This essay examines the intriguing “great friendship”1 between the English composer Matthew Locke and the antiquarian and amateur musician Captain Silas Taylor, alias Domville, with the aim of opening a window onto the many subtleties of, and porous boundaries between, the conventionally separate categories of professional and amateur, parliamentarian and royalist, Protestant and Catholic, and their public and private expression in seventeenth-century England.2 The contrasted confessional and political backgrounds of Locke and Taylor would seem strong barriers to social interaction: Locke apparently converted to Roman Catholicism while in the Netherlands with the exiled court in the late 1640s, later marrying Mary, daughter of Herefordshire recusant Roger Garnons; Taylor, by contrast, was the son of a “Grand Oliverian” and a former parliamentarian soldier, who served in the 1650s as Herefordshire subcommissioner for sequestration and compounding with papists and delinquents.3
From a biographical perspective centered upon Locke, it makes sense to gloss their well-attested friendship as “in spite of religious and political differences,” casting Taylor as simply “an enthusiastic amateur musician who provided [Locke] with a house in Hereford.”4 On the other hand, any tacit assumption that Taylor’s “amateur” music making had—and has—little bearing on his “official” persona could be misleading. Close attention to the music associated with Taylor reveals new evidence concerning his political proclivities, aligning him with his patron Edward Harley and former military commander Colonel Edward Massey, both of whom were increasingly estranged from the Cromwell regime during the 1650s.5 The study of royalism during the Interregnum is already severely impeded by the difficulties of defining a clear category of representative beliefs and practices;6 such concerns are only amplified when dealing with individuals who appear to traverse such boundaries, whether through day-to-day social interactions or a gradual realignment of political identity—or indeed, as we shall see, in cases such as Taylor’s where it appears the former led to the latter over time.
As Robert C. Evans suggests in relation to the royalist poet Katherine Philips, such “difficulties and dilemmas” should certainly “discourage simplistic responses to the Interregnum as a whole.”7 Indeed, comparison between Taylor and Philips, the “matchless Orinda,” is particularly instructive for the present purposes, and not just because of the superficial biographical similarities between these two ostensible Presbyterians with then-scandalous royalist connections.8 Philips’s Interregnum poetry forms part of a wider 1650s political discourse that has been widely figured in recent years as an early instance of what Habermas called the “public sphere”;9 her frequent rhetoric of domestic withdrawal—once a factor in her marginalization—has emerged as a key component of a public royalist poetic shared with other members of her coterie.10 Similarly, Taylor’s music has been largely overlooked as the work of a “competent” (read “uninteresting”) amateur; yet a similar reconfiguration of the complicated relationships between apparently privately conceived and privately themed discourses on the one hand, and the fundamentally public nature of their conception, dissemination, and reception on the other, casts new light upon Taylor and his music.
How Taylor, who as sequestrator was responsible for the confiscation of property and collection of fines from royalists and recusants, became acquainted with the Catholic musician Matthew Locke, who in the 1650s was on his way to recognition as the foremost English composer, is unknown, but numerous sources refer to Taylor’s provision of a house during this period for Locke in Hereford.11 Later, we find them both meeting with Samuel Pepys and one of the elder Purcells on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 21, 1660, in the aftermath of Parliament’s confirmation of General Monck as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The significance of this event in the lead-up to the Restoration was surely not lost on the group, as shown by Pepys’s record of the title and nature of the composition they performed—a more apt musical representation of the promised reestablishment of rule and order could hardly be imagined:
I met with Mr. Lock and Pursell, Maisters of Musique; and with them to the Coffee-house into a room next the Water by ourselves; where we spent an hour or two till Captain Taylor came to us. . . .
Here we had variety of brave Italian and Spanish songs and a Canon for 8 Voc:, which Mr. Lock had newly made on these words: Domine salvum fac Regem, an admirable thing.12
Evidence relating to Locke in Taylor’s autograph survives in his “Collection of Rules in Musicke” (GB-Lbl Add. MS 4910), dating from the later 1660s.13 Taylor’s version of John Birchensha’s famous “Rules of Composition” occupies much of the manuscript, but Locke provided both a preprint version of his thoroughbass primer from Melothesia (1673) and a pair of canons published in Christopher Simpson’s 1667 Compendium of Practicall Musick, the first of which is three bars longer in Taylor’s version.14 All are proudly labeled “given . . . to Silas Domville als Taylor” (fols. 43–44, 60), with the canons dated 1669.
Further evidence of the close association between the two men relates to a collection of thirty psalms, hymns, and other devotional songs attributed to Taylor in GB-Cfm Mu MS 163, part F (hereafter Cfm 163), which will be the focus of much of the discussion below;15 as many as twelve of these songs are ascribed to Locke in a manuscript at Brussels Conservatoire (B-Bc MS 1035; for details see table 9.1).16 Rosamund Harding spotted five of the Cfm 163 songs, including two with contested attributions, under Taylor’s name in a University of Pittsburgh manuscript;17 she thus considered all twelve “doubtful” at best for Locke.18 It is clear, furthermore, that most of the Cfm 163 songs can only be associated with Taylor, and there is no sharp stylistic distinction between this majority and the twelve items attributed to Locke in Brussels: all are worthy of Locke, yet quite attainable for a skilled amateur like Taylor (see figures 9.1 and 9.2).
