Anthony Wood, seventeenth-century chronicler-topographer of Oxford's City and University, was also a keen amateur violinist whose casual jottings on musicians hold the odd gem. One is to list four verse efforts by Thomas Pierce, set in music, little discussed and since assumed long-lost.Footnote ¹ They survive as a group in one almost unexamined pamphlet. The topic's unusual aspects call for special appraisal.Footnote ² Pierce (1622–91) was Chorister of Magdalen College, then Demy, then Fellow 1643–8 and MA June 1644. In a civil-war spring-cleaning, he was ejected by Parliament for royalism and sat out the early Commonwealth tutoring a sprig of nobility. His recompense: presentation in 1657 to a comfortable benefice. In 1661, court mandate imposed him on his reluctant alma mater as its first post-Restoration President. An ensuing decade of turf wars with the fellows led to his induced resignation, on pretexts of ill health. Moved sideways to be Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, he reasserted there an untrammelled vindictiveness, quite unabashed; Wood felt him ‘somtimes little better than mad’.Footnote ³ That and his acclaimed, rapt sermonizing make a partial context for the four hitherto unassessed verbal texts. Two lack extant settings, only one is wholly new, but all are well-nigh unprecedented as verse for music. Dated 1647–9, they attempt ballad form as well as elevated paraliturgical style, but as enhanced propaganda, pure and simple: to deplore an unravelling socio-religious fabric and the execution of a king. That function incidentally subverts genre, and even performance modes. Pierce, warped by his troubled era, repaid the damage with compound interest. A High Anglican convert at the worst possible moment, c.1644, his acquired world-view impelled him to devote what devious pen-skills he could muster, pious, combative or petulant by turns, to rallying loyalists in their disarray.

Wood's entries are organized by person (and can be fairly meagre; some even blank).Footnote ⁴ He listed Pierce's pieces thus, under setter. He probably relied on college chit-chat for that, since their names are never stated elsewhere, even in the ‘new’ pamphlet. He named William Child and Nicholas Lanier each for one and Arthur Phillips for two. Two of the four settings may be extant: that by Child, and one by Phillips. John Gamble reset that last, clearly later; Wood gives him no mention. As the best-known text it garnered varied authorial ascriptions, mutually exclusive of course, and all demonstrably wrong. Contemporary printed forms that exist for that and one more are trumped by the later letterpress pamphlet. It dates all four to their year with a detailed textual superiority that shows it to be a personal print job for an author. Its intrinsic authority gives grounds for attribution, if Wood's remarks are valid. It does not actually name Pierce; but that (like other contemporary attributions) is insignificant. For a cleric like Pierce to have owned to any would have been incautious as well as indecorous. Breaking cover to involve musical setters already risked self-compromise, in the war years up to 1649. His motives in volunteering verse for the royal cause may straddle murky areas beside music. He attestably relished propaganda as a pastime; he was to earn notoriety in the 1660s through his penchant for pseudonymous disinformation. In his final stage of life, though, he must have wanted to leave a trace, some oblique record, of his ‘back-room’ work.

Lanier's only known work dateable to the Interregnum is Pierce's Funeral Hymn for Charles I, listed by Wood. He is the setter most in need of attention: the only one really eminent but the least associable with Oxford collegians.Footnote ⁵ How did the first-named Master of the King's Music, a chief advisor to Charles in fine art, come to collaborate on a lament for his executed master with an ejected college fellow? It is so unlikely as to ring true, but Lanier's sheer lack of links to Oxford gives it an underappreciated oddity. A commonly held view is that he was at the civil-war court there, 1642–6 (whereon it capitulated to Parliamentary forces, on terms of dignified withdrawal; Charles had fled). Not a shred of evidence supports it. By time of the execution in 1649, a court era was over. Was he – could he have been – in Oxford or London, even England? Accounts of his career are dogged by lack of information at this time: what we have has never been forensically, dispassionately sifted. Doing so with accuracy has to cover his rôle as artist, a multi-faceted, lengthy task: it pre-empts the equally nebulous one of sounding out Pierce's relations to more naturally Oxfordian setters, and the location of texts mentioned by Wood (who gave them only by title, text-incipit and setter).

Civil war eclipsed Lanier; his English estate was impounded and he spent much of the time enduring privations in the Spanish Netherlands.Footnote ⁶ Despite his centrality, his musical output has vanished almost entire, as has contemporary comment to illustrate its nature. Oxford does hold one extant trace: his self-portrait, a real curio that he is thought to have donated to the university's Music School. But no date for that is recorded, or of its painting.Footnote ⁷ Far more relevant to this period is another oil of him: not the fine Van Dyck made in his mid-career, but one by William Dobson, painter to the Oxford court. That is a triple portrait: Dobson, set between Lanier and the court functionary Charles Cotterell. An assumption that it too was painted at Oxford is just that: no proof has been advanced. One opinion finds the pose too novel even for that innovative part of a brief career: Malcolm Rogers put it after the fall of Oxford in August 1646, within Dobson's last three months of life, lodging obscurely and unsupported in Saint Martin's Lane, London. This theory rests on equating Lanier's pose in the triple portrait to one held by Lucas and Cornelis de Wael in an engraving of Van Dyck published in 1646.Footnote ⁸ The borrowing may be validly detected, but need Dobson have waited so long to absorb the influence? There is little to forbid acquaintance with the engraving's original beforehand, in sketch form if no other. Later 1646 hardly offered ideal circumstances for impoverished Dobson to branch out afresh, as the main current study of Lanier remarks.Footnote ⁹ But the case for Oxford 1642–6 is as injudicious. Lanier had directed scores of musicians at Whitehall in London, or royal palaces at large; yet they were conspicuously, well-nigh totally, absent from the Oxford court. No function remained for him to exercise there as Master. Had he been present, surely it would have left some traces? Lack of evidence is no evidence of lack, but his proclaimed indigence abroad, if true, would surely rule out undercover service for his king. John Wilson was the one servant in the ‘Private Music’ renowned in his own day for attending at Oxford. The king granted him a war-time university DMus for that, 10 March 1644: a type of bounty discouraged by the dons for diluting its value and, strikingly, awarded no other serving musician. That speaks clear enough. (Wilson returned as Oxford Professor of Music in 1656; his donated personal songbook is now Bodleian Library, MS Mus b.1.)

