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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 1982
In the summer of 1539 Henry VIII was once again preparing for marriage. In June the French ambassador reported that;
The king, who in some former years has been solitary and pensive, now gives himself up to amusement, going to play every night upon the Thames, with harps, chanters and all kinds of music and pastime. He evidently delights now in painting and embroidery, having sent men to France, Flanders Italy and elsewhere for masters of this art, and also for musicians and other ministers of pastime. All his people think this is a sign of his desire to marry if he should find an agreeable match.
1 Calendar of Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, xiv, vol. 1 (London, 1895), 498.Google Scholar
2 The words ‘consort’ and ‘band’ are used in this paper to mean a group of instruments one to a part and an orchestra respectively. ‘Consort’ was certainly used to describe the four court instrumental ensembles around 1600, as a reference in PRO, L.S. 13/168, 185 of 1605 shows. However, the royal string players were normally just referred to as ‘viols’ or ‘violins’ up to the Restoration, when ‘band’ came into general use to mean the court string orchestra.Google Scholar
3 Richard Rastall, ‘Some English Consort-Groupings of the Late Middle Ages’, Music and Letters, lv (1974), 179–202; Henry Cart de Lafontaine, The King's Musick (London, 1909), 2–4.Google Scholar
4 In 1544 Peter van Wilder claimed that he had been in royal service for 29 years and had been bom ‘in Millom in the dominion of the Emperor’. See Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalisation for Aliens a England 1509–1603, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, viii (Lymington, 1893).Google Scholar
5 They are listed for the first time in British Library, Egerton MS 2604, a chamber account book for 17 Henry VIII [1525–6], but they could have arrived in England at any time in the early 1520s, since no account books survive from that period.Google Scholar
6 See, for instance, PRO, E 101/426/6, f. 30v.Google Scholar
7 The only earlier groups to my knowledge were at the French court and at the Lorraine court in Nancy, which acquired ‘quatre violons’ in 1534; see Boyden, David, The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965), 24–5; Walter Kolneder, Das Buch der Violine (Zurich, 1972), 270, who gives no source for his reference.Google Scholar
8 British Library, Arundel MS 97, f. 155'.Google Scholar
9 PRO, S.P. 1/153.Google Scholar
10 British Library, Arundel MS 97, f. 131.Google Scholar
11 David Lasocki, ‘Professional Recorder Playing in England 1500–1740, 1:1500–1640’, Early Music, x (1982), 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
12 David Boyden, op. cit., 66ff.; Ian Woodfield, ‘The Early History of the Viol’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, ciii (1976–7), 141–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13 Guildhall Library, MSS 9171/11, f. 73v; 9168/9, f. 223v.Google Scholar
14 Roger Prior, ‘Jewish Musicians at the Tudor Court’, The Musical Quarterly, box (1983), 253–65, particularly 257–8. I am most grateful to Mr Prior and David Lasocki for sharing many discoveries relating to Jewish musicians with me, and for allowing me access to their unpublished writings.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15 PRO, E 101/426/5, f. 55v; E 315/439, f. 56.Google Scholar
16 Returns of Aliens in the City and Suburbs of London, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, x, vol. 2 (Aberdeen, 1902), 316.Google Scholar
17 PRO, S.P. 4/1, no. 57; Guildhall Library MS 9238/8.Google Scholar
18 Information from David Lasocki.Google Scholar
19 Guildhall Library, MS 9051/4, f. 19.Google Scholar
20 PRO, E 101/426/5, f. 55v; Henri Prunières, ‘La musique de la chambre et de l'écurie sous le regne de François I°, L'Annéc musicale 1911 (Paris, 1912), 245.Google Scholar
21 PRO, E 101/426/5, ff. 13, 50v.Google Scholar
22 In the court acquittance book PRO, E 101/430/15 of 1570/1, Innocent signed himself ‘innocentio comi’, while George signed himself ‘George Comy’.Google Scholar
23 Woodfield, op. cit., 143–4.Google Scholar
24 British Library, Stowe MS 554, ff. 13v, 15v.Google Scholar
25 British Library, Add.MS 59900, f. 87v.Google Scholar
26 An outline of the affair can be found, not without some inaccuracies, in Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (3rd edn., Oxford, 1964, repr. 1978), 138.Google Scholar
27 Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers … Spanish, vi, vol. 1 (London, 1890), 467.Google Scholar
28 PRO, S.P. 4/1, no. 57; Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, iii (London, 1891), 127; ‘Household Expenses of the Princess Elizabeth during her Residence at Hatfield, October 1, 1551, to September 30, 1552’, The Camden Miscellany, ii, Publications of the Camden Society, old series, lv (London, 1853), 40; PRO, L.C. 5/49, 90, 260; PRO, S.P. 12/8(10), f. 14.Google Scholar
29 British Library, Add. MS 5750, f. 64.Google Scholar
30 I am grateful to Paul O'Dette' for this suggestion.Google Scholar
31 For example, PRO, L.C. 5/49, 120.Google Scholar
32 Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de l'Isle and Dudley preserved at Penshurst Place, Historical Manuscripts Commission, lxxvii, vol. 1 (London, 1925), 291; David C. Price, Patrons and Musicians of the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 1981), 169; John Wilbye, First Set of Madrigals, ed. Edmund Fellowes, The English Madrigal School, vi (London, 1914), x.Google Scholar
33 British Library, Harley MS 1419, ff. 202, 205; edited in Raymond Russell, The Harpsichord and Clavichord (London, 1959), 157–8.Google Scholar
34 The Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain Thematic Index of Music for Viols, compiled by Gordon Dodd (London, 1980–2), lists the extant fantasies of Thomas Lupo and Alfonso Ferrabosco II. The five-part fantasy ‘Alte parole’, listed in the Index as by Thomas Lupo, is ascribed to Joseph Lupo in Christ Church Library, MS Mus. 67.Google Scholar
35 Innocent is first heard of in a Chamber document dated 30 September 1552, PRO, E 101/424(9), 136, and must have been appointed some time during the previous two years, for which no documents survive. The sources of information upon which Table 2 is based are too complex from Elizabethan times onwards to be set out here in full. The chief source is the yearly series of accounts audited or ‘declared’ by the Treasury of the Chamber to the Exchequer of Audit. Two copies of these Declared Accounts survive; the incomplete one in the series PRO, A.O.3 was printed in summary form in 'Lists of the King's Musicians, from the Audit Office Declared Accounts in The Musical Antiquary, i-iii (1909–12), but the other copy, in PRO, E 351, is complete from 1558 onwards.Google Scholar
36 British Library, Add. MS 34195, f. 13.Google Scholar
37 Lasocki, op. cit., 24–5.Google Scholar
38 Ibid., 24; Thomas Platter's Travels in England 1599, ed. Clare Williams (London, 1937), 195.Google Scholar
39 Report on the Manuscripts of the most Honourable the Marquess of Bath preserved at Longleat, Historical Manuscripts Commission, lviii, vol. 4 (London, 1968), 185.Google Scholar
40 In the possession of Her Majesty the Queen; reproduced in G.E. Aylmer, The King's Servants (2nd edn., London and Boston, 1974), plate 2, and Peter W. Thomas, ‘Charles I of England’, The Coats of Europe, ed. A.G. Dickens (London, 1977), illustration 224. A detailed description and study of the painting is in Christopher White, The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1982), 63, who points out that it is related to two other contemporary works apparently showing Frederick and Elizabeth of Bohemia dining in publicGoogle Scholar
41 Calendar of Litters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of the Reign Henry VIII, xvi (London, 1898), 614.Google Scholar
42 Household Ordinances and Regulations, Edward III to William and Mary (London, 1790), 371.Google Scholar
43 Reproduced in Boyden, op. cit., plate 14, who summarizes the situation on pp. 56–7.Google Scholar
44 Facsimile in ‘L’Épitome musical de Philibert Jambe de Fer (1556)’, ed. Francois Lesure, Annales musicologiques, vi (1956–63), 341–87.Google Scholar
45 Reproduced in Frederico Sopeña Ibanez 4 Antonio Gallego Gallego, La musica en al Musea del Prada (Madrid, 1972), 154.Google Scholar
46 Reproduced in Tom L. Taylor, The Trumpet and Trombone in Graphic Arts 1500–1800 (Nashville, 1979), plate 50.Google Scholar
47 Franz Waldner, ‘Zwei Inventarien aus dem XVI und XVII Jh. über hinterlassene Musikinstrumente und Musikalien am Innsbrucker Hofe’, Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, iv (1916), 128–47.Google Scholar
48 A convenient summary of the information given by these sources a in David Boyden, ‘The Tenor Violin; Myth, Mystery, or Misnomer?’, Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80 Geburtstag, ed. Walter Gerstenberg, Jan La Rue and Wolfgang Rehm (Kassel, 1963), 273–9.Google Scholar
49 James R. Anthony, French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (London, 1973), 10, 93.Google Scholar
50 Il scolaro di Gasparo Zannetti per imparar a soonare di violino et altri stromenti (Milan, 1645).Google Scholar
51 PRO, L.C. 5/132, 242.Google Scholar
52 Bodleian Library, MS Mus. c. 23, ff. 25–34. The edition in Matthew Locke, Anthems and Motets, ed. Peter Le Huray, Musica Britannia, xxxviii (London, 1976), 52–73 scores the ‘band of violins’ most improbably for three violins, viola and bass viol, and contains several other misunderstandings of Locke's instrumental writing.Google Scholar