Henry VIII on Tour by Delphian Records

HENRY VIII ON TOUR

MUSIC FROM TUDOR ROYAL PROGRESSES

ENSEMBLE PRO VICTORIA toby ward

Ensemble Pro Victoria

2, 4–6, 8–9, 11–12, 15, 19, 21, 23

New Vocal Ensemble 4–6, 8–9

Toby Ward director

* premiere recordings † premiere recordings in these versions

David De Winter tenor 1

Toby Carr lute 1, 22

Aileen Henry harp 3, 13, 20

Magnus Williamson organ 7, 10, 14, 16–18

Recorded on 5-7 March 2024 in Lyddington Parish Church, Rutland and 12 April 2024 in St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Newcastle (organ pieces)

Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter

24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis

24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter

Organ: the ‘Wetheringsett organ’, Martin Goetze and Dominic Gwynn, 2001

Design: Drew Padrutt

Booklet editor: Henry Howard

Cover: Joos van Cleve (c.1485–1540/41), Henry VIII of England, formerly attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Session photography: Will Coates-Gibson/Foxbrush Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK Made and printed in the EU

www.delphianrecords.com @ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords.com @ delphian_records

Henry VIII’s royal year divided into two clear halves. From November until early summer, he resided in a relatively small number of ‘standing houses’: Greenwich, Eltham, the old Palace of Westminster and its successor Whitehall, Richmond and, from the late 1520s, Hampton Court. These palaces were machines for the transaction of royal business, council meetings, patronage and ambassadorial audiences.

The standing houses provided stages for the all-important ritualisation of royal power. Central to this was the church calendar. The main church feasts were nearly always spent in the standing houses: Advent Sunday, Christmastide, Epiphany (6 January), the Purification (2 February), the Annunciation (25 March), Holy Week, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and Trinity Sunday, culminating with the great Eucharistic feast, Corpus Christi. Rarely, as in 1518, when an outbreak of the plague forced his rustication from the environs of London, did Henry break this pattern, celebrating Holy Week and Easter at Abingdon Abbey and Ascension, Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi at the royal manor of Woodstock.

The pattern of the royal ritual year has left audible traces in the surviving Tudor repertoire: Thomas Tallis and his Chapel Royal colleagues composed hymns, responsories and other polyphony expressly for performance on these great public feasts. After Corpus Christi, however, the baggage carts were loaded and the king set out on progress. Most of the thirty gentlemen and

ten boys of the Chapel Royal were stood down during progress season: only a select number of musicians, centred on the ‘Riding Chapel’ of six men and six boys, attended the king on his travels.

Itinerancy had been a norm of medieval kingship.

In his prime, Edward III had travelled the length of his kingdom: in 1337 he ranged from Kent through the Midlands to Berwick upon Tweed. Medieval politics had necessitated regular royal journeys within and beyond England throughout the year, but gradually, Westminster’s consolidation as the judicial and administrative centre encouraged later kings to spend most of the year in the Thames Valley. Long-distance progresses with set-piece royal entries into the major regional cities helped kings to win hearts and minds but became less frequent after 1485.

The trend intensified under Henry VIII. He travelled most assiduously in the early years of his reign, making a progress of the southern counties in the summer of 1510 followed by a more sweeping tour of the Midlands in 1511. On the road south from Nottingham Castle, Henry and Katherine of Aragon were treated to a classic Coventry welcome on Saturday 30 August 1511 with three pageants, one at Jordan Well with the nine orders of angels, a second at Broadgate ‘with divers beautifull Damsells’ and another at the main marketplace, Cross Cheaping, where a ‘goodly Stage Play’ was performed, before the royal entourage swept into the prior’s lodgings at the cathedral priory; the following day, Sunday

31 August, Henry made an offering at ‘Our Lady of the Tower’, Coventry’s devotional image of the Virgin Mary. Earlier in the progress, on the way north from Windsor, one of Henry’s stopovers on his way to Nottingham had been the bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Lyddington (Rutland), where he stayed on 4 August 1511 and where this recording was made in March 2024.