It seems likely that Pepys referred to this same body of works in his diary on Sunday April 16, 1665:
By and by comes Capt. Taylor . . . that understands Musique very well and composes mighty bravely; he brought us some things of two parts to sing, very hard. But that that is the worst, he is very conceited of them; and that, though they are good, makes them troublesome to one, to see him every note commend and admire them.19
If this indeed refers to the Cfm 163 songs, it would be fascinating to know which passages particularly stirred Taylor’s pride. Although they contain some touches of imitation, there are no passages of particularly learned counterpoint; perhaps Taylor’s acute ear for chromatic intensification and assured modulations aroused the envy of the diarist, who famously failed in his attempts to master the technique of thoroughbass.20 Also worthy of note is Taylor’s use of written expression marks in two songs: the instructions “(voce) submissè” and “strenué” (both with varying diacritics; see figure 9.2) appear to indicate contrasting moods, perhaps analogous with Giulio Caccini’s example illustrating Esclamazioni, “languida” or “più viva,” in the preface to his 1602 Le nuove musiche.21 Taylor’s use of these Latinate terms as specific performance directions in the score is extremely unusual, though as Andrew Parrott has recently pointed out, the term submissa voce had long been applied to the action of singing softly.22 This usage was evidently current in England, because Charles Butler made use of an Anglicized version in 1636, urging that “In Ditti-Mixt-Musik is alway to bee observed, that the Instruments dooe either sound Submisly, or by Turns; that the Ditti bee not obscured.”23
Table 9.1Cfm 163, fols. 45–72: Contents.
*George Sandys, A Paraphrase on the Psalmes of David (London, 1636).
†Hildebert of Lavardin (1056–1133), “De Confessione Sanctae Trinitatis”; available in Interregnum England in James Ussher, De Romanae Ecclesiae symbolo apostolico vetere aliisque fidei formulis (London, 1647), 45–48.
‡George Buchanan, Paraphrasis psalmorum Dauidis poetica (London, 1580); citations given from the reprint as Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica Georgii Buchanani Scoti (London, 1648).
§Immanuel Tremellius, Franciscus Junius, and Théodore de Bèze, Biblia sacra (first London folio 1580; many reprints including London, 1640).
Figure 9.1 Silas Taylor, “Dominantur in Nos Servi.” Cfm 163, fol. 61v, © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Figure 9.2 Silas Taylor, “Vox Dilecti Mei” (also attributed to Matthew Locke in B-Bc MS 1035, p. 24). Cfm 163, fol. 68v, © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
It is surprising that Taylor’s very accomplished songs have not attracted greater attention. No doubt at least partly to blame are his status as an “amateur” composer, the fact that the songs remained unpublished, and their association with “private” performance. Before examining them in more detail, we must first explore the background to Taylor’s political identity and flesh out some details of the public controversy in which he became embroiled in the mid-1650s.
The apparent conflict in Taylor’s persona most obviously exemplified by his friendship with Locke, and to be further strengthened in the reading of his devotional songs that follows, stems from an implicit assumption, I argue, that his political identity can be located primarily in the external signs of his upbringing, military service, and public appointments. Very similar assumptions (concerning her youth, education, and marriage) marked the modern reception of Katherine Philips’s poetry until comparatively recently, with the additional factor of gender exacerbating the degree of her marginalization.24 As Philips’s work has been taken more seriously, however, the strength of her royalist friendships has been increasingly understood as a vehicle of empowerment in the face of traditional notions of patriarchal authority and feminine domesticity.25 Not only did Philips’s assertion of authorial autonomy per se threaten conventional notions of proper female behavior, but also her royalist associations further undermined societal assumptions that women’s political identities were tied, like their legal subjecthood, to those of their husbands or fathers.
Similar lines of reasoning might arguably be applied to male contemporaries, whose lives were equally (if differently) shaped by patriarchal societal norms. In Taylor’s case, the conventional account is of a promising parliamentarian soldier and administrator whose career was cut short by the Restoration: “The times turning, he was faine to disgorge all he had gott, and was ruined.”26 Yet Taylor was already a controversial figure in 1650s Hereford: his sponsorship of the Catholic royalist Locke and his music meeting were publicly denounced as politically subversive. Furthermore, even his earliest biographers hint at ambivalence toward the political milieu within which he came of age. According to Wood, his education at New Inn Hall, Oxford, from 1641 was interrupted when he was “soon after called thence, without the taking of a degree”; thereafter, “upon the eruption of the civil wars, he took part with the rebels upon his father’s instance,” and later “was made by his father’s endeavours a sequestrator of the royalists in Herefordshire.”27 Silvanus Taylor Sr. also looked after his eldest son’s material needs: he “setled upon him a good estate in church lands . . . and had the moiety of the bishop’s palace in Hereford setled on him.”28 Wood’s phraseology may reflect his post-Restoration standpoint, but the constant passive constructions are nevertheless striking. While there is no suggestion that Taylor followed his father’s wishes under protest, the strength of his patriarchal obligation is arguably little diminished even if he did so out of genuine filial loyalty. The idea that his conscience was pulling in a different direction, meanwhile, might help explain why despite his father’s beneficence, once installed at Hereford, Silas “used [his power] so civilly and obligingly, that he was beloved by all the King’s party.”29
Such disjunctions would soon impinge on both Taylor’s and Philips’s public lives. For Philips, the occasion was the threat to her husband, the parliamentarian administrator James Philips, referred to in “To Antenor on a paper of mine wch J. Jones threatenes to publish to his prejudice.”30 Far from conforming to expected feminine modesty and retracting, Philips’s response—apart from ridiculing Jones—adopted the then-remarkable strategy of reasserting her personal autonomy: “My love and life I must confesse are thine, / But not my errours, they are only mine” (lines 7–8).31 Yet whereas the conventional lack of female subjective autonomy ironically permitted Philips such flagrantly royalist outbursts without seriously endangering her husband’s (and therefore her) position, Taylor’s own brush with radicalism reveals his greater difficulty in divorcing his “amateur” pursuit of music from its public implications.