There are cogent reasons to think Dobson's piece an early token of entry to court. Van Dyck left England mid-1641 for The Hague to deliver in person his portrait of Princess Mary Stuart with her bridegroom William II of Orange. Even then, he was ailing. In October he went on to Paris, but was worse-inclined by the month-end and returned to England to die in December. It takes no cynic to see how any potential recruit would have weighed his chances at this time, when Dobson became just that successor. Cultivating a go-between like Lanier, a royal advisor, could advance him: what better opportunity to tackle an ambitious, intimate group-composition? From mid-1641 Cotterell was a freshly placed, highly regarded power-broker, newly assisting a distrusted Master of Requests, Sir Balthasar Gerbier.Footnote ¹⁰ Gerbier left England by 1643, though amid the swirl of current events Cotterell received no official title as replacement until the Restoration.Footnote ¹¹ He became active in the king's cause: military duties outright began to absorb his energies. He left to muster men in Wales after seeing the king's standard raised at Nottingham; he took a company to Shrewsbury, and was at the battles of Edgehill, Newbury (first and second) and Alresford. He visited Oxford and was knighted for service there, but not until 21 March 1645. Another distraction in summer 1642 was his marriage. After such unsettling developments, a joint likeness to seal a new faction among court officials could not have preoccupied any of these three men. A triple portrait with no martial symbolism at all must predate by some period, not postdate, the armed struggle 1642–6.Footnote ¹² Winter 1641 to summer 1642 encloses the only period for Dobson to be cementing a pact, by portraiture, with the most valuable court colleagues that he could have acquired.Footnote ¹³ Granting all credit to Van Dyck, the unusual triple pose signals Dobson's arrival: ushered into the arms of Cotterell by Lanier, custodian of court painterly values, expressly to mark his sobering fresh status and duties alongside them. It can be no proof of Lanier in Oxford.

Even after the king fled London, Parliament was prepared to support his household servants financially, records show, except those still in active attendance, like Wilson. No record states that aid was withdrawn from Lanier, but the question is less open if debarment was routine. By 19 October 1639 he was a groom in ordinary of the privy chamber to the reviled queen consort, Henrietta Maria, a post reconfirmed at the Restoration to her as queen dowager.Footnote ¹⁴ Secondment to her retinue would have made him a target by February 1642, the time of her departure abroad to attempt some gun-running. Her Catholic chapel in Somerset House, London, was sacked in March 1643.Footnote ¹⁵ Lanier was in Paris by 1645 and Antwerp soon after, bemoaning his straits to Constantijn Huygens. Gaspar Dúarte befriended him there, a wealthy amateur musician whose son Jacques was jeweller to Charles I. He did visit England in 1650 to attend the sale of the late king's goods, and purchase: that offers some credibility to setting a Funeral Hymn. Even so, he stayed resident abroad. On 30 August 1655 he was allowed to import to England ‘such things as belong to the arts of music and painting’, and on 5 October 1658 ‘to come from Flanders, and bring such pictures of his as he thinks fit’ with two servants.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1660 John Donne Junior mentioned requesting verse texts from Lanier in ‘Germany’, the Netherlands: surely a recent or not much outdated act if then described so.Footnote ¹⁷

The puzzle of Lanier's self-portrait and its accession to the Music School is best tied to general hypotheses on the formation of a collection there. Whatever casual set of portraits may have coalesced after the founding of the Heather Professorship of Music 1626–7 (or before), floruits of subjects suggest that most donations postdate 1649, last regnal year of Charles I.Footnote ¹⁸Negative evidence, though, suggests some first crop before 1656, when Anthony Wood took up instrumental playing (and frequented Oxford music-meetings, like those at the Music School itself under the professorship of John Wilson). He remarked on few portraits in the School, but did expect that an on-going trickle might yet result. Had concerted efforts existed to solicit or manage donations of portraiture then, or after, he would have been alert to them. Wilson's professorial successor, Edward Lowe of Christ Church, did attempt to raise a subscription, but not until the mid-1660s. Several player-performers of existing repute can be mentioned, probable donors of their own images, for not being significant post-Restoration figures. (Such is the lack of record that even the title ‘donor’ is unsure; but no other mode of acquiry is likely.) Lanier is one; he lived into the Restoration, respected still, but little sought-after for composing. A similar pre-war figure, Henry Lawes, managed to eke out the Protectoral years on the back of teaching; after his three books of Aires of 1653–8 his printable repertoire may have been exhausted. John Hilton was a friend of the Lawes brothers, but a minor writer: no great creative force. Catch that Catch can (1652), his enduring success, speaks most for him as a collector of catches and rounds by many authors, Pierce included. Christopher Simpson, an enlisted royalist soldier, is more shadowy; never at court, maybe Catholic, and of limited compositional rank, but a highly respected violist by the end of the Commonwealth era. He shunned the Protector's court, as did Henry Lawes. To all such men Lanier in 1647–9 was chief, his standing authority merely dormant. On any upsurge in royal fortunes or return of the court, however vestigial, he would have reassumed office in a revived Private Music, even in 1648. One sees a point in him venturing back to England at this time. There is no sign that his private affairs, dubious in 1645–6, enabled his return earlier. If he or his associates saw a sanctuary in the Music School, a way to reinstate or at least safeguard royalist values (insofar as music embodied them), then this was a bulwark obviously worth securing. Something comparable in fact seems to have occurred eventually, even in a university purged of royalist dons: John Wilson returned to Oxford to be professor. By the mid-1650s a network of meetings existed, not all under his aegis but acknowledging his supremacy at his Music School centre; so the journal of Wood, from 1656 a participant in music-making of these circles, puts it. A conclusion that Wilson presented the Music School portrait of himself in doctoral robes to celebrate his appointment is irresistible (if undocumented), given its date within the previous year.Footnote ¹⁹ There is no reason to suppose that as the first donation, but Lanier does not seem placeable in Oxford at this time when a little oasis was forming for royalist musicians, just as Wood was reaching an age to document affairs. One must conclude that any visit by him there predates the 1650s and a cluster then of presentations to the School, potently mixed with live music-making. Henry Lawes gave a theorbo to the School, at an assumed date c.1660 (he died in 1662), and probably music too, like Wilson; his own portrait may well have been part of the package. (Even John Hingeston, effectively Master of the Music to the Cromwellian court, donated his autograph works and portrait with another, now lost, of his master Orlando Gibbons; but that came out of respect for Lowe's diligence in fostering musical activities, at some time after 1661.)