After 1511, Henry kept himself to the south and east: only in July 1541, three decades almost to the day since his last visit, did the now ageing and jaded monarch next stay in Lyddington, this time en route to York. Apart from the occasional military or diplomatic adventure in France, Henry’s travels had three principal foci: reinforcing his social bonds with courtiers, inspecting naval and military fortifications and, above all, hunting. Henry generally avoided staying in towns. Unlike his grandmother, the pious matriarch Margaret Beaufort, he made little attempt to align his itineraries with the great religious festivals and pilgrimage sites. Once he was off duty, Henry kept himself as much as possible from the public gaze: when he celebrated the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on 15 August 1532, the choristers of New College, Oxford travelled to Woodstock to sing in the privacy of his royal manor. The pious Katherine of Aragon had favoured Oxford with a royal entry in 1523, but there was no question of Henry doing so.

Judging from his itinerary, Henry was by nature a stay-at-home. After 1511, he restricted his

progresses to a narrow circuit of routes through south-east England. A favoured host was the bishop of Winchester, Richard Fox (d. 1528), whose string of episcopal palaces in Esher, Farnham and Bishop’s Waltham gave access to well-stocked deer parks as well as a convenient route to the naval dockyards at Southampton and Portsmouth. Bishops’ palaces, abbots’ lodgings and the homes of his courtiers all served their traditional role as royal stopovers, but Henry’s itinerary increasingly revolved around his own expanding portfolio of country houses, from the ancient Oxfordshire manor of Woodstock to newer properties such as Beaulieu (or New Hall, Essex), Petworth (Sussex) and the lost palace at Oatlands (Surrey).

Windsor Castle is nowadays a principal royal residence, but it was for Henry only a second-tier property. He sometimes spent extended periods in residence at Windsor, keeping Christmas there in 1513 and the early summer feasts of Whitsun, Trinity and Corpus Christi in 1519. But for Henry Windsor was more of a launchpad for his regional journeys: in July 1510, wrote the chronicler Edward Hall, ‘the whole Courte removed to Wyndesore, then begynnyng his progresse’.

Then as now, Windsor Castle’s spiritual hub was St George’s Chapel. It had been re-endowed and expanded by Henry’s Yorkist grandfather Edward IV in the 1470s and was now a fully modernised choral foundation. St George’s Chapel choir was immensely well networked, surpassed

Notes on the music

only by the Chapel Royal. Its lay clerks included leading composers, and many of its choristers proceeded to scholarships at nearby Eton College and to careers as church musicians. One such was William Rasar, a chorister at St George’s (1499–1504) who subsequently became a lay clerk at King’s College, Cambridge (1510–1515). His Missa Christe Jesu was probably composed as an imitation mass, based on a now-lost motet, and anticipating the imitation masses of Rasar’s contemporary and fellow Lincolnshire man, John Taverner. Like the latter, it is in tempus imperfectum or duple time throughout; it is lean and pithy, less ornate than other Henrician masses.

Rasar’s Mass is an interesting, if flawed, pioneer work, combining loose melisma with incisive writing more attuned to the prosody of the text. It retains some of the traditional textural contrasts between full sections and more soloistic writing in ‘counter-verses’ for reduced voices. This enables us to imagine a scenario in which members of the king’s riding chapel (here represented by Ensemble Pro Victoria) sang the more demanding solo passages, but were joined in the full sections by members of one of Henry’s host institutions (represented here by Newcastle University’s New Vocal Ensemble) which ranged from grand collegiate foundations to more modest churches and households.

Stylistically, Rasar’s mass belongs to the 1510s or thereabouts, and it was probably composed

when he was at Cambridge where it would have entered the choral repertory at King’s College.

The famous college chapel, finished in 1515, continued to be a startling advertisement of the Tudor dynasty, whose heraldic devices festoon the nave, when King Henry stayed in King’s College during the 1522 progress (he stayed in the Provost’s lodgings). The year 1522 was exceptional, as there were effectively two royal progresses. During the first, between 28 May and 6 July, Henry entertained his nephew-in-law the Emperor Charles V, signing the Anglo-Imperial Treaty of Windsor on the feast of Corpus Christi, 19 June. True to form, a couple of days later, Henry set off with his imperial guest along his familiar progress route through Hampshire to Winchester and Bishop’s Waltham. The second progress of 1522 took in the eastern counties of Hertfordshire, Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, getting Henry to Walsingham in time for Sunday 13 October – one of his rare appearances at a major pilgrimage site.

The royal court was the main arbiter of taste, not least because of its itinerancy. This was particularly true in the sunlit early years of Henry’s reign. Edward Hall’s description of Henry’s first progress of 1510 gives a good sense of the intensity of the young king’s pastimes:

exercysing hymself daily in shotyng, singing, daunsyng, wrastelyng, casting of the barre, plaiying at the recorders, flutes, virginals, and on setting of songes, makyng of balettes, and [he] dyd set ij goodly masses, every of them fyve partes, whiche were songe oftentimes in hys chapel and afterwardes in diverse other places. And when he came to Wokyng, there

were kept both Iustes and Turneys [jousts and tournaments]: the rest of thys progresse was spent in huntyng, hawkyng and shotyng.

Hall encapsulates perfectly the range of Henry’s pastimes which required competitors, collaborators, companions, audiences, spaces, landscapes, prey and resources. Although his two five-voice masses are lost, his compositions travelled beyond his immediate circle, and he never lost his reputation as a musically accomplished monarch. The so-called ‘Henry VIII Book’ (British Library, Add. Mss 31922) is the most vivid legacy of Henry’s musicianship. Despite its name, it probably didn’t belong to Henry himself but to his boon companion and master of revels, Sir Henry Guildford (1489–1532). Its most famous item, Pastime with good company, is attributed to ‘The Kynge .H. viij’, although its melody drew upon a preexisting Continental tradition and Henry’s main contribution was its familiar English text. Henry’s creative interaction with Continental music can also be seen in the untexted En vray amoure. The tune can be found in Continental sources and was used by the composer Loyset Compère, whose setting was probably known by Henry. Its declamatory style makes En vray amoure an attractive piece for wind instruments but, like Pastime with good company, it could equally have been performed on the lute, in the intimacy of the privy chamber. Likewise, William Cornysh’s Ah, the sighs is found as a three-voice part-song in the Henry VIII Book, but a slightly different version survives as a single voice-part in another

Henrician manuscript (BL, Royal Appendix MS 58): this latter version has been recorded here in the standard lute and voice format.

If the Henry VIII Book encapsulates the brilliance and youth of the 1510s, it also reflects older traditions. Its likely copyist, Thomas Farthing, had been a lay clerk at King’s College, Cambridge in the mid 1490s and then a singing-man in the household chapel of Henry’s formidable grandmother, Margaret Beaufort. Its contents include learned exercises in musica speculativa alongside more earth-bound vernacular songs, such as Robert Cowper’s Fare well my joy. Like Farthing, Cowper had been a lay clerk at King’s before taking up employment in Margaret Beaufort’s chapel, at which time (1506–7) he secured a Cambridge MusD.

William Cornysh had joined Henry VII’s Chapel Royal as a gentleman around 1495. As early as 1493 he had specialised in the directing of pageants and plays, a role that would continue under Henry VIII. His Trolly lolly was probably written for one of the dramas so characteristic of the 1510s, but this rumbustuous miniature was well suited to the sociable singing of Henry and his companions. The choirbook format of the Henry VIII Book requires the three singers to stand in a huddle, reading their voice parts which were disposed in separate blocks across the opened book. One misreading can lead to irrecoverable breakdown and, perhaps, a chaffing royal rebuke.

A final item from the Henry VIII Book not only became one of the best-travelled pieces in the repertory, but also enjoyed a revealing afterlife. Dionisius Prioris (or Denis Prieur) was a singer in the chapel of King Louis XII of France (r. 1498–1515). His miniature Marian motet Dulcis amica Dei is found in over twenty sources from the 1480s to 1538, including three in England: the Henry VIII Book, a Flemish chansonnier that entered England through Humanist circles (BL, Add. Mss 35087), and a choirbook copied on the Continent but given to Henry VIII while Prince of Wales, probably by Anne, Duchess of Brittany and wife of King Louis XII (Magdalene College, Cambridge, Pepys Library, MS 1760).

years as an unwilling guest at the Tudor court where, we can safely assume, he encountered Prioris’s motet.

Bizarre evidence for the spread of Continental music through the Tudor realm, aided in large part by the mobility of court tastes, can be found at the siege of Maynooth Castle on Tuesday, 23 March 1535. The castle belonged to ‘Silken Thomas’ Fitzgerald, 10th Earl of Kildare, who had risen in rebellion against Henry VIII. Writing his Chronicle several decades later, but using eyewitness reports, Raphael Holinshed described how the king’s forces finally entered Maynooth Castle:

in the after noone, upon whose repaire, James Delahide, and [Robert] Haiward, two singing men of the earle his chappell, that were taken prisoners, prostrated themselves on the ground, pitifully warbling a soong, named Dulcis amica.

Thomas Fitzgerald had been born in London and his father Gerald Fitzgerald had spent several

We have lost nearly all the music books used in Henry’s Chapel Royal. A weekly cycle of Lady Masses by Nicholas Ludford of Westminster survives in the British Library (Royal Appendix Mss 45–8); a printed Sarum Processional of 1528 also survives in the BL, with a polyphonic voice part for the hymn Salve festa dies, in a version for the summer feast of St Anne, copied by hand on its flyleaves (BL, C.35.f.10). Both of these sources were listed in an inventory of the king’s Upper Library at Whitehall in 1542 and may therefore not have been used by the Chapel Royal itself. Fragments of what looks like a dismembered Tudor royal choirbook would find their way into various bookbindings now in Oxford, Leipzig, Zwickau and elsewhere. Repertory from Chapel Royal choirbooks can probably be identified among the contents of post-Reformation sources such as John Baldwin’s partbooks (Christ Church, Oxford, Mus. 979–83).

Fortune has been kinder to the prestigious musical gifts received by Henry VIII. Among these are the Newberry–Oscott Partbooks, now split between Chicago and Sutton Coldfield but commissioned by the city of Florence as a diplomatic gift for Henry VIII in the late 1520s. The most prominent composer in this collection is the Frenchman Philippe Verdelot who worked

in Florence during the 1520s. Having reached the Tudor court via the Florentine gift, Verdelot’s Marian motet Sancta Maria virgo virginum was subsequently included in a set of partbooks probably copied by the Fleming Derick Gerarde for Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel, who in 1556 bought Henry’s still-uncompleted white elephant, Nonsuch Palace.

Inventories made in the 1540s, corroborated by payment records in the wardrobe and household accounts, attest to Henry’s insatiable appetite as a collector. By the time of the king’s death in 1547, the main collection at Whitehall Palace comprised 19 regals, 16 virginals, 2 clavichords, 19 viols, 21 gitterns, 24 lutes, 60 flutes, 7 crumhorns, 40 recorders, 17 shawms and more. These were curated by the Flemish lutenist, singer and composer, Philip van Wilder, who served as Privy Chamber musician and de facto master of the king’s music until his death in 1553.

Van Wilder typifies the generation of foreign musicians who thrived at Henry’s court, bringing with them new musical styles and competences. His position within the Privy Chamber gave him access to the ‘upstairs’ sector of the royal household, where power was defined by proximity to the king. Access to the royal person was gained through a succession of physically defined spaces: the Watching Chamber, the Presence Chamber and, for the privileged few, the Privy Chamber. This tripartite spatial layout was incorporated into all of Henry’s standing

houses, but it was also emulated in his progress venues. One of the most interesting of these is Acton Court in Gloucestershire, whose Henrician owner Sir Nicholas Poyntz constructed a new wing with the three-chamber layout for the royal progress of 1535.

Van Wilder’s duties included directing a small group of Privy Chamber singers, five men and up to half a dozen ‘singing children’. This team was independent from the Chapel Royal and, judging from van Wilder’s own compositions, their duties included the singing of continentalstyle motets and chansons. Van Wilder’s court position enabled his chansons to spread widely in England. A smaller number of Latin pieces circulated, along with one long-lived vernacular anthem. Van Wilder’s Sancte Deus is closely related to a setting of the same Jesus antiphon by Thomas Tallis who joined the Chapel Royal around 1543. Both settings survive in the Elizabethan Gyffard Partbooks (BL, Add. Mss 17802–5); both are for one lower and three upper voices; and both composers follow the same sectional divisions found in more richly scored (but rather shorter) settings by John Taverner and William Whytbroke. Jesus antiphons could be sung throughout the year, particularly on Fridays, but the reduced scoring used by both Tallis and van Wilder would have been particularly suited to the limited personnel of the summer progresses, when Henry’s ritual obligations were pared back to Lady Mass in the morning and an anthem each evening.

Henry’s accumulation of musical instruments attests to the growth of instrumental consort playing at court. As curator of the king’s collection, Philip van Wilder was responsible for loaning instruments to players, who presumably included courtly amateurs alongside the paid ensembles of Englishmen, Flemings and Italians. The 1542 inventory mentions cases, and it seems likely that some of Henry’s instrumentalists attended him while on progress, especially as he built up his portfolio of Home Counties progress houses such as Oatlands (bought in 1538) and Nonsuch (begun the same year).

William More ‘the blynde harpe’ was one of Henry’s longest-serving instrumentalists. He entered the household in 1515 and was acknowledged as England’s leading harpist by 1520; tainted by association with the executed abbots of Reading, Colchester and Glastonbury in autumn 1539, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London but was soon released and remained in royal employment until his death in 1565. As king’s harpist, More would have been expected to perform ballads and improvise songs in the chamber, at home in the standing houses and – we can assume – while on progress with the king. He also composed at least two Latin motets and two consort pieces on the cantus firmus Miserere. His motet Levavi oculos meos (from Psalm 121) is an early prototype of the psalm motet in England: tautly constructed and epigrammatic, with frequent cadences and tightly packed stretto fuga, it bears a stylistic

kinship with the motets of John Sheppard and Christopher Tye. It is found in an Elizabethan source, the Hamond Partbooks (BL, Add. Mss 30480–83) without text but bearing the title ‘Levavi occilose’. The Latin psalm text can be underlaid to the music without much difficulty, although the music transmitted in ‘Hamond’ is occasionally rough. The piece was also turned into a vernacular anthem to another psalm text (Psalm 126: ‘When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion’), a single voice-part of which is found in a Cambridge tenor partbook copied c.1640.

As a composer of polyphonic vocal and consort music, William More was presumably able to dictate music into both lute tablature and stave notation. Mid-century Continental theorists like Juan Bermudo presupposed the desire of harpists to play part music, and in 1511 the German Johannes Cochlaeus described the English using harps with multiple rows of strings capable of playing fully chromatic music. Some of the simpler pieces found in Tudor keyboard sources could be rendered on diatonic harp, such as the two-voice texture of La bounette, from the early Elizabethan Mulliner Book (BL, Add. Mss 30513). The kynges maske and A galyard are both found in the diminutive keyboard source, BL, MS Royal Appendix 58, among a clutch of dances and character pieces suitable for secular recreation and playable on a range of instruments, here the harp. They are supplemented with a set of Three galliards from another British Library manuscript (BL,

Add. Mss 60577). These are early essays in the form, composed by John White, successively headmaster and warden of Winchester College (1535–42, 1542–54) and later bishop of Winchester (1556–9).

It was during the royal visit to Winchester in September 1535 that the household musician

Mark Smeton visited Anne Boleyn in her chamber when ‘she sent for hym to play on the virginals’. A decade earlier, Henry had stopped in Winchester and its vicinity in June–July 1522 and August 1526. These earlier visits coincided with John Redford’s tenure as organist of the ancient hospital of St Cross, Winchester, between 1523 and 1526. Redford would go on to become almoner and organist of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the first major British organ virtuoso whose compositions survive. Much of his organ music comprises hymns and antiphons for the greater church feasts, but he also wrote two settings of Felix namque, the offertory at Lady Mass throughout the summer months. They are both found in a mid-century collection of liturgical organ music that later belonged to the composer Thomas Tomkins (BL, Add. Mss 29996), and the second is also found in a manuscript of the 1550s containing Redford’s dramatic interlude, The Play of Wit and Science (BL, Add. Mss 15223).

Both pieces demonstrate Redford’s mastery of paraphrasing a plainsong cantus firmus: the first Felix namque, which is mainly in two parts, has the chant in the left hand and was composed for an organ with short-compass keyboard; the

second setting is for a longer-compass keyboard and has the chant in the middle of its three voices.

A third item from Lady Mass is the anonymous setting of the Communion chant, Beata viscera, which is found in BL, MS Royal Appendix 56, the twin of Roy. App. 58 and the earliest English source of fully fledged organ music. This setting has the chant in the top voice, easily discernible as a series of breves under which two other voices weave a single-minded fuga. We can be certain that Henry heard this music, or similar organ verses, during celebrations of Lady Mass while on progress. Inventories of the 1540s mention organs in the chapels of New Hall and Nottingham Castle and some of Henry’s provincial hosts had fully equipped chapels with organs, lecterns, stalls and vestments.

A key piece of evidence is the Eltham Ordinances of 1526 which supplemented earlier ordinances regulating the royal household. The 1526 ordinances were drafted ostensibly ‘for the establishment of good order and reformation of sundry errors and misuses’. The Eltham Ordinances clearly delineate the ritual division of the royal year: when the king was at Windsor, New Hall, Richmond, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Eltham or Woodstock, ‘the King’s noble chappell [was] to be kept in the same place’. When the king was on progress, however, in order to minimise ‘excessive labour, travell, charge and paine’, the Riding Chapel comprising the master

of the children, six men and boys were to give their ‘continuall attendance’ on the king’s court:

daily, in absence of the residue of the chappell, to have a massse of our Lady before noone, and on sundayes and holydayes, masse of the day besides our Lady masse, and an antheme in the afternoone; for which purpose no great carriage, either of vestments or bookes shall be required.

Nicholas Ludford’s weekly cycle of Lady Masses, contained in four little books (BL Royal Appendix Mss 45–8), seem ideally suited to this purpose, and probably comprise one layer of the progress repertory.1 Ludford’s Lady Masses are masterpieces of miniaturisation, but Henry’s voracious appetite for music and instruments would have required a more varied diet across the 38 years of his reign.

The onset of autumn heralded the court’s return to the Thames Valley and its resumption of normal termtime residency in the king’s standing houses. The timing varied from one year to another, according to political circumstances, the weather and, perhaps, the king’s mood. His reluctance seems more marked in his later years: in 1543 he delayed his return to Hampton Court as late as 18 December; and he seems to have used Windsor Castle and Oatlands Palace as homes-from-home. Windsor came equipped with its own permanent infrastructure, including the choral foundation at St George’s, and both Windsor and Oatlands acted as de facto

1 Parts of the cycle were recorded by Ensemble Pro Victoria/Toby Ward and Magnus Williamson (organ) on Tudor Music Afterlives (Delphian DCD34295).

standing houses, following the logic of the Eltham Ordinances (if they remained in force – indeed, if they had ever fully been enforced). This meant a return to the full routine of choral services, attended by the wider Chapel Royal – a return symbolised by two seasonal rewards paid to the boys of the Chapel. Like clockwork, throughout Henry’s reign, the sum of 20 shillings was paid ‘to the Children of the Chappell for singinge Audivi vocem on Allhollondaye’ (All Saints, 1 November); eight weeks later, 40 shillings was regularly paid

‘to the Children of the Chappell for synginge Gloria in excelsis deo on Christmas day’. These were showcase events for pre-Reformation choristers: elaborate responsories set to polyphony and sung either in the middle of the chapel (Audivi vocem) or from a high loft in imitation of angels (Gloria in excelsis). Settings of these responsories were composed by several Tudor composers: the one sung here, Audivi vocem de caelo is by that ‘homo memorabilis’ and archetypal Tudor composer with close connections to Henry’s Chapel Royal, John Taverner of Boston.

Texts and translations

1 Ah, the sighs

Ah, the sighs that come from my heart, They grieve me passing sore, Since I must from my love depart, Farewell, my joy, for evermore. Oft to me her goodly, sweet face Was wont to cast an eye; And now absence to be in place, Alas, for woe I die, I die. I was wont her to behold And take in armès twain; And now with sighès manifold, Farewell my joy, and welcome, pain, And I think I see her yet,

As would to God I could, There might no joys compare with it Unto my heart as now she should.

attr. to William Cornysh (BL. Royal Appendix 58, f. 3r, spelling modernised)

2 Trolly lolly

Trolly lolly lolly lo, Sing trolly lolly lo, My love is to the greenwood gone, Now after will I go: Sing trolly lolly lo.

attr. to William Cornysh (BL, Add. Mss 31922, ff. 43v–44r)

Missa Christe Jesu

4 Gloria

Gloria in excelsis Deo

et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.

Laudamus te. Benedicimus te.

Adoramus te. Glorificamus te.

Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.

Domine Deus, Rex caelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens.

Domine Fili unigenite, Jesu Christe; Domine Deus, Agnus Dei, Filius Patris.

Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Qui tollis peccata mundi, suscipe deprecationem nostram.

Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, miserere nobis.

Quoniam tu solus Sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe.

Cum Sancto Spiritu in gloria Dei Patris. Amen.

5 Credo

Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium. Et in unum Dominum Jesum Christum, filium Dei unigenitum, et ex Patre natum ante omnia saecula, Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero. Genitum non factum, consubstantialem Patri; per quem omnia facta sunt. Qui propter

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.

We praise you. We bless you.

We worship you. We glorify you. We give you thanks for your great glory.

Lord God, heavenly King, God the Father Almighty.

Lord, the only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ; Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father: Who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. Who takes away the sins of the world, receive our prayer.

Who sits at the right hand of the Father, have mercy upon us.

For only you are Holy, only you are Lord, only you are Most High, Jesus Christ. With the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. Amen.

I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages. God of God, light of light, true God of true God; begotten, not made; consubstantial with the Father, by whom all things were made. Who for us men, and for

nos homines et propter nostram salutem descendit de caelis. Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto, ex Maria Virgine; et homo factus est. Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est.

Et resurrexit tertia die secundum scripturas, et ascendit in caelum, sedet ad dexteram Patris, et iterum venturus est cum gloria iudicare vivos et mortuos, cuius regni non erit finis. Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre Filioque procedit, qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et conglorificatur, qui locutus est per prophetas.

Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam. Confiteor unum baptisma in remissionem peccatorum, et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum, et vitam venturi saeculi. Amen.

6 Sanctus

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus. Dominus Deus Sabaoth: Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Hosanna in excelsis.

8 Benedictus

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini: Hosanna in excelsis.

our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man. He was crucified also for us, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was buried. On the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven. He sits at the right hand of the Father, and shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. And his Kingdom shall have no end. I believe in the Holy Ghost, Lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who together with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified, who spoke through the prophets. I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I confess one baptism for the remission of sins. And I await the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.

9 Agnus Dei

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

11 Dulcis amica Dei

Dulcis amica Dei, Rosa vernans, stella decora, Tu memor esto mei Dum mortis venerit hora.

Anon. (first in a MS of the 1480s)

Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

Lamb of God, who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.

God’s sweet beloved, Rose in blossom, fair star, Be mindful of me

When comes the hour of my death.

12 Sancta Maria virgo virginum

Sancta Maria virgo virginum, sanctae Trinitatis sacrarium, angelorum speculum, scala sanctorum omnium, tu peccatorum refugium, cerne pia meum periculum.

Suscipe clementissima meum suspirium et da mihi tuum placatissimum filium. Amen.

Anon. (first in Newberry–Oscott Partbooks, late 1520s)

Holy Mary, virgin of virgins, shrine of the Holy Trinity, mirror of angels, ladder of all saints, you are the refuge of sinners, loving one, behold the danger I am in.

Most gracious one, accept my sigh, and grant your Son to be most favourable to me. Amen.

15 Sancte Deus

Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, sancte et immortalis, miserere nobis. Nunc, Christe, te petimus, miserere, quaesumus.

Qui venisti redimere perditos, noli damnare redemptos: quia per crucem tuam redemisti mundum. Amen.

Anon. (BL, Add. Mss 17802-5, Gyffard Partbooks)

19 Levavi oculos meos

Levavi oculos meos in montes, unde veniet auxilium mihi.

Auxilium meum a Domino, qui fecit caelum et terram.

Non det in commotionem pedem tuum, neque dormitet qui custodit te.

Ecce non dormitabit neque dormiet qui custodit Israel.

Dominus custodit te; Dominus protectio tua super manum dexteram tuam.

Per diem sol non urat te, neque luna per noctem.

Dominus custodit te ab omni malo; custodiat animam tuam Dominus.

Dominus custodiat introitum tuum et exitum tuum, ex hoc nunc et usque in saeculum.

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto: sicut erat in principio, et nunc et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Psalm 121 (120 Vulgate)

Holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us.

Now, Christ, we beseech you, have mercy, we beg.

You who came to redeem those who were lost, do not condemn those you have redeemed: since by your cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.

I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from where help will come to me.

My help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

May he not give your foot to confusion, nor may he sleep who watches over you.

Behold, he will not sleep, nor will he fall asleep, who watches over Israel.

The Lord watches over you; the Lord is your shield upon your right hand.

May the sun not burn you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord guards you from all ill; may the Lord watch over your soul.

May the Lord watch over your coming in and your going out, from this time and forever.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, and is now and will be forever and throughout all ages. Amen.

and translations

21 Fare well my joy

Fare well my joy and my sweet heart, Fare well, mine own heart root. From you a while must I depart, There is none other boot. Though you depart now thus me fro, And leave me all alone, My heart is yours wherever that I go, For you do I moan.

Anon. (BL, Add. Mss 31922, ff. 66v–68r, spelling modernised)

23 Audivi vocem de caelo

Audivi vocem de caelo venientem: Venite omnes virgines sapientissimae, oleum recondite in vasis vestris dum sponsus advenerit.

Media nocte clamor factus est: Ecce sponsus venit.

Responsory at Matins for All Saints

I heard a voice coming out of heaven:

Come all you wisest virgins, store up oil in your vessels against the bridegroom’s arrival. In the middle of the night a cry went up: Look, the bridegroom comes!

This recording stems from Henry on Tour, a project funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council, and involving researchers from Historic Royal Palaces, Newcastle University and the University of York, alongside collaborators including Ensemble Pro Victoria.

Thanks are due to Prof. Anthony Musson; Nick Walters; Ian Roberts, Kris Thomsett and the Dean and Chapter of St Nicholas Cathedral, Newcastle; the vicar and churchwardens of St Andrew’s church, Lyddington; and to Andrew McCrea and the Royal College of Organists for the loan of the Goetze and Gwynn ‘Wetheringsett’ organ. We were very saddened to learn that Dominic Gwynn died on 24 May 2024 soon after this recording was made.

Biographies

Founded in 2015 at Cambridge University by Humphrey Thompson and Toby Ward, Ensemble Pro Victoria is established as of Britain’s leading early music ensembles. Named after a favourite Spanish Renaissance battle mass by T.L. de Victoria, the Missa Pro Victoria, the ensemble put down roots in the rich tradition of combined historical research and performance. It won joint-first prize at the London International Festival of Early Music’s Young Ensemble Competition in 2020 and a first album, Robert Fayrfax: Music for Tudor Kings and Queens (Delphian DCD34265) was received with critical acclaim in 2021, winning five stars from Choir and Organ and being praised for ‘outstanding vocal energy and stylistic elan’ in Cathedral Music. Major highlights for the ensemble include Monteverdi Vespers in the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, and a live Tudor Vespers on BBC Radio 3 from Hampton Court Palace. Ensemble Pro Victoria collaborates extensively with musicologist Magnus Williamson to fulfil its vision of stimulating performance combined with cutting-edge research. It is one of the few groups in the world to practice choir-book performance from one manuscript, while researching the effects of this lost manner of performance. The ensemble also runs workshops and joint concert days to educate, inspire and develop love for early music and music-making.

Toby Ward was born in Otley, Wharfedale, in 1993. He was one of the last choristers of Leeds Parish Church, studying organ with David Houlder and Simon Lindley before joining the choir of Gloucester Cathedral under Adrian Partington. He read music as a choral scholar at King’s College Cambridge under Sir Stephen Cleobury, followed by postgraduate studies in singing at the Royal College of Music, studying with Alison Wells, and continued studies in conducting and choir training with Paul Brough.

A versatile conductor, singer and organist, he is director of music for the Grand Priory of England and a specialist in liturgical provision. He regularly sings with vocal ensembles Tenebrae Choir and Contrapunctus, and is known for his work with boy trebles, having taught at Westminster Abbey, Durham and Newcastle Cathedrals. Future projects with Ensemble Pro Victoria expand on his research interests including the combined liturgical and musical traditions of Catholic worship and the use of instruments in Renaissance polyphony.

Lutenist and guitarist Toby Carr is known as a versatile and engaging artist, working with some of the finest musicians in the business. In demand as a soloist, chamber musician and continuo player, his playing has been described as ‘sensuous and vivid’ (Guardian), ‘eloquent’ (BBC Music Magazine) and ‘mesmerising’ (Opera Today).

Biographies

Toby has performed with most of the principal period instrument ensembles in the UK and beyond, as well as with many symphony orchestras, opera companies and ballet companies. Notable recordings include De Pasión Mortal with Nicholas Mulroy and Elizabeth Kenny, Drop not, mine eyes with Alexander Chance and Battle Cry – She Speaks with Helen Charlston (Delphian, DCD34283), winner of both BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone Awards in 2023.

Magnus Williamson is Professor of Early Music at Newcastle University, a keyboard player, improviser, researcher and editor specialising in musical practices, sources and contexts from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century.

Ensemble Pro Victoria

Soprano

Fiona Fraser

Áine Smith

Alto

Matthew Farrell

David McGregor

Lissie Paul

Toby is a professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, working across the guitar and historical performance departments.

Aileen Henry is a Northern Irish harpist, now based in London, who specialises in historical performance.

After gaining her BMus and MMus in performance at Trinity Laban with Gabriella Dall’Olio and Frances Kelly, she then studied historical harps with Mara Galassi at the Civica Scuola di Musica Claudio Abbado in Milan.

As a continuo player and as a soloist Aileen has worked with a large variety of orchestras and ensembles, specialising in the performance of music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

His publications include a prize-winning facsimile of the Eton Choirbook and a major edition of Latin polyphony by John Sheppard