His trouble originated in a dysfunctional working relationship with his fellow Herefordshire sequestrator Captain Ben Mason, an outsider identified with a town-based, radical puritan faction (as against Taylor’s association with county Presbyterian gentry). From October 1652, the two exchanged accusations concerning various abuses of office,32 with matters coming to a head in 1653 with Mason’s deposition of seventeen articles against Taylor. Not least among these were that “he associates with Papists and delinquents, owns himself their protector, and has meetings with them at taverns late at night, with music”; that “he hired a house at Hereford for a Jesuitical Papist” (presumably Locke); and that “he wanted to dismiss the clerk and put a musician in his place.”33
Ultimately emboldened by his exoneration, Taylor counterattacked with an anonymously published pamphlet Impostor Magnus (1654),34 viciously excoriating one of Mason’s witnesses—the puritan divine Richard Delamain—who had testified that “the Souldiers in the Garrison of Hereford, upon Monday and Tuesday the 3. and 4. of January, 1652, were necessitated to keep all to their arms, by reason of a convention of Papists and Delinquents . . . occasioned by a Musick-meeting, appointed by Captain Taylor.”35 To parry the charge that this activity was contaminating his public office, Taylor plays down its importance, scoffing “What credit he doth the Souldiers, to be afraid of a Musick-meeting; surely [they] are fraughted with very unharmonious Souls, to be frighted with fiddles.”36 Thus, whereas Philips asserts her autonomy in spite of her sex, which protects her, Taylor opts to undermine his vulnerability, protesting in essence that “it’s just Musick.” In doing so, he becomes complicit in the disregarding of activities not considered part of his official or public status as described above, encouraging the assumption that his “amateur” pursuits are of minimal biographical importance.
Apparently undeterred, Delamain remains adamant, in his no-more-edifying reply The Close Hypocrite Discovered, that Taylor’s music meeting represented a genuine threat: “The Pamphleteer himself confesses, that at one meeting there was ten men and six women; the number was not above as many more that gave the first onset, when the Parliaments forces surprized the City of Hereford [referring to the advance party, disguised as laborers, which opened the gates to Colonel Birch’s waiting army in December 164537] . . . whilst such meetings by such persons are ever to be suspected.”38 Having anticipated the charge of subversion, however, Taylor sarcastically pointed out two of Delamain’s own “Croneys” among the “participants in this dangerous enterprize” of music making.39 Remarkably, Taylor goes on to blame these individuals—George Lynn, the very “clerk” Mason alleged Taylor had sought to supplant with a musician, and Matthew Price, an innkeeper and former agent for the Committee for Compounding who had himself been investigated for misdemeanor in 1653—for his opponents’ knowledge of the meeting, even as he asserts their presence as evidence for its nonpartisan nature.40
Taylor’s portrayal of his meetings as politically neutral resembles Anthony Wood’s account of William Ellis’s meetings in Oxford, whose participants’ “love of music superseded any political, religious, or philosophical differences.”41 Taylor himself attended these meetings in the late 1650s, as Wood tells us, though it is unclear (because Wood only started attending in 1656) whether Taylor could have been familiar with this cross-partisan musical circle while his Hereford meetings were taking place.42 Meanwhile, and whether genuine or merely polemical, Delamain’s aspersions exemplify a narrative of suspected sedition that affected clubs and societies of many kinds during the seventeenth century.43 Some midcentury musical organizations clearly were identified strongly as royalist, including the Old Jewry “Musick-Society” associated with John Playford, which Taylor also seems to have encountered in London after 1659 and which, as Bryan White notes elsewhere in this volume, drew its membership from a broad social cross-section.44 The music meeting held by Henry Lawes at his London house was the base for a royalist musical and literary circle heavily overlapping with Katherine Philips’s coterie; two of her poems on friendship appeared in Lawes’s 1655 Second Book of Ayres, and Dialogues.45 We know much less about the participants and repertoire at Locke’s and Taylor’s Hereford meetings, though Taylor’s detractors clearly felt they showed similar royalist bias; the Cfm 163 “Taylor” songs, furthermore, would have been ideal repertoire for such a meeting.
One should of course be wary of assuming that vocal music per se—even setting religious texts, and even in Latin—automatically raised suspicions of Anglicanism or even popery: Cromwell himself was apparently “most taken with” the few-voice motets by Richard Dering that John Hingeston had performed in his household,46 and indeed Hingeston even seems to have set to music a large-scale Latin ode in honor of Cromwell—Funde flores, thura crema—marking the third anniversary of the protectorate, in line with what Patrick Little has suggested was an increasing use of music in a state-ceremonial context in a court setting influenced more and more by cultured civilian courtiers such as Bulstrode Whitelocke, Viscount Lisle, and Pepys’s patron, Edward Mountagu.47 Yet conversely, William Ellis’s Oxford meetings do seem to have favored consort music specifically as a precaution against puritan suspicion of vocal music, on the grounds that the latter was “used in church by the prelaticall partie.”48
What is particularly striking about the “Taylor” songs, though, is not just their psalmic texts, which after all were common to Anglicans, Presbyterians, Independents, and indeed Catholics alike, but their persistent pre-Restoration royalist outlook. Table 9.1 shows the contents of Cfm 163: seventeen songs set English texts from the 1636 Paraphrase on the Psalmes of David by George Sandys, the royalist courtier and poet, while a further thirteen in Latin draw mainly on psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations. Sandys’s poetic renderings were saturated with Laudian sensuousness and references to “divine kingship,” associated in his dedication with Charles I himself, all of which would have been anathema to Taylor’s enemies among the Hereford Independents.49 Moreover, the passages chosen frequently explore themes of isolation, separation, and imposition, long-standing tropes of exile and captivity among English recusant Catholics that proved similarly germane to 1650s royalism.50
Among the longest of Taylor’s settings is Psalm 137, with its poignant description of Jerusalem laid waste and vengeful predictions toward the Israelites’ Babylonian oppressors; for Paula Loscocco, tracing the influence of this text upon an emergent 1650s royalist “psalmic poetic,” this text above all “enabled writers to construct the Interregnum as an interregnum—as a period of humiliation, chastisement, disenfranchisement, patience, and silence that might extend for decades . . . but that would come to an end when God’s anger at the confessed sins of God’s chosen people subsided.”51 Similar themes are explored in texts from Psalm 122, Psalm 71, and two songs setting texts from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, but perhaps even more revealing are the explicit allusions to royalty and kingship such as the start of Psalm 96, “New composed Ditties sing / To our Everlasting King,” or the image in “Non habet Sion” of a Zion built from walls of living stone, whose protector is the King of Joy (“cujus muri lapis vivus / cujus custos rex festivus”). “When Stormes Arise,” a setting of words from Psalm 27, is particularly intriguing. The stanzas selected make good sense as a reference to the same rhetoric of enforced retirement observed in the writings of Philips and her circle; what makes Taylor’s setting remarkable, however, is its rewriting of Sandys’s final couplet apparently with the sole purpose of introducing a reference to “my King,” doing considerable violence to the original couplet of iambic trimeter:
When stormes arise on every side,
He will in his Pavillion hide:
How ever great,
In that retreat
I shall conceal’d and safe abide.
He, to resist their shocke,
Hath fixt me on a Rocke.
Now is my head advanc’d, renown’d
Above my foes, who gird me round;
That in my Tent
I may present
My sacrifice with Trumpets sound:
There will I praises sing And Hallelujahs to my King. |
[Sandys: There I thy praise will sing, Set to a well-tun’d string.]52 |
Other allusions to kingship are more extended. “Revertere O Sulammittis” is one of five texts from the Song of Songs, most of which express longing for an absent lover. Like the Psalms, such texts meant different things to different people: puritan interpretations figured the “Godly” protestant church as the bride of Christ, while among some Catholic writers the Song of Songs invoked a heady allegory of the Immaculate Conception and, by extension, Charles I’s bride Henrietta Maria; it could thus stand as a lament for Charles I or even an expression of his subjects’ desire for the “return” of Charles II.53 The specific text of “Revertere O Sulammittis” is more subtly allegorical: the longed-for Shulamite is a female personification of peace via the etymological connection with the word shalom, and similarly linked to Jerusalem, frequent code for an England in better times (as in the royalist interpretation of Psalm 137);54 furthermore, the fact that this Shulamite is the daughter of a prince seems particularly suggestive. Perhaps most striking of all the texts set in terms of its apparent reference to the royalist condition in the 1650s, though, is the selection from Lamentations chapter 5 in “Dominantur nos servi”; these are words that hardly require interpretation as a reference to Charles I’s execution and its attendant disruption of social order (given here in the 1611 King James Version; for the original text and music, see figure 9.1):
8 Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doeth deliver us out of their hand.
16 The crowne is fallen from our head: Woe unto us, that wee have sinned.
17 For this our heart is faint, for these things our eyes are dimme.
15 The joy of our heart is ceased, our daunce is turned into mourning.
The emerging picture is one of a collection of sacred songs that could have provided for shared political identity among a group of even quite disparate individuals, including perhaps both Catholics and prayer book Anglicans and Episcopalians, and both those who had remained loyal to Charles I himself and those who were more generally committed to the principle of monarchy. If so, Taylor’s carefully curated texts would also encompass those who originated on the opposite side of the divide but who perhaps never supported the regicide (even if strongly opposed to the person of Charles I himself); indeed, the inclusive first-person plural of Lamentations 5 seems particularly suited to such personal identification with the causes of the Troubles. Individuals like Taylor and his Presbyterian patrons (as discussed above) may increasingly have embraced the idea of Restoration in the face of anxiety about the nature of Cromwell’s government and in particular, as we see in Impostor Magnus, the spread of radical independent religion without state control. Without going into detail here, such a reading would be consistent with the evolution shown in Taylor’s manuscript and published writings, their early antiroyalism55 tempered from the start with the antiquarian’s strong distaste for iconoclastic cultural vandalism.56 Later, they show at least a pragmatic acceptance of the inevitable return of state religion (in Taylor’s transcription of the Caroline cathedral statutes of Hereford, which he noted “may be of a manifold use; to be made out hereafter”57), even stretching to praise for past restored monarchies—such as that of the fifth-century King Vortiger—in his 1663 History of Gavel-Kind.58
The large amount of instrumental music Locke composed around the time he was in Hereford could have provided comparatively uncontentious repertoire for a nonpartisan music meeting along the lines of that described by Wood in Oxford, where even known Catholics and royalist sympathizers seem to have been admitted. That Taylor’s meetings instead proved so controversial might be partly explained by performance of music with the strong internal implications discussed above; and as we have seen, the participants in the meetings included individuals from Taylor’s opposing faction who were well placed to relay such information to his most vocal critics. The scandal seems all the more understandable, furthermore, when contextualized within the much wider flowering of royalist devotional song in the 1650s—a conscious promotion of the genre concurrent with the literary appropriation of the metrical psalm described by Loscocco, but rather more straightforwardly linked with the popularity of stile nuovo liturgical and sacred music in prewar courtly circles.59 Even aside from their textual sources, this style firmly links the “Taylor” songs with repertoire that remained rich in associations with royalist activity elsewhere: Richard Dering’s Latin motets had been performed in Henrietta Maria’s Catholic chapel from 1625, for example, and were apparently later adopted by the reduced Anglican Chapel Royal at Oxford. During the 1640s, George Jeffreys, who supervised the copying of some of Dering’s music for that purpose, also composed both Latin and English “Mottects”; later, in the 1650s, he provided similar music for Exeter House in London, where the royalist divine Peter Gunning managed to maintain prayer-book Anglican worship.60
Robert Thompson has pointed out the strength of topical resonance in the words from Psalm 80 set by Jeffreys probably immediately after the 1649 regicide, using careful selection from scripture in a very similar manner to the “Taylor” songs.61 Much the same could be said of some of the Lawes brothers’ songs; indeed, in its inclusion of both English and Latin words, including texts from Sandys and from Lamentations, Henry’s 1648 memorial to his brother in Choice Psalmes presents a striking parallel with the Cfm 163 repertoire. Yet Lawes makes the royalist agenda even more explicit, not only dedicating his book to Charles I but also observing that “much of Your Majesties present condition, is lively described by King Davids pen”;62 a conceit that was to be taken even further in the 1649 Eikon Basilike—and its musical adaptation, John Wilson’s 1657 setting of Thomas Stanley’s Psalterium Carolinum—in which the purported prayers of the king directly appropriated psalmic language and tone.63 Lawes’s songs, furthermore, seem to have been well known in Hereford: “The ghost of Sandys in Elyzium longs / To have his Joy encreas’d by His-Your Songs,” wrote Clement Barksdale to his fellow Hereford vicar choral John Philips, in a poem addressing Henry Lawes and later printed on the same page as a complaint on behalf of the displaced vicars choral of Hereford, who had been ejected from their college by Colonel Birch in 1645.64 If indeed the Cfm 163 “Taylor” songs represent a provincial contribution to this wider repertoire of royalist-themed stile nuovo psalm settings,65 it seems likely that their performers could have included former vicars choral; at least one, William Broad, was certainly in touch with Locke in 1654 when he proposed to him a plainsong for a canon.66 Taylor’s meetings could even have been intended to compensate for the ejected vicars’ lost facilities; in the 1630s, their college is recorded as a venue for private music making by a visiting party from Norwich, while late in the century it became the site of a regular music meeting.67
A series of previously mysterious rubrics observed in Cfm 163 by Harding may even suggest that the “Taylor” songs were considered for wider distribution at some (perhaps later) stage;68 as late as 1681, for example, Playford was advertising manuscript copies of “choicest Vocal Hymns and Psalms for two and three Voyces” by a distinctly retrospective list of composers—including both Lawes brothers, Locke, Jenkins, and Rogers—testifying to the continuing popularity of recreational psalm singing in the 1660s (as described later in this volume by White) and well beyond.69 In fact, the Cfm 163 rubrics direct the reader through an ordered sequence beginning at the all-important Psalm 137 and progressing through songs—first in English, then Latin—with successively higher keynotes, beginning at G minor (table 9.2). Comparable schemes are followed, with varying degrees of consistency, in Lawes’s Choice Psalmes and both volumes of Cantica Sacra. In the absence of any obvious reason to have copied the songs out of order, it seems likely that the anonymous copyist began by following the order (of composition?) in his source but later—perhaps as early as item 14, after which the sequence is already logical—began following the rising-keynote scheme, adding instructions to the existing items to derive an ordered collection for use in a scriptorium context or even perhaps as potential printer’s copy.
The friendship between Locke and Taylor with which I began this essay looks considerably less incongruous in the context of Taylor’s Cfm 163 psalms and their relationship to the wider royalist genre of stile nuovo devotional song. Taylor’s political identity is likely to remain ambiguous, but the gentle hints of Wood and Aubrey and the vicious impugning of his political enemies together suggest real divergence of Taylor’s views from the political status quo by 1652–1653. Nevertheless, as with Katherine Philips, it is clear that political and religious identity, normative assumptions concerning gender and its social expression, the negotiation of public and private spaces and discourses, and even the distinction between so-called professional and amateur roles all interact in complicated ways, which are more likely than not to defy conventional oppositions. Willingness to embrace such confusion, while it may produce messier and more equivocal narratives, surely results in a richer understanding of the period and its cultural legacy.
Taylor’s experiences post-1660 further illustrate the difficulties of pinning down his Interregnum persona, in light of early biographical accounts conceived against the backdrop of Restoration political realities. Notwithstanding Aubrey’s reference to his ruin, Taylor was able to rely on patrons to secure him in respectable employment, first as commissary of ammunition at Dunkirk under Harley, and later as Keeper of the King’s Stores at Harwich through the mathematician Sir Paul Neile;70 the notion that his career was hampered by a reputation for fanaticism, meanwhile, seems to derive from confusion with the ship builder Captain John Taylor.71 On the other hand, both posts left him geographically—and hence culturally—marginalized, isolated from London or Oxford and with little prospect of compensation in local cultural life. Unlike Philips, who from her new Dublin base was able to harness her Interregnum reputation, asserting an increasingly panegyric royalism in hopes of securing patronage, Taylor—having previously downplayed his musical activities—was obliged to make a volte-face in deliberately harnessing them in lieu of court- and London-based official status, as a means of gaining access to elite cultural circles.72 His relationship with Locke must have subtly evolved with the latter’s ascendancy—whereas Taylor was essentially Locke’s patron in Hereford, Wood implies that in effect the reverse was true later on:
being well acquainted with that most admired organist to the queen, called Matthew Lock . . . [Taylor] did compose several anthems . . . which were sung in his majesty’s chapel . . . his majesty was pleased to tell the author that he liked them.73
Table 9.2Cfm 163, fols. 45–72: order of songs implied by manuscript rubrics.
Paradoxically, however, such cultural exposure and royal approbation came at the cost of undermining Taylor’s aspiration to higher social rank; hence the Duke of York’s belittling of Taylor’s efforts to Pepys in 1668: “[he] told me that [Taylor] was a better store-keeper then Anthem-maker—and that was bad enough too.”74 The earlier breakdown of traditional hierarchies—of social standing, church music career structures, and relationships between trained professional composers and dilettante amateurs—seems to have allowed Taylor access to musical circles within which he expressed a political allegiance profoundly at odds with that suggested by the more “official” circumstances of his life. Ironically, it was the later reentrenchment of these same pre-Interregnum hierarchies that would hamper his attempts to harness his musical skill in order to compensate for his reduced social standing in the post-Restoration political climate.
1. Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. 2, 254.
2. I thank Stephen Rose, organizer of the study day “Crisis, Creativity and the Self 1550–1700” (Senate House, London, Tuesday, May 14, 2013) for the opportunity to present a preliminary version of this research; and my colleague at Selwyn College, David L. Smith, for reading a later draft and drawing to my attention several further studies of relevance to the context against which the present study unfolds.
3. On Locke: Holman, “Locke, Matthew,” GMO (accessed June 29, 2013); Thompson, “Locke, Matthew (c.1622–1677),” DNB (accessed July 1, 2013); Harding, A Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Matthew Locke, xxiii–xl. On Taylor: Westrup and Spink, “Taylor, Silas,” GMO (accessed July 3, 2013); Whitehead, “Taylor, Silas (1624–1678),” DNB (accessed June 29, 2013).
4. Thompson, “Locke, Matthew”; Birchensha, Writings on Music, 221 n3.
5. Goodwin, rev. Whitehead, “Harley, Sir Edward (1624–1700),” DNB (accessed June 29, 2013); Warmington, “Massey, Sir Edward (1604x9–1674),” DNB (accessed July 3, 2013). For a more detailed examination of the background to Harley’s position during the 1650s, see Eales, Puritans and Roundheads.
6. See McElligott and Smith, Royalists and Royalism, 10.
7. Evans, “Paradox in Poetry and Politics,” 176.
8. I thank Deana Rankin for suggesting this comparison at the study day detailed above.
9. Gray, “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” 426–451; Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 299–323.
10. Compare Mulvihill, “A Feminist Link,” 71–104, with Shifflett, “‘How Many Virtues Must I Hate,’” 103–135; Evans, “Paradox in Poetry and Politics,” 174–185.
11. At 4l per year according to Webb, Memorials of the Civil War, vol. 2, 314 (unfortunately his source is unclear).
12. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1, 62–63 (this must be Silas Taylor as Pepys moves on to his 1663 A History of Gavel-kind). The canon Pepys mentions is no longer extant; Harding, Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Matthew Locke, 26–27.
13. Birchensha, Writings on Music, 217–220.
14. The Melothesia excerpt is on fols. 43r–44r; compare also the very similar unattributed set of “Generall Rules for a Thorough Base,” fols. 61ff.
15. Taylor’s other compositions include at least three anthems, and two two-part suites published by Playford in Court-Ayres (1655). His music is frequently confused with that of his younger brother Sylvanus. GMO ascribes his setting of Cowley’s “The Thirsty Earth” to both, for example; though ambiguously attributed “Mr Syl. Taylor” in Playford’s 1667 Catch that Catch Can, Playford’s manuscript partbooks (GB-Eu MSS R.d. 58–61) credit it to “Cap:t Silas Taylor,” and a nineteenth-century sale catalog at Glasgow lists a copy of the 1667 publication inscribed from Playford to Silas Taylor (special.lib.gla.ac.uk/manuscripts/search/detail_c.cfm?ID=89515, accessed June 10, 2013). GMO also erroneously ascribes Sylvanus Taylor’s twenty-five pieces for two trebles and bass (GB-Ob MS Mus. Sch. E. 429) to Silas, compounding the error in the Viola da Gamba Society’s Thematic Index of Music for Viols, which conflates the two (www.vdgs.org.uk/files/thematicIndex/T.pdf, accessed June 10, 2013).
16. This is not the only cross-attribution involving Locke and Taylor. The familiar five-part anthem “Lord, Let Me Know My End,” ascribed to Locke in Playford’s 1674 Cantica Sacra (which prints a two-part version) is attributed to Taylor in sources at Durham and Ely (Harding, Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Matthew Locke, 3, 9–11; Crosby, “An Early Restoration Liturgical Music Manuscript,” 460), while Charles Badham’s copy (GB-Ob MS Mus. Sch. c. 40) very curiously credits “Silas Taylor al[ia]s Mr Locke” (p. 58). Locke’s authorship seems reliable, but in terms of the confusion between the men, it is perhaps notable that both Badham and Richard Hosier, copyist of the relevant Durham manuscript, had close Hereford connections; see Spink, “Badham, Charles,” GMO (accessed July 1, 2013); Crosby, “An Early Restoration Liturgical Music Manuscript,” 462; Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 225–226; Havergal, Fasti Herefordenses, 95–97.
17. This manuscript is now untraceable. James P. Cassaro, head of the Finney Library at Pittsburgh, suggests that it may have been copied by Theodore M. Finney, the library’s founder (personal correspondence, May 28, 2013), but this seems unlikely from Harding’s descriptions (Thematic Catalogue, 4, 5, 24, 31–33). It is not discussed in Finney’s article, “A Group of English Manuscript Volumes at the University of Pittsburgh” (detailing manuscripts later sold to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA and the University of Texas at Austin; see Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 223 n63).
18. Harding, Thematic Catalogue, 27, 30–34.
19. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 6, 80–81. Very few seventeenth-century English amateur musicians were principally recognized, like Taylor, as composers (others include Sir Edward Golding, Sampson Estwick, and Henry Aldrich); see also the heading of this section, from Anthony Wood (Bellingham, “The Musical Circle of Anthony Wood,” 39).
20. Emslie, “Pepys, Samuel,” GMO (accessed June 19, 2013).
21. Caccini, Le nuove musiche, 49.
22. Parrott, “Falsetto Beliefs,” 82.
23. Butler, The Principles of Musik, 98.
24. Mulvihill, “A Feminist Link,” 74, 79, 81–82.
25. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 10; Gray, “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” 434.
26. Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. 2, 254.
27. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2, columns 1175–1176. Emphasis mine.
28. Ibid., vol. 2, column 1176. Emphasis mine.
29. Aubrey, Brief Lives, vol. 2, 254.
30. On the offending “paper,” see Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 305; Gray, “Katherine Philips and the Post-Courtly Coterie,” 450.
31. Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 306; Limbert, “Katherine Philips,” 29.
32. Green, Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee, part I [hereafter CPCC], 613, 620–621, 637, 641, 643–661. Petty disagreements rumbled on; ibid., 682, 684, 694–695, 697, 706, 710, 718–720.
33. Green, CPCC, 655.
34. Webb, Memorials of the Civil War, vol. 2, 314.
35. [Taylor], Impostor Magnus, 26–27.
36. Ibid., 27.
37. Webb, Memorials of the Civil War, 249–255. One later account has Taylor alongside Birch among the parliamentarian forces (Dugdale, The New British Traveller, vol. 2, 579), though Whitelocke’s (Memorials of the English Affairs, 190) contemporary account does not.
38. Delamain, The Close Hypocrite Discovered, 10.
39. [Taylor], Impostor Magnus, 27.
40. On George Lynn, see Green, CPCC, 650–651, 653; for Matthew Price see ibid., 631, 636–37.
41. Bellingham, “The Musical Circle of Anthony Wood,” 32.
42. Ibid., 39.
43. See Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 44–46, 52–55; Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture, 75–83.
44. Spink, “The Old Jewry ‘Musick-Society,’” 39; see White, “Music and Merchants,” this volume, also Herissone, “Daniel Henstridge,” this volume.
45. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 17–21, 59–62; Evans, Henry Lawes, 187–191, 202–211; Hamessley, “Henry Lawes’s Setting,” 115–138.
46. GB-Ob MS D.19(4), “Hingston”; on the midcentury reception of Dering’s motets, see Wainwright, “Richard Dering’s Few-Voice ‘Concertato’ Motets,” 165–194 at 184.
47. Little, “Music at the Court of King Oliver,” esp. 178–179.
48. Bellingham, “The Musical Circle of Anthony Wood,” 18.
49. Ellison, George Sandys, 175–211; George Buchanan, whose Latin psalm paraphrases were also set by Taylor, was a profound influence on Sandys (ibid., 190–199).
50. Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 169–187; for the earlier Catholic phenomenon, see Kerman, “Music and Politics,” 275–287.
51. Loscocco, “Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song,” 500, 528. Interpretation of this text of course heavily depended on one’s political persuasion, given its use by all sides as a metaphor of exile and subjugation (Hamlin, Psalm Culture, 251–252); Taylor in Impostor Magnus (p. 31) invokes Babylon in conjunction with the “prophaneness, blasphemy, heresie and hypocrisie” supported by the then-incumbent regime.
52. Cfm 163, fol. 46v; Sandys, A Paraphrase on the Psalmes of David, 37.
53. Clarke, Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs, 77–104, esp. 100 (on Marvell’s “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn” as a response to the Troubles via Song of Songs imagery).
54. Bloch and Bloch, The Song of Songs, 197–198; also Chapman, Hallelujah, 110: the Shulamite “signified the people of Jerusalem, so called of Shalem, peace.”
55. For example, in GB-Lbl MS Harley 6868; quoted in Robinson, A History of the Castles of Herefordshire, 144.
56. GB-Lbl MS Harley 6766, fol. 192; see Parry, The Trophies of Time, 17–19.
57. GB-Lbl MS Harley 6726, fol. 251.
58. Taylor, The History of Gavel-kind, 35–36, 40–41.
59. Loscocco, “Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song,” esp. 517.
60. Wainwright, “Richard Dering’s Few-Voice ‘Concertato’ Motets,” 169–170, 185 (esp. n54); Wainwright, Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-Century England, 160–177. Jeffreys, 16 Motets, iii–vi; Thompson, “George Jeffreys,” 325.
61. Thompson, “George Jeffreys,” 330–331.
62. Lawes, Choice Psalmes, sig. A3v (“The Epistle Dedicatorie”).
63. Rivers, “Prayer-Book Devotion,” 205–206; Loscocco, “Royalist Reclamation of Psalmic Song,” 521–523.
64. [Barksdale], Nympha Libethris, 56. This presumably predates Choice Psalmes; Barksdale may have known Lawes’s music in manuscript, and/or the simpler treble-and-bass settings in Sandys, A Paraphrase on the Divine Poems (1638). For a list of Hereford vicars choral, see Havergal, Fasti Herefordenses, 97.
65. To those titles already mentioned one might add Walter Porter’s 1657 Mottetts, and the 1650 and 1656 reprints of William Child’s 1639 First Set of Psalms; Milsom, “Walter Porter’s Mottetts,” 1–5; Zimmerman, “The Psalm Settings,” vol. 1.
66. GB-Lbl Add. MS 17801, fols. 64[r]–64v; Harding, Thematic Catalogue, 89.
67. GB-Lbl Lansdowne 213, p. 333 (quoted in Havergal, Fasti Herefordenses, 101); Chevill, “Clergy, Music Societies,” 35–53.
68. Harding, Thematic Catalogue, 30–34.
69. Wainwright, “Richard Dering’s Few-Voice ‘Concertato’ Motets,” 184–188; see also White, “Music and Merchants,” this volume.
70. Taylor, History of Gavel-kind, sigs A2[r]–A3v (Harley/Dunkirk); Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2, column 1176 (Neile/Harwich); also Simpson, “Neile, Sir Paul (bap. 1613, d.1682x6),” in DNB (accessed July 1, 2013).
71. Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, November 4 and December 19, 1664, vol. 5, 314 and 350. A related letter confirms this Taylor as John Taylor, former master shipwright at Chatham; see Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, 103; Green, Calendar of State Papers, 68 (also the extremely useful website The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries from the 17th Century London Diary, www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1664/11/04/, accessed July 2, 2013).
72. On this observation concerning Philips, see Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 83; Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 299, 306–310.
73. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2, column 176. Music aside, Taylor sought cultural engagement through the Royal Society, of which his patron Neile had been a founder (see, for example, Birchensha, Writings on Music, 219), and apparently harbored theatrical ambitions, sending a script, “The Serenade, or Disappointment,” to Pepys for his opinion (Diary of Samuel Pepys, May 7, 1669, vol. 9, 546–547).
74. Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, June 29, 1668, vol. 9, 251.
