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William Byrd, John Petre and Oxford, Bodleian Ms Mus. Sch. E. 423

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

David Mateer
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Extract

This manuscript consists of the Contratenor only of what was originally a set of six partbooks. Had the collection survived intact, it would undoubtedly have ranked as one of the most important of all secular sources dating from the Elizabethan period, for it comprises a representative cross-section of most musical genres—English anthems, Latin motets, consort songs and instrumental pieces—and its 131 items include many unica. But the sheer size of the anthology is not the only reason why we should lament its tragically imperfect state. Mus. Sch. E. 423 is an important and authoritative source for the vocal music of William Byrd, as Philip Brett, Alan Brown and other scholars have shown. Writing more generally about the instrumental music it contains, Warwick Edwards has stated that its ‘authority as a consort source derives from its exclusion of all but a few faults against other sources’. The manuscript's special relevance to Byrd, then, not the mention the high quality of its musical and verbal texts, makes the loss of its companion books all the more regrettable.

Type
Articles
Information
Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle , Volume 29 , 1996 , pp. 21 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1996

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References

1 Madrigals, Songs and Canons (The Byrd Edition 16), 184; Cantiones Sacrae I (1589) (The Byrd Edition 2), 224; W. Edwards, ‘The Souces of Elizabethan Consort Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1974), i, 117.Google Scholar

2 Certain editors have consequently referred to the manuscript as a ‘second alto’ partbook.Google Scholar

3 This confirms the suspicions of Brett (‘The Songs of William Byrd’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1965), i, 22–3) and Edwards (The Sources', i, 116–7) who both suggest, in addition, John Parsons as a possible candidate; Edwards particularly makes an elaborate case for the latter.Google Scholar

4 Essex Record Office D/DP A17–22. Plate 1 is the first page of the accounts for 1576–7 and shows Bentley ‘s secretary script in its most careful mode. The hand responsible for Mus. Sch. E. 423 worked more fluently (Plates 2a and b), but it is nonetheless possible to demonstrate that it, too, is Bentley's. Both hands employ two forms of capital C; compare, for instance, ‘Childerditche’ (last marginal note in Plate 1) with ‘Chappell’ (at the top of Plate 2a), and ‘Cowbridge’ (in the entry relating to John West) with ‘Contratenor’. Both use minuscule d with or without a loop; sometimes the looped ascender of the letter is flattened and elongated so that it collides with previous characters, as in ‘Childerditche’ and ‘wycked’ (fourth line of underlay in Plate 2a). The P in ‘Parson Hunter’ and ‘Pickeringe’ (first marginal item and entry of Plate 1) should be compared with the P of ‘Peccatum’ in Plate 2b, particularly with respect to the flourished approach-stroke to the stem.Google Scholar

5 See Edwards, ArthurCharles, John Petre (London 1975), which draws heavily on these books; this is a useful and readable study, despite a number of minor errors. There are a few references to John Petre in F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary (London 1961), the standard work on his father; see also idem, ‘Notes and Queries’, Galpin Society Journal, 14 (1961), 73–5. The Petre accounts were examined from a musical perspective in David C. Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge 1981), 83–91, though without making the connection with Mus. Sch. E. 423.Google Scholar

6 See Emmison, Tudor Secretary, 210–16 and D/DP A 8 and 9.Google Scholar

7 The lute for which John paid ‘Mr Pietro’ 50s in September 1570 must have been an instrument of the highest quality.Google Scholar

8 D/DP A 9. Woodward, who refused to conform to the Elizabethan settlement, resigned his rectory in 1565, though he continued as Sir William's chaplain at Ingatestone Hall (Emmison, Tudor Secretary, 230, 278–9); in 1560, a David de la Hyde was ejected from his fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, for declining the oath of Supremacy (David Mateer, ‘The ‘Gyffard’ partbooks: Composers, Owners, Date and Provenance', Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 28 (1995), 30).Google Scholar

9 D/DP A17; it is not possible to give precise references, since the Petre accounts have not been foliated.Google Scholar

10 C. H. Hopwood ed., Middle Temple Records, 3 vols. (London 1904–5), i: Minutes of Parliament, 159; see also H. A. C. Sturgess, Register of Admissions to the… Middle Temple, 3 vols. (London 1949), i, 31.Google Scholar

11 It no doubt represents a fair copy of accounts prepared for Sir William's perusal. The care lavished on it by Bentley is apparent on every page, but just occasionally he slips up, as when he enters payment for a Valentine on ‘the xiiijth daye’ under March instead of February. The error is probably due as much to the disorganized state of his exemplar as to any inadvertence on his part.Google Scholar

12 Public Record Office (henceforth PRO) LC 2/3, Part 1, p. 52.Google Scholar

13 For the most recent biography of Plowden, see Geoffrey de C. Parmiter, Edmund Plowden: An Elizabethan Recusant Lawyer (Catholic Record Society, 1987).Google Scholar

14 In May 1577 he gave the same ensemble 5s. ‘for playinge at Thorndon’.Google Scholar

15 His godfathers were Lord Burleigh and Thomas, Earl of Sussex; see J. J. Howard and H. F. Burke eds., Genealogical Collections Illustrating the History of Roman Catholic Families (priv. pr., 1887), 38–9, 50.Google Scholar

16 D/DPA18.Google Scholar

17 The Queen had stayed at Chillington in August 1575 during the course of her progress through the Midland counties, and in return for his hospitality John Giffard was immediately summoned before the Privy Council to explain his habitual absence from worship at the local parish church. He was committed to the custody of the Bishop of Rochester but given temporary leave ‘to repair home to his howse, being as he alleadged, by reason of her Majesties late being there, out of order and unfurnished’. He was then released on condition that he attended church and used the prayer book in his chapel, but he made little effort to conform. In 1580 he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea, though his detention was later commuted to house arrest; see Wrottesley, George, Giffards from the Conquest to the Present Time in Collections for a History of Staffordshire N. S., v (1902), 130.Google Scholar

18 All these families were bonded not only by their adherence to the old faith, but by blood relationships and friendship. Talbot's mother was the aunt of John Giffard; the latter's younger brother, Humphrey, had been a contemporary of John Petre's at the Middle Temple; John Lyttelton and Gilbert Astley were cousins, and the latter's wife, Dorothy, was one of John Giffard's sisters. Sheldon's wife was Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Throgmorton of Coughton, Warwickshire; her grandfather's half-sister was John Giffard's mother.Google Scholar

19 D/DP A20; there may, of course, have been earlier evidence of their friendship in the lost accounts for 1577–86. They were certainly acquainted by 17 October 1581, the date of Byrd's letter on behalf of Dorothy Tempest, for there the composer mentions meeting the addressee ‘mr [Robert] Petre on[e] of ye officers of her Maties Exchequer …‘ at Sir John's house in Aldersgate Street; see Fellowes, E. H., William Byrd (London, 1948), 39 and the photographic reproduction of the letter opposite p. 42.Google Scholar

20 Robert Brough was married to Byrd's sister Barbara; this information is kindly supplied by Mr John Harley, whose recent study of the composer—William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot, 1997)—provides further details of the family's relationships. He is doubtless the same ‘Mr Broughe’ who, on 19 February 1583, paid forty shillings to the parish of St. Dunstan in the West ‘for the Olde Organs’; see London, Guildhall Library MS 2968/1, Churchwardens' accounts f. 335.Google Scholar

21 A similar payment is recorded at the end of March 1587; Brough's fee was increased to ten shillings a quarter in August 1590, in line with the growth in Petre's instrument collection.Google Scholar

22 See under ‘Charges for Children’. John, the Petres' third (but second surviving) son, was born on 4 September 1582.Google Scholar

23 D/DPA21.Google Scholar

24 The Petres probably spent every Christmas for the next nine years at Ingatestone.Google Scholar

25 See The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd (London 1978), 196. The pair was printed in Parthenia (1612/13) with the title ‘Pavan: Sir William Petre’, which misled Dr Emmison into thinking that it was written for the first Sir William; see Tudor Secretary, 312. The grandson named after him was knighted in 1603.Google Scholar

26 D/DP A22; D/DP A29 and 30 (Household Accounts of Ingatestone Hall, 1591–99).Google Scholar

27 For Petre's parliamentary career, see P. W. Hasler ed., History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558–1603, 3 vols. (London 1981), iii, 209–10; D/DP A26 (Household Accounts [Provisions] 1607–10); Frederic Chancellor, The Ancient Sepulchral Monuments of Essex (London 1890), 318; D/DP F14, 22, 23, 24, 29.Google Scholar

28 PRO Prob 11/122, f. 315–16v.Google Scholar

29 William Petre's account book for October 1597 to October 1610 is now Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, MS 1772.1; see Dawson, Giles, ‘A Gentleman's Purse’ Yale Review, 39 (1950), 631–46. Essex Record Office has a microfilm of Dawson's transcription of the manuscript, which is catalogued as TA 174.Google Scholar

30 See J. Bennett and P. Willetts, ‘Richard Mico’, Chelys, 7 (1977), 24; the article in Grove 6; John Bennett, ‘Byrd and Jacobean Consort Music: a look at Richard Mico’, Byrd Studies, ed. Alan Brown and Richard Turbet (Cambridge 1992), 129–40. For Mico's recusant leanings see Briggs, Nancy, ‘William, 2nd Lord Petre (1575–1637)‘, Essex Recusant, 10 pt. 2 (1968), 51–64.Google Scholar

31 'I have decided, furthermore (Most Illustrious Sir), that these Songs, completed long ago by me and sent to the Press, should be dedicated above all to you I am grateful to Professor Philip Brett for permission to quote from the translation of the dedication which is to appear in The Byrd Edition 7.Google Scholar

32 ‘Moreover, these musical products of my night labours have proceeded as copiously from your house (most dear to me and mine, by Hercules) as a harvest born from fertile soil…‘; ibid.Google Scholar

33 See Fellowes, E. H., William Byrd (London 1948), 20–6, 44.Google Scholar

34 TA 174, ff. 34v, 107; D/DP A26. We know from an inventory taken on 28 May 1608 that Byrd had his own room at West Horndon; see D/DP F218.Google Scholar

35 See British Library, Lansdowne MS 33, ff. 145–9; extracts, somewhat inaccurately transcribed, are printed in ‘The religious beliefs of the Petre family under Elizabeth I’ Essex Recusant, 3 pt. 1 (April 1961), 58–66, and Henry Foley, S.J., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 vols. (London 1877–84), ii, 586–9. Elliot may also have been responsible for the capture of Edmund Campion; see Reynolds, E. E., Campion and Parsons: The Jesuit Mission of 1580–1 (London, 1980), 117.Google Scholar

36 For a study of this phenomenon, see Gillian E. Brennan, ‘Papists and Patriotism in Elizabethan England’, Recusant History, 19 (1988), 1–15; Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London 1979); and John Bossy, ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism’, Past and Present, 21 (April 1962), 39–59. Among the State Papers I can find only two documents that acknowledge John Petre's adherence to the ancient faith; one is very early, dated c. 1574 (PRO SP12/99, item 55, f. 2) and the other, from c. 1582, couples ‘Sir John Peter & his Lady’ (PRO SP12/157, item 90, f. 196).Google Scholar

37 D/DP F8 and PRO Prob 11/64 (PCC 15 Tirwhite).Google Scholar

38 For an account of the trial and an assessment of Elliot's character, see Foley, B. C., ‘Bl. John Payne, Seminary Priest and Martyr—1582‘, Essex Recusant, 2 pt. 2 (August 1960), 48–75.Google Scholar

39 Essex Record Office, Q/SR 81/4. There is evidence that, before her marriage, Lady Petre was close to the Queen. In 1591 The Tragedie of Tancred and Gismund, which had been ‘… compiled by the Gentlemen of the Inner Temple and by them presented before her Maiestie’ in 1566/7, was published in revised form by one of its authors, an Essex clergyman named Robert Wilmot, who dedicated it to ‘the right Worshipfull and vertuous Ladies, the L. Marie Peter, & the Ladie Anne Graie …'; the prefatory matter recalls that first royal performance and speaks of ‘these Gentlemen, which with what sweetnesse of voice and livelinesse of action they then expressed it, they which were of her Maiesties right Honorable maidens can testifie', among them Mary Petre and Anne Grey.Google Scholar

40 London, British Library, Yelverton Papers: Add. MS 48023, f. 110; see also PRO SP12/157, item 88, f. 193. Incidentally, while Woodward was on his spying mission in Rome he met the elder Ferrabosco:Google Scholar

The xvijth of February 1579 [i.e. 1580]: Alfonsus an Itallian whoe was not long since one of the Quenes mates musitions came to craue acquaintance of doctor Allin he was released out of the inquisition not long before and went under sureties and had gotten licence for to gooe to Bolonga where he was borne & where he should have his libertie in time graunted if his usage were thought good and honest Cardinall Palliot was to geve him his libertie appointed by the Pope when he pleased. For wch cause he travailed to Bolonga wth William Shipwraye preist an englishman Chaplaine to Cardinall Paliot… (f. 106)Google Scholar

41 PRO SP12/168, item 31 (f. 74)Google Scholar

42 D/DP A18, December 1576, under ‘Rewardes and guyftes’. A William Perryn was employed as a minstrel at Lincoln's Inn from 1563 to 1600; see John R. Elliott, ‘Invisible Evidence: Finding Musicians in the Archives of the Inns of Court, 1464–1642', Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 26 (1993), 45–67. For an assessment of the importance of women in English Catholicism, see Bossy, John, ‘The Character of Elizabethan Catholicism', Past and Present, 21 (April 1962), 39–59 and English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London 1975), 158; Retha Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, Connecticut 1983); J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford 1984), 150–9; Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant women 1560–1640', Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. M. Prior (London 1985), 149–80; P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London 1993), ch. 3: ‘Anglicans, Puritans and Catholics 1558–1640'; and Michael O'Dwyer, ‘Catholic Recusants in Essex c. 1580 to c. 1600’ (M.A. thesis, London University, 1960), particularly ch. 4: ‘Recusant Wives in Essex'.Google Scholar

43 See Wulstan, David, ‘Where there's a will’, Musical Times, 135 (1994), 25–7.Google Scholar

44 Could this be the composer Kyrton whose Miserere occurs twice in Lbl Add. MS 29996?; see John Caldwell ed., Early Tudor Organ Music: I Music for the Office (Early English Church Music 6). For more on Danyell and the English Hospice, see Emden, A. B., A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford 1501–1540 (Oxford 1974), 160, and Anthony Kenny, ‘From Hospice to College 1559–1579‘ in The Venerabile (Sexcentenary Issue), 21 (May 1962), 218–73, especially 224 fn. 15.Google Scholar

45 In November he bought two quires of paper at Brentwood for his pupil.Google Scholar

46 Essex Record Office, Q/SR 78/46; 79/75; 79/100; 80/77 and 78. Clauses VI and VII of ‘An Act to retain the Queen's Majesty's Subjects in their due Obedience’ (23 Elizabeth I, c. 1) particularly targeted recusant schoolmasters.Google Scholar

47 TA 174 and D/DP A33. See also ‘Marian Priests in Essex’, Essex Recusant, 4 pt. 1 (1962), 91–4 and A. C. F. Beales, ‘A Biographical Catalogue of Catholic Schoolmasters in England from 1558 to 1700. Part 1:1558–1603', Recusant History, 7 (1964), 268–89. For the career and religious affiliations of Sheppard's replacement, Kenelm Carter, see Briggs, ‘William, 2nd Lord Petre (1575–1637)', Essex Recusant, 10 pt. 2 (1968), 51–64.Google Scholar

48 Grove 5, i, 799–800. The source of his information is apparently the chronicle of St. Monica's, Convent, Louvain; see Morris, John, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers; First Series (London 1872), 297–300. Bolt should not be confused with the John Bold who was parish clerk of St Botolph, Aldgate, between 1554 and midsummer 1563, nor with Richard Bold, the friend of the priest William Weston, who sheltered Fathers Garnet and Southwell on their arrival in England in 1586.Google Scholar

49 PRO Prob 11/64, f. 99v; Trevor Lennam, Sebastian Westcott, the Children of Paul's, and The Marriage of Wit and Science (Toronto 1975), 24 and 28. Thomas Morley, who was once organist of St. Paul's, may have been thinking of Bolt when, in his Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music (1597), Polymathes attributes his skill in descant to the teaching of ‘my master Bold’, who ‘ever had me in his company, and because he continually carried a plainsong book in his pocket he caused me to do the like, and so, walking in the fields, he would sing the plainsong and cause me sing the descant, and when I sung not to his contentment he would show me wherein I erred’; see Alec Harman ed., (London, 1953), 214.Google Scholar

50 D/DPA29.Google Scholar

51 Presumably this was a copy of one of the many books written in protest at Edmund Campion's execution in 1581.Google Scholar

52 This poem on Campion's martyrdom has been attributed to Henry Walpole. The first stanza only was set by Byrd, though the song was printed in his 1588 collection with two additional stanzas not taken from Walpole's poem.Google Scholar

53 See PRO SP12/248 nos. 37–9, and Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1591–1594 (London 1867), 467.Google Scholar

54 See Philip Caraman (trans.), John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London 1951) 227 et passim; Joseph Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics, 5 vols. (London, c. 1885) i, 256–7; Morris, The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers: First Series (London, 1872), 297–300; Catholic Record Society, 3 (1906), 31.Google Scholar

55 Bentley senior died in 1594. For his will, see P.R.O. Prob 11/84.Google Scholar

56 D/DPA5.Google Scholar

57 D/DPA8.Google Scholar

58 D/DPA9.Google Scholar

59 D/DP A17 June 1569: ‘Rewardes’. A daughter, Francis, baptized at West Horndon on 2 May 1578, also died young.Google Scholar

60 D/DP E25: Lease Book 1572–1635, ff. 62v–63v.Google Scholar

61 For more on Edward's subsequent career, see J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1922) Pt. 1, i, 137.Google Scholar

62 D/DP 31/1/1.Google Scholar

63 D/ABW 5/365.Google Scholar

64 Edward was still a student at Cambridge, and Mary was only fifteen.Google Scholar

65 “The Sources', i, 111–8; Edwards' perceptive account of the manuscript has served as the starting-point for the following discussion. The rather careless pagination of the collection, which dates from the turn of the century, has been further complicated by the recent separation of leaves originally glued together, and by a change of policy regarding blanks. The pagination given in the Index represents the situation as it currently stands; for more on these issues, see the excellent notes made by Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield during the course of the manuscript's repair in 1985–6 (Bodleian Library, Refs. LVI 16).Google Scholar

66 Briquet, C. M., Les filigranes, ed. A. H. Stevenson (Amsterdam 1968); London, Guildhall Library, MS 2968/1, f. 324vet passim.Google Scholar

67 The final four-leaf gathering of type B is empty, and was doubtless added much later.Google Scholar

68 Joseph Kerman, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd (London, 1981), 128.Google Scholar

69 If he accidently omitted a passage, he would insert a caret in the text and make good the defect on an extra stave at the bottom of the page; see, for instance, ‘Constant Penelope’ on pages 4–5. To improve the look of his anthology, however, he later recopied these pages incorporating the corrections and pasted them over the offending pages; this happened once in Byrd's Recordare Domine, and twice in the course of Sheppard's Magnificat. These added leaves, which were intended to replace pages 135c, 239b and 241c, are now sewn onto their own guards.Google Scholar

70 See Elizabethan Consort Music: I (Musica Britannica 44), 189.Google Scholar

71 See F. Procter and C. Wordsworth eds., Breviarium ad usum… Sarum, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1879–86) i, col. mliv et passim.Google Scholar

72 These manuscript versions have been edited by Philip Brett in The Byrd Edition 16.Google Scholar

73 The Masses and Motets of William Byrd, 57; British Library, Add. MS 32, 377 ascribes it to Byrd, while Tenbury MS 389 and the ‘McGhie’ partbook cannot decide between Byrd and Alphonso Ferrabosco the elder.Google Scholar

79 PRO KB9/658, Part 1 (25–26 Eliz. I [Michaelmas 1583]), m. 52 and KB29/219, rot. 16d. Among the accounts of Robert (later 3rd Baron) Petre are references to ‘Willie White’ and ‘White the Musitian’; see D/DP A 40, which begins in 1621.Google Scholar

80 See Brett, Philip, ‘Edward Paston (1550–1630): A Norfolk gentleman and his musical collection’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, iv pt. 1 (1954), 61–9, and Edwards, ‘The Sources’, i, 169–70 et passim; the index to D/DP Z6/1 given by E. H. Fellowes in the Appendix to Tudor Church Music (London 1948) should be treated with caution.Google Scholar

81 Very little can be deduced from Margaret Crum, ‘Early Lists of the Oxford Music School Collection’, Music & Letters, 48 (1967), 23–34.Google Scholar

82 D/DP E2/1; the list also includes ‘2 Setts of Mr Birds books Intituled Gradualia, the first and second Sett, … one other Sett of Mr Birds bookes contayninge Songes of 3. 4. 5. and 6 parts’ [Psalmes, Sonets & Songs (1588)].Google Scholar

83 D/DPE2/8.Google Scholar

∗ I owe a debt of thanks to Professor Philip Brett who commented on an early draft of this article with awesome thoroughness and promptitude.Google Scholar

Plate 1 is reproduced by kind permission of the Essex Record Office and Plates 2a and 2b by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.Google Scholar

1 ‘Mr Robart Parsons of the ChappeU’.Google Scholar

2 ‘Arise O Lord Secunda Pars’.Google Scholar

$ = consort versionGoogle Scholar

3 Pages 28–9 are ruled but empty.Google Scholar

4 Items in square brackets are unnumbered by the scribe.Google Scholar

$ = consort versionGoogle Scholar

5 The pagination omitted the numbers 143–4; the last leaf of quire X is now paginated ‘141’ [recto] and ‘142–4’ [verso].Google Scholar

6 ‘Gregorie Ballarde’.Google Scholar

∗ ‘for men‘Google Scholar

7 Dated 1568.Google Scholar

8 Preceded by opening of Tenor of Tye's Ave caput Christi; crossed out.Google Scholar

9 ‘Mr William White 1570‘.Google Scholar

10 ‘Mr Robarte Parsons of the Chapell’.Google Scholar

11 ‘Lamentacio Hierimie Mr Whyte’.Google Scholar

12 Pages 303b and c are ruled but empty.Google Scholar

13 Printed in Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets (1611).Google Scholar