Pierce, deprived 15 May 1648, was among the luckier ejected Oxford dons who found clerical patronage among royalist gentry up to 1660; his came from the Spencer family. But for a distinguished colleague within the university to set his verse in 1649 implies that he was then still close by. Arthur Phillips is now barely a name, though Wood wondered if he had been music-instructor to Pierce. (In fact the other name he offers is likelier: Richard Nicholson of Magdalen, whom Phillips succeeded as Professor in 1639.)Footnote ²⁰ Settings by him for Pierce's verse suggests vicinity; Wilson, in Oxford 1642–6 and 1656–61, does not figure. Child, the other named composer, produces meagre or indirect results. The undercover nature of Pierce's work makes other authentication hard. All to be said so far is that Lanier's setting of Pierce's hymn cannot predate the king's execution, January 1649. Yet help exists to prevent a resort to other avenues of surmise, and flesh out the bare bones served by Wood.

This evidence is the pamphlet. It falls within a penumbra of sparsely documented work around one of the most disputed books of the era, Eikòn Basiliké, purportedly the king's personal defence of his reign, and account of his preparation for ‘martyrdom’. Leaving aside the vexed authorship of that work (now usually accepted as Dr John Gauden's, based on the king's private papers), its complicated textual history includes a group of separates listed in Francis Madan's bibliography.Footnote ²¹ One was published in broadside 5 February 1648/9, just before Eikòn itself: ‘HIS MAJESTIES REASONS Against the pretended Iurisdiction of the high Court of Iustice’.Footnote ²² This was the king's, and asserted his core strategy: reliance on the royal prerogative to deny the capacity of any court of the land to try him. Maybe for international standing, a Latin translation of the original circulated in 1649 gradually acceded to editions of Eikòn published by Richard Royston, listed on title pages among supplements as ‘RATIONES Serenissimi CAROLI ΤΟŶ ΜΑΚΑΡΊΤΟΥ Contra affectatam Curiæ’.Footnote ²³ Madan accepted Wood's annotation in his (English) Reasons for this version's origin: ‘This paper was translated into Lat. by D^r Tho. Pierce – printed 1674–5 qv. [viz quarto] with other writings of y^e D^r’.Footnote ²⁴ No form so-dated seems extant. Intriguingly, Wood amended this by crediting Pierce's son: ‘a translation from composition in Latin made by the son of Pierce entitled Reasons against the pretended Jurisdiction Of the high court of justice, which King Charles I intended to deliver in writing on Monday 22 Jan 1648. Printed, but 1674–5 qu. [quarto]’.Footnote ²⁵ Pierce may well have had help, given his sub-Ciceronian command of Latin; but the translation first reached print hard on the heels of the original, far too soon to have been amended by his surviving son Robert. In citing a later imprint precisely enough to imply basis in fact, Wood attests a final form with some such date, though not now precisely verifiable.Footnote ²⁶

Wood's vindication is not in Rationes of 1649, but a thorough revision surviving in print, unique to the British Library. The copy is ‘followed by a thirty-six-page piece, also without title-page or date’.Footnote ²⁷ For the varied content of that remainder, Madan gave one detail to show how it gave a terminus ante quem non: an epitaph in Latin on Sir Philip Warwick ‘dated 17 February 1682’.Footnote ²⁸ Among others in its group is one on Sir Edward Peyto, published in a funeral sermon acknowledged by Pierce.Footnote ²⁹ Preceding pieces here include an elegy on the king known to be Pierce's, in English but entitled Caroli τοῦ μακαρίτου Παλιγγενεσία, and an epitaph in limp (at times ametric) hendecasyllables ascribed to Pierce in one of the first post-Restoration (‘later’) editions of Eikòn, noted by Madan: ‘Sistas sacrilegum pedem, viator’.Footnote ³⁰ The recurrence of both those, with even more pompous macaronic titles, and pride of place handed to Rationes (if not under a full title-page), would make it indirectly plain that Pierce is the anonymous author of all even without Wood's remarks. Other mid-placed epitaphs include one of 1660 for a large influence on Pierce's career, the churchman Henry Hammond who persuaded him into receiving surreptitious ordination.Footnote ³¹

To revise a Latin Rationes at all is a type of afterthought, given its limited value at such a late date.Footnote ³² But a significant part of the undescribed remainder is a final group, after the epitaphs: Pierce's four verse pieces, just as described by Wood. Their tally with his titles and incipits affirms and completes a verification circle.Footnote ³³ These final works are: ‘A Funeral Hymn to The Royal Martyr’, ‘The RESURRECTION’, ‘An Hymn to the TRI-UNE’ and ‘The Requiem and Liberty of an Imprison'd Royalist’, with the same datings 1647–9 given by Wood. This part like the rest is unascribed; but Pierce, well aware of the power of the press, furthered his aims by other untitled, privately distributed print runs quite apart from this.Footnote ³⁴ It has textual superiority: type-setting takes unusually specific care with italicization and asterisks for cross-reference. (Square brackets around italics for parenthesis and quotation marks act in a way found in Elizabethan usage).Footnote ³⁵ The undistinguished, probably provincial, press-work has been given precise inked corrections in both epitaphs and verse.

‘Beat on Proud Billows, Boreas blow’ is the fourth item, and by sheer popularity the most contested in authorship: now widely attributed to Sir Roger L'Estrange on a slender basis which boils down to two Bodleian and British Library manuscripts.Footnote ³⁶ Another form, unascribed, entered print soon after the very time of writing claimed by this pamphlet, to be collected by George Thomason in that same year, 1647; one bibliographer assigned it to Richard Lovelace.Footnote ³⁷ Anthologists have invented other putative authors: William Davenant and, quite at random, Arthur Lord Capel. Parnassus Biceps (1656), billed as a compilation of verse from both universities, gave a good version. But the late form in Rationes, more measured and coherent than any other earlier, makes Pierce's claim indisputable and for the first time gives a rightful assignation. Even if revised, this is pre-1649 in origin: like all, it refers to a living king. Its popular circulation did not evoke comment from Wood, even in passing: by his more mature years it had doubtless become a familiar but period piece. It struck Pierce's most popular chord, but its easy banter uses a single-strand thread of paradox with a veneer of learning, lacking his contemporary John Cleveland's panache in wittily excoriating his foes. Weighted by a leaden temper, with undertones of self-pity and partisan menace, that maybe was exactly its contemporary appeal. Wood's veracity is as palpable with the third item. An extant setting in Bodleian MSS Mus. Sch. C.32-7 has music ascribed to his named setter, Child. The second item has no musical setting known, and one is hard to imagine for this Easter text; it handles the resurrection so uneasily. The first, the Funeral Hymn, is again not unique to this source, but does find best form in it and must also bear authorial cachet as either the text originally sung or else slightly revised. Its nearest rival is well-nigh identical, a literate broadside with a few variants such as (like one manuscript copy) a word repeated ametrically at the chorus opening: ‘hark’. That is a trait of verbal texts taken from musical underlay.Footnote ³⁸ Not a single text names a setter: Wood's information here is entirely independent. In this area he was not so well informed as to have a professional store of knowledge at his fingertips. It is more likely that he was annotating from an intermediate printed issue, because his dating for a revised Rationes is so disparate from that which does survive, and he was alert to that type of issue. It cannot be known if such a copy held identifications, but in the absence of any such copy, and assuming it improbable that Pierce was ever named in such form, Wood had ‘inside’, local information. Pierce's musical training and reputation as capable executant must have made it the easier for him to call on the aid of professionals in setting verse. Wood's correct naming of William Child gives equal substance in his third link, to Arthur Phillips, for two items: ‘The Resurrection’ and ‘The Requiem and Liberty’. (Biographical articles on Phillips take the remarks to imply a vague possibility of other lost settings by him, though evidence falls short of that.)Footnote ³⁹ Phillips succeeded Richard Nicolson as organist at Magdalen, and music professor, but little work survives by him to enlarge the picture. A convert to Catholicism, he left (apparently in 1656) to become organist to the widowed queen consort, Henrietta Maria, in France.Footnote ⁴⁰ After the Commonwealth era and his return, he was employed by Catholic gentry in Sussex, and settled there. Child's movements during that time are even less clear. Ian Spink's off-the-cuff proposal that he was in Oxford with the civil-war court was based solely on the survival of his small-scale Latin motets in the Bodleian Library, and a belief that they were repertoire for Queen Henrietta Maria's war-time Oxford chapel.Footnote ⁴¹ This, if attractive, is uncorroborated: Child could have written such work for the queen or any others before civil war broke out. He did after all pioneer published three-part ‘psalms’ in 1639, considerably before the Lawes brothers’ Choice Psalmes (1648), the next in a similar vein to be printed. Both issues have a small Latin component.Footnote ⁴² In any case, the date at which Lanier is known to have been in England attending the sale of the late king's goods, bidding for his own likeness done in oils by Van Dyck, is the more likely one for him to have been drawn to Oxford. More exact links to possible performing university groups c.1648–9 cannot, regrettably, be established for either Lanier or Child.

Pierce's choice to remain anonymous was in various ways the more astute path. He was no prisoner of conscience, and self-dramatising as an immured cavalier would have claimed his oddly unembodied work for a cause as personal, and exposed him to ridicule. His career-long penchant for proxy publishing (and printing) to serve covert interests is illustrated by two episodes in especial. As President of Magdalen, to discredit opponents he amazingly created the ploy of two pamphlets published pseudonymously, written by him but purporting to be hostile to him. John Dobson, a Fellow and minion of his, took responsibility and was briefly expelled from the university. His publisher Richard Royston, Royal Printer, refused to name names when the Stationers’ Company court called him to account for his part in the ruse after the machinations came to light.Footnote ⁴³ A talent for disinformation resurfaced in Pierce's campaign at Salisbury against his bishop, Seth Ward. His attacks in print manifested ‘black malice’, as John Aubrey saw it, and helped drive Ward into senility and a premature grave.Footnote ⁴⁴

Pierce's underlying traits, injured innocence (however unjustified) and unshakeable self-righteousness, explain why ‘The Requiem and Liberty’ betrays a singularly Pooterish stance. It begins in bombast: it scolds the relentless elements, the least responsible party one could arraign in his quarrel. Paranoia and self-justification, typical of Pierce the man, were the frame of mind to strike wide resonance in his disappointed party. ‘A Funeral Hymn’ is very much in memoriam, not for the interment at Saint George's Chapel, Windsor, 8 February, where rites of any sort were banned. It is ambiguously titled, probably of intent; but Pierce had no standing at that level, even supposing semi-official obsequies among remaining royal courtiers or divines. It bears the date of execution, 30 January, but casually implies topical reference to Eikòn Basiliké, the apologia written in the king's name that, if produced before his death, was widely available only a fortnight after. This more than anything made the usage of ‘martyr’ common currency to describe Charles.Footnote ⁴⁵ Pierce likely set about a local Oxford commemoration to redress official lack. ‘The Resurrection’ is the most bizarre of the texts for one thing: imagery. It crosses most bounds of propriety in celebrating the dead king: conflating him with Christ, and both to a sun-god in temporary abeyance, to be reinvigorated at the spring equinox. That simile is too far-fetched to have gained currency for church use at any era, not to mention its flabbiness in execution: it stretches imagination to envisage its writer's state of mind at the time. By naming its setter, Arthur Phillips, Wood does seem to imply Pierce's presence in Oxford or its environs, 1649–50 (depending on dating old-style or new-style). It is as likely to posit him on an Oxford–London axis when providing Lanier with his ‘Funeral Hymn’ for setting (that does express its title in OS dating). The relations between Pierce and Royston, printer in London, go back at the very latest to 1648. Royston was at the forefront of the royal cause from 1642 when hostilities broke out between king and parliament, and the main instrument in having Eikòn Basiliké printed by a series of handlers and distributed, possibly even before the king's death. Pierce is shown engaged in this enterprise to the hilt from the title page and pretentious titling of Rationes, the translation issued soon after by Royston. Much later, Royston kept silent under questioning over the bizarre pamphlet warfare indulged in by Pierce as President to dislodge a fellow, Henry Yerbury (when his creature Dobson was briefly divested of university membership).Footnote ⁴⁶ Both Pierce and Royston are shown as accomplices, in thrall to the dark arts of dissimulation.

As pieces of a jigsaw come together, they show by default those still missing. How texts evolved for co-opting into a liturgy is rarely clear, even less so paraliturgical texts for commemorations. Few have recorded usage. One notable semi-official outpouring of national grief in the century was for Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales (d. 1612): an official anthem, ‘Know you not’ by Thomas Tomkins, and a flock of biblical settings based on the death of Absalom. This musical mourning by far outweighed any after the execution of his younger brother, Charles.Footnote ⁴⁷ The case of Pierce falls outside normal contemporary practice, but while atypical still gives food for thought. His post-Restoration sermonizing gulled Samuel Pepys into thinking him a scholar, though John Evelyn was not fooled about his good intentions.Footnote ⁴⁸ Clandestine ordination as a priest in 1646 may have emboldened him to write sacred texts for his cause, but placement within Anglican services must by this date also have been clandestine, not least in collegiate chapels. His obviously wide reading did not equate to insightful scholarship, as witnessed in side-notes that give misleading references to his sources – see the notes on texts below.

All of his verse attempts fall short of Parnassus: not just stilted in phraseology but ‘donnish’ in the full humourless sense pilloried by Hilaire Belloc – arrogant, fawning, inflated, pedantic. A strategy of whipping opinion into line fails to allure or convey genuine emotion; it addresses his self-esteem more than matters in hand. His unsatisfying metaphors can be grotesque or indecorous. Such handiwork, from one who took umbrage if his authority or scholarship were queried, fosters little sympathy.Footnote ⁴⁹ Adulatory verse as such was commonplace in the earlier Stuart era; his novelty is mainly to position it genre-wise as semi-sacred lament, and then have that set, if only secretly sung. In an uncanny way, it is a harbinger of the restoration court ode: a larger canvas on which Pierce's faults recur combined, even exalted, some might say. This overlooked moment produced just this new type of enthusiasm, in a fairly uncharted time when Anglicanism was at its bleak nadir. ‘The Requiem and Liberty of an Imprison'd Royalist’ aims at a jaunty pose atypical of Pierce. Yet, for all its flaws, just that gave it appeal, and all the more for the spice of mystery in authorship to this, his one popular and secular success. Wider-ranging questions remain tantalizingly unanswered. One would like to know how he became available to the king's cause: did a burgeoning association with Hammond stimulate it? Just how did Royston (Oxford-born) and Lanier fit in?Footnote ⁵⁰ It could hint at London-based activity; yet Oxford was surely the only possible main arena for music-making by Pierce and his colleagues. One can at least now take cognisance of the idiosyncratic, hitherto unperceived part played by him in moulding an era's popular opinion, and adjust prevailing accounts of propaganda publication.

Verse texts from a pamphlet assignable to Thomas Pierce

RATIONES | SERENISSIMI CAROLI, | Τοῦ μακαρίτου μεγαλομάρτυρος | Contra affectatam Curiæ (quæ dicebatur) Justitiæ | Jurisdictionem; quas, stupendæ quidem, sed | afflictissimæ virtutis Princeps, tan- | quam Cygneam Integritatis, & | sapientiæ vocem edidit.

Notes

Items follow the unnumbered printed order. The text of no. 2 has never so far been reprinted. No musical setting survives for nos. 1–2. No modern edition of the extant setting yet exists for no. 3; for no. 4, well circulated in print and manuscript, see its particular notes and discussion of the music. Original stanza-numeration is inconsistently Roman-Arabic when given at all; its large left-hand marginal side-brackets (over two lines) are shown by double brackets, repeated for the second line. Right-hand line numeration is wholly editorial.

General title: Toû makarítou megalomártyros ‘Of the blest great-martyr’. In classical usage makarītēs (n; gen. makarítou) applies like mákar (adj) to the ‘blessed’ dead in the Hesperian Isles. Megalomártyr marks a Greek Orthodox saint before the Edict of Milan 313 AD, which confirmed toleration of Christianity in the Roman Empire; like hiero- and proto-mártyr, clerical and pioneer martyr for a region, a postclassical distinction. Pierce may have promoted the term here to disparage non-Anglican state worship under the Commonwealth régime. It marks the dawning cult of Charles I, the only saint created by the Anglican Church.

[1] A Funeral Hymn

Concordances: ‘An ELEGIE upon the Death of King CHARLS. | Bright Soul ! instruct us Mortals how to mourn’, [Oxford? c.1649]; STC (Wing 2nd edn) E465; ESTC R38485. US-SM Bridgewater 133296, and GB-Occc: Santa Barbara, University of California, English Broadside Ballard Archive (EBBA) 32125. Manuscript copy in US-CAh MS Eng. 624 no. 36 pp. 131–2: ‘An elegy upon the death of King Charles the first’ (MS owned formerly by the critic Edward Dowden; contents mostly 1660–70s, but its continuance into the 1680s is shown by a copy of ‘Rochester's Farewell’). Preservation in an Oxford library makes a case for a local ceremony and this as its libretto. Major variants of this version, and details of its variant lineation, are given here, below. Wood called Nicholas Lanier its setter (f. 81^v), but no music seems to survive. He altered his description of the setting from ‘two’ to ‘several’ parts, which could suggest that solo verses were for two voices, and choruses for more.

1: echoes ‘Bright soule ! teach us to warble . . .’: Richard Lovelace, ‘An Elegie. Princesse Katherine borne, christened, and buried in one day’, line 11. This is one of over 90 quickly gathered for a consolatory address to Henrietta Maria, mother of Catherine Stuart (b.-d. 20 January 1638/9 at Whitehall Palace, buried Westminster Abbey): Musarum Oxoniensium Charisteria (Oxford, 1638/9). Pierce did not contribute to that. Variants from Occc (etc.) are those given here, as the most likely to be Pierce's first wording, if he revised it in Rationes.

1: ‘poor mortals’][‘us Mortals’

2, 10, 24: the double repeat of ‘Urn’ as capping rhyme to ‘turn’ (9, 23) shows the limits of Pierce's ear. Other similarly spaced repetitions: 7, 22, ‘shrine’; 10, 23, ‘lustre’. The Resurrection similarly falls back on ‘in his Urn’, lines 4, 11; also ‘mourn’ in 3. All of them recall the first couplet (1-2) of A Funeral Hymn in probably unintended echoes.

6–7: no stanza separation here, nor for stanza 2 (Occc etc.).

17: ‘not safe’][‘unsafe’

20: refers to Eikòn Basiliké, attributed to the king, seemingly generally issued 9 February 1649. Advance copies may have been circulated by the day of the king's execution, and Pierce may have begun to compose this verse memorial immediately; but as likely a time for completion is shortly afterwards, in reaction to the lack of a public funeral ceremony.

22: ‘thee’][‘them,’

24: ‘will’][‘can’

25, rubric: ‘Full Chorus’][‘CHORUS’

25–36: set continuously without numeration of stanzas, and all in italic (Occc etc.).

25: ‘Heark’][‘Hark, hark’

26: Occc etc. lack the emphatic brackets (and are already in italic).

26: ‘Whilst’][‘While’

34: ‘heaven's loud Harmonie,’][‘Heav'ns loud harmonyes;’

36: ‘Sky’][‘Skyes’

[2] The Resurrection

Possibly for Easter 1649 following the execution of Charles I; or else a year later.

1: ‘Daughters of the Sun’ (Hēliadae, Hēliades, Phāethontiades), mother Clymenē, father Hēlios; tenders of his flocks of oxen and sheep. cf Neairides, also daughters of the Sun and shepherdesses of his flocks. They yoked the horse of their brother Phaethon to his chariot, and after his death were turned to poplars on the banks of Eridanus (variously identified as the Po or Rhône) and their tears into amber, according to Pseudo-Hyginus Fabulae 154. Accounts vary of their number and names. Fabulae named seven: Aiglē, Aitheriē, Dioxippē, Hēliē, Lampetiē, Meropē, Phoibē. Aeschylus Hēliades (now lost) had Aiglē, Lampetiē, Phāethoussa; Ovid Metamorphoses 2.340 Lampetiē, Phāethoussa, Phoibē. Nonnus Dionysiaca 27.189 mentioned another daughter, untransformed: Astris.

1–4: though without side-note this may recall a passage from a longer one describing the river Eridanus: ‘rami caput umbravere virentes | Heliadum, totisque fluunt electra capillis’. Claudian De Sexto Consulatu Honorii Augusti 176—7 (dated 404 AD).

2: Diodorus Siculus Bibliotheca Historica 5.23.1-4, in fact. His discussion of τὸ καλούμενον ἤλεκτρον, ‘ēlectron’, is alert to the basis for amber in liquid resin, as later in Pliny.

10 Clemens Romanus First Epistle to the Corinthians chapter 25 (late second century AD?) equated divine resurrection to the rebirth of the phoenix every 500 years.

19– 22: in this marginal note, as elsewhere, Pierce's learning fails him in citing his main source. Homer's Odyssey, 11.572-5 (Nékyia), pictures Orion in Hades, even there continuing to hunt. Pierce faultily mistook it for his real source, Vergil Aeneid 10.763-7, and conflated alternative similes in that: ‘quam magnus Orion | cum pedes incedit medii per maxima Nerei | stagna viam scindens, umero supereminet undas, | aut summis referens annosam montibus ornum, | ingrediturque solo et caput inter nubila condit’. Theocritus Idyll 7.54 (Thalýsia) is the model cited for Virgil's lines 763–4: ‘. . . χ̕Ὠρίων ὅτ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ὠκεανῷ πόδας ἴσχει’ (see Servius, Commentary).

29– 30: these lines vary the stanza metre. Line 30, set flush (maybe inadvertently), is also indented to match 33, 36. Charles I is equated to the resurrected Saviour more explicitly than before, perhaps coincidentally; but a parallel with Phaethon's mourners first made in stanza 1 then becomes more uneasy, whether Christ or Charles is in mind. The sun's daughters, by daring to mourn, commemorated transgression of divine (if pagan) order: in punishment, they were transformed. To forge comparison with women mourners at Christ's tomb is correspondingly lacking in due decorum.

38–42: similar thoughts from Pierce's Παλιγγενεσία (1648) lines 189–92 are remodelled here.

[3] An Hymn to the TRI-UNE

Concordance: musical setting à3, ‘Alleluia. Thou who when all . . . ’ by William Child; GB-Ob Mus. Sch. C.32, 34, 35, 36 ff. 8, 9^v, 8, 7^v, B-A-T-bc parts; ‘A Him for Trinety Sunday’, ‘Dr Childe’. The parts are disappointingly uncontemporary; late seventeenth-century at soonest. This is the last of four with ‘Alleluia’ incipits, the initials ‘T.P.’ associated. Pierce did not acknowledge the others by inclusion in Rationes: it detracts from possibilities that he is author of all, as held by Ian Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music 1660–1714 (Clarendon Press; Oxford, 1995), 373–4. Spink's discussion limits their use to the same chamber context that he assumed for Child's Psalmes (1639). Notwithstanding, the given date must confirm a hitherto unenvisaged post-civil-war clandestine chapel usage and partisan bias, as do the chorus couplets – surely a prayer for restoration of Anglicanism.

3: ‘Wain’ must be for ‘wane’, though in A Funeral Hymn line 30 this same spelling conveys the standard meaning ‘cart’, maybe in punning fashion.

[4] The Requiem and Liberty

The circulated version closest to Pierce's, in titling too, is Parnassus Biceps (1656), 107–10: ‘The Liberty and Requiem of an | imprisoned Royalist.’ Its stanzas are set up identically in that verses are indented and not the chorus couplets. It typifies the best of inferior readings (or rather unrevised, maybe), and are those variants noted here as PB, with one from Lloyd (for which, see full concordances below, including musical ones).

1, 5– 6: rubrics in the left margin give ‘Vers. 1.’ and (over two lines, with a bracket) ‘Cho. I.’ respectively. Lack of continuation in marking verse-divisions and chorus couplets was presumably an inconsistency in copy. It is unclear if more than one voice was involved.

5: ‘Roar's,’][‘frown’, PB

6: ‘thy’][‘your’ PB

11: ‘thou’][‘tho’ PB

17: ‘Sophi’][‘Sophies’ PB. Greek ‘sophoí’ wise men is likelier than ‘sufi’ or the Persian ‘Grand Sophi’; but the comparison grammatically inverts the fish with them. Two tales of Gotham (Nottinghamshire) mention drowning an eel; the main one has it sentenced for eating the village pond out of stored fish. Merie Tales of the mad men of Gotam. Gathered to gether by A.B. of Phisike Doctour (Thomas Colwell ‘at London in Flettstret’; n.d), STC 1020.5: The Merry Tales of the Wise Men of Gotham ed. James Orchard Halliwell (John Russell Smith, 4, Old Compton Street, Soho Square; London, 1840). Cf the ‘Wise Men of Chełm’ (Poland): Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Fools of Chelm and their History transl. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elizabeth Shub (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; N.Y., 1973). A carp taken live for Shabbos (Sabbath) gefilte fish dared slap its captor's face with its tail: the council condemned it to drowning in the lake.

19: ‘hugg's’][‘hug’ PB

23: ‘And like to these Stoics severe we see’ PB

24: ‘Make torments easie by their apathy.’ PB

31–6: Thorn-Drury (1927) noted that this Jason is not the Argonaut but tyrant of Pherae and tagus of Thessaly, murdered 370 BC. Pliny tells how doctors despaired of an abscess (imposthume) in his chest: it drove him to find death in the battle-line, ‘in acie’, but an enemy's random cut lanced it: Natural History 7.50. Other accounts seem to attribute fortuitous cure to a would-be assassin's knife (also ‘acie’): Cicero De Natura Deorum 3.70, Valerius Maximus Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium Libri Novem 1.8.6. The latter interpretation, of ‘the smiler with the knife’ is naturally preferred by Pierce.

32: ‘t'have’][‘h’ had’ PB

35: manually inked, ‘Wit’ corrects printed ‘Vit’.

43–8: transposed with 49–54 PB

44: ‘As’][‘Like’ PB

45: ‘And’][‘Or’ PB

47: ‘poynt’][‘part’ PB][‘ piece’ Lloyd

58: ‘Render's’ and ‘not’, originally printed, are corrected to ‘Renders’ and ‘not’ in ink.

59: ‘My Prince from me what’][‘My King from me no’ PB

60: ‘Heart ?’][‘heart.’ PB

61: ‘Soul is’][‘soul's’ PB

62: ‘Immew'd’][‘immur'd’ PB

64: ‘To companie’][‘T'accompany’ PB

65: ‘may’][‘doe’ PB

69: ‘And heard her tell her’][‘How she doth sing her’ PB

71: ‘chirping’][‘chanting’ PB

73: ‘the Bird, whom Beasts combine’][‘that bird, which they combine’ PB

76: a grave accent is added in ink to the ‘e’ in what was printed ‘Malgre’.][‘maugre’ PB

77: ‘Immew'd’][‘immur'd’ PB

Main concordance: GB-Lbl E.398.(12.) Thomason Tracts; a three-page pamphlet, listed under Richard Lovelace as STC (Wing) L3239A, with a presumption of his authorship. Apparently the earliest; bound with items of 1647. G. Thorn-Drury's note pointed out that Thomason's hand-written date is cropped, and could have read 1649: N&Q Tenth Series 1 (January–June 1904), 250, answering notes by Andrew Clark and J.R.F.G., respectively pp. 141, 193. However reference to a living king corroborates a date before 1649. It is not in Vaticinium votivum (1649) E.1217.(2.) = STC (Wing) W3206. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing Royalist Literature 1641—1660 (Cambridge, 1989), 135, described ‘Beat on’ as ‘one of the most popular poems’ of the 1640–50s. Some explanation of that success could be its adoption of attitudes expressed in masterly fashion by Richard Lovelace's Lucasta. That, licensed 4 February 1647/8, was not entered for publication until 14 May 1649 and so not available before the king's execution. The Thomason copy, Lbl E.1373.(1.), is annotated 21 June; it may still have circulated enough in manuscript to attract attention before that. Whether or not, the handling by Pierce was felt as robust, enough so to maintain its own miscellany presence well into the twentieth century. ‘Fly leaves – No. VII Rump Songs’, Gentleman's Magazine (1823), 23–4, cited it from The Rump, 1732 edition (2 vols.), and other late sources.

‘Beat on proud billows’ from GB-Llp MS 1041 ff. 6^v-7 (music unascribed; verse unascribed but accepted editorially as Roger L'Estrange's): Songs with Theorbo (ca. 1650—1663) Oxford, Bodleian Library, Broxbourne 84.9 London, Lambeth Palace Library, 1041 ed. Gordon J. Callon (A-R Editions, Inc.; Madison WI, 2000) no. 5, pp. 37–8: RRMBE 105. This gives an express theorbo part, and ten verses of an inferior text. GB-Ob MS Don. C.57 f. 34 (p. 65), concordant with it, has all 13 (unattributed) but no tune; only a basso line in the stave. This version may not be that set by Arthur Phillips, if one takes Pierce's marginal note to differentiate a chorus and so represent the original setting's practice. US-NYp Drexel MS 4257 no. 326 (notated 3016 sic), is a different setting in the third hand of this manuscript, John Gamble's Songbook, which is thought to be Gamble's. This, almost certainly written by Gamble, was not in his Ayres and Dialogues I–II (1656, 1659); but its inconsequential basso line bears his hallmark of utter incompetence. A long-term associate of Thomas Stanley and, equally inexplicably, possessed of a cult following in Oxford, he could have found the text by either route – place or person – or even some other. Just under four verses are given, up to line 24, word 3. Before that, a peculiar omission is of ‘hard words’: Sophi, Cynick, Caucasus and Stoicks (17, 19, 22–3). For these blanks are left, as if to be filled after checking.

Verbal textual concordances listed by Gordon J. Callon (with amplifications and comments)

Lbl E.398.(12.) as above.

Parnassus Biceps (George Everton; London, 1656), 107–10, “The Liberty and Requiem of an imprisoned Royalist”; Parnassus Biceps ed. G. Thorn-Drury (Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald; London, 1927).

Wit and Drollery (1656), 11–14, “Loyalty confin'd”; Wit and Drollery (1661), 16–19, and other uncollated editions. (Inferior texts).

Da[niel] Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives . . . of those Noble . . . Personages, that Suffered . . . for the Protestant Religion . . ., (Samuel Speede, John Wright, James Collins; London, 1668), 96–7. (Poor and faulty).

Westminster Drollery (1671), 96–8, “The Loyal Prisoner.” (A poor text; cf line 5 ‘Nero’ for ‘Nereus’, etc.).

Lbl MS Harleian 3511 ff. 8-9 ‘Mr Le Strange his verses in the prison at Linn’. It was in fact in Newgate, London, that Roger L'Estrange was immured 1644—8, for attempts to take King's Lynn. It is just possible of course that Pierce wrote for him, or assumed his persona.

Lbl MS Sloane 1454 ff. 29-30^v.

Ob MSS Add. B.106 ff. 45^v-47 ‘A song composed by a loyal subject imprisoned in the late rebellion’. (Titling by a hand other than the main compiler's, in the 1680s).

Ob MS Rawl. poet. 142 ff. 46^v-47 ‘Mr L'Estrange his prison solace’.

US-Ws MSS V.a.85 pp. 44-45; V.a.148 I ff. 119^v-120 inv [or 12^v-13], some reordering of stanzas suggested; V.a.169 II ff. 8-10 rev; V.a.232 pp. 40-41; X.d.171 pp. 1-2 ‘A song made by S^r: W^m. Davenant when confined in Cowes Castle in the Isle of Wight’ (sole content of this MS). Since the piece's date in print precedes his imprisonment, this title can only be a fabrication.

Source abbreviations used, RISM sigla: