today's money.
21 See Andrew Ashbee (ed.), Records of English Court Music, 9 vols. (Aldershot, 1986–96) ii. 163–66 and viii. 282; Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, 179; and Andrew Pinnock, ‘Theatre Culture’, in Rebecca Herissone (ed.), The Ashgate Companion to Henry Purcell (Farnham, 2012), 165–99, at 165, citing Bruce Wood, Purcell: An Extraordinary Life (London, 2009), 132.
22 Pinnock, ‘Theatre Culture’, 165.
23 For further background and a discussion of Purcell's ‘Advertisement’ at the back of the score, see Rebecca Herissone, ‘Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing in Restoration England’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 243–90. Copies of Dioclesian were still being advertised in Henry Playford's General Catalogue of 1697; John Walsh senior took over Playford's stock in 1707, and he and his son continued to advertise the availability of Purcell's score until 1741.
24 This preface is omitted from most copies of the score; see Herissone, ‘Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing’, 245 n.3. In a recent essay Ellen Harris states that the quotation is from the preface to John Eccles's The Judgment of Paris (1702), despite referring to Herissone's article, which identifies the source correctly; see Ellen T. Harris, ‘Music Distribution in London during Handel's Lifetime: Manuscript Copies versus Prints’, in Craig A. Monson and Roberta Montemorra Marvin (eds), Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles (Rochester, NY, 2013), 95–117, at 108.
25 Duffy, Henry Purcell, 194. There is an acquittance (a receipt), signed by Purcell, for payment by the Abbey of one quarter of his £8 housing allowance up to Christmas 1691. The document, dated 9 January 1692, does not specify the property to which it refers, and the allowance could have been used in respect of any house in which he chose to live. In other words, it did not tie him to Bowling Alley, or to any dwelling near, or belonging to, the Abbey; see Westminster Abbey Muniments 47667.
26 City of Westminster Archives Centre (henceforth CWAC): MS E872 (highway rate 1690–91), 68; ibid., MS E203 (poor-rate accounts 1690–91), pagination illegible.
27 She later paid the rates on the house; see CWAC: MS E309 (poor-rate assessments 1693–94), 72.
28 Cognovit notes still have a place in the US legal system; most states have outlawed or restricted their use in consumer-credit transactions, but they are still occasionally encountered in the business and mortgage sectors.
29 See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (henceforth ODNB), s.v. ‘Cracherode, Clayton Mordaunt’.
30 See Llp: Vicar General's Marriage Allegations VM I/10, and the transcription in Joseph Lemuel Chester and George J. Armytage (eds), Allegations for Marriage Licences…issued by the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury 1660–1679, Harleian Society, 23 (London, 1886), 289.
31 See Llp: Vicar General's Marriage Allegations VM I/12 (16 May 1681 to 1 November 1683); the date of the licence is inaccurately transcribed as 10 October in George J. Armytage (ed.), Allegations for Marriage Licences issued by the Vicar-General of the Archbishop of Canterbury: July 1679 to June 1687, Harleian Society, 30 (London, 1890), 110.
32 Walter C. Metcalfe (ed.), The Visitations of Essex, Harleian Society, 13–14, 2 vols. (London, 1878–79), ii. 646; CWAC: Registers of St Paul's Covent Garden, Burials 3, 206.
33 Richard Steele, Town-Talk (London, 1716), 5.
34 F. H. W. Sheppard (gen. ed.), The Survey of London 36: The Parish of St Paul Covent Garden (London, 1970), 26, quoting from Bedford's petition for his licence to build.
35 John Stow (ed. John Strype), A Survey of London, 6 Books. (London, 1720), vi. 87.
36 See Lawrence Stone, ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century’, in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980), 167–212; J. F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community 1525–1640 (Manchester and New York, 2005); and Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 2011). We know from contemporary legal records that the poet and dramatist Elkanah Settle (1648–1724), for whose tragedy Distress'd Innocence (1690) Purcell composed the incidental music, shopped in Covent Garden.
37 CWAC, MS 426/151: St Paul's Covent Garden, Churchwardens’ Accounts for 8 February 1692/3, at 14.
38 Ibid., MS H456-472: St Paul's Covent Garden, Overseers’ Accounts 1675–1693.
39 William A. Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books 1660–1718, 32 vols. (London, 1904–61), ix/2. 535.
40 Ibid., ix/2. 548.
41 Ibid., x/3. 1076, 1079. One of the Cracherodes’ competitors in Bedford Street, Thomas Alchorne and Partner, also supplied the fashion-conscious queen with a range of materials for which the bills and invoices still survive; see London, British Library (henceforth Lbl): MS Add. 5751A; CWAC: St Paul's Covent Garden, Overseers’ Accounts for the early 1690s; and Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (New Haven and London, 2005), 285–90.
42 Lbl: MS Add. 61346 (Blenheim Papers, vol. ccxlvi), f. 110.
43 See Documents 2 for a transcription and translation.
44 Because of disputes surrounding the creation of the new parish of St Paul's Covent Garden, which was carved out of an existing one (St Martin-in-the-Fields), the law was slow to recognize it as a distinct entity; however, the business was undoubtedly transacted in Cracherode's shop in Covent Garden. According to a conservative estimate, £100 had the purchasing power of about £20,000 in today's money.
45 Sir William Blackstone gives the clearest exposition of the early-modern woman's unenviable position before the law in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. A Facsimile of the First Edition of 1765–1769, 4 vols. (Chicago and London, 1979), iv. 430. See also Erickson, Women and Property, 24; Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 14; and J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (4th edn, Oxford and New York, 2007), chap. 28: ‘Persons: Marriage and its Consequences’.
46 However, juries almost always reduced to realistic levels the size of plaintiffs’ claims for such charges.
47 Blackstone, Commentaries, iii. 303–4.
48 See Cheryll Duncan, ‘“Young, Wild, and Idle:” New Light on Gaetano Guadagni's Early London Career’, The Opera Journal, 44 (2013), 3–28.
49 TNA: KB27/2123 (Michaelmas 1697), rot. 536.
50 TNA: CP40/3130 (Trinity 1694), rot. 319.
51 TNA: KB27/2106 (Hilary 1695), rot. 151; KB27/2124 (Hilary 1698), rot. 95.
52 The publications included A Choice Collection of Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinnet (1696), A Collection of Ayres, Compos'd for the Theatre (1697), Ten Sonata's in Four Parts (1697), Te Deum & Jubilate, for Voices and Instruments (1697), and Orpheus Britannicus, Book 1 (1698).
53 21 Jac. I. c.16; see Statutes at Large III: James I – William III (London, 1770), 100–2.
54 See Blackstone, Commentaries, iii. 307–8.
55 Frances later dedicated to them the Ten Sonata's and the first book of Orpheus Britannicus respectively. For Lady Rhoda, see Burden, ‘“He had the Honour to be Your Master”’; for more on the Purcell/Howard nexus, see Robert Thompson, ‘Sources and Transmission’, in Herissone (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion, 47–9.
56 Tim Reinke-Williams, ‘Women's Clothes and Female Honour in Early Modern London’, Continuity and Change, 26 (2011), 69–88.
57 Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford, 2012), chap. 1: ‘Introduction’, at 9–10.
58 Claire Walsh, ‘Shops, Shopping, and the Art of Decision Making in Eighteenth-Century England’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America 1700–1830, Studies in British Art, 17 (New Haven and London, 2006), 151–77.
59 The composer's use of fashionable dress as a means of self-promotion is discussed in Cheryll Duncan, ‘Henry Purcell and the construction of identity: iconography, heraldry and the Sonnata's of III Parts (1683)’, Early Music 2016 (in press).
60 Zimmerman, Henry Purcell, 191, states that ‘[s]traitened financial circumstances…were to be [Purcell's] lot during his last five years’; this may well have been the case, though the author cites no documentary evidence in support of this contention.
61 Her pension of £40 per annum was not paid until 25 March 1703, and even this was reduced to a paltry £20 from Michaelmas 1705, the year before she died; see Ashbee (ed.), Records of English Court Music, viii. 308, and Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books 1660–1718, xx/2. 83.
62 Wood, Purcell: An Extraordinary Life, 55.
63 The third year of William and Mary's reign covered the period 13 February 1691 to 12 February 1692. The rotulus number designates the point at which the case appears on the plea roll, without specifying the recto or verso side of the parchment; Purcell v. Howlett is therefore on the 909th ‘roll’. In the transcriptions that follow, expanded abbreviations and contractions are shown in italics; text placed between convergent oblique lines indicates an interlineation in the MS; text in square brackets is editorial.
64 Mark of contraction omitted in MS.
65 ‘eum’ for ‘eam’.
66 ‘Mia’, a contraction of ‘misericordia’, indicates at a glance that the defendant lost the case.
67 Punctuation has been added tacitly to the translations.
68 Literally ‘puts in his place’ the named attorney as his legal agent.
69 12 June, the first day of Trinity term 1691.
70 The tenth year of William III's reign extended from 13 February 1698 to 12 February 1699; Hilary term 1699 began on 23 January and ended on 13 February.
71 ‘vidua’ is superfluous here.
72 Arabic numbers in bold type are used to identify the multiple counts.
73 24 June 1698, the first day of Trinity term.
74 Dots indicate the omission of occasional redundancies in the legal language.
75 The assignment of breach that follows the counts was normally preceded by ‘nevertheless’ or ‘notwithstanding’.
76 Easter term 1698 began on 11 May.
77 23 January 1699, the first day of Hilary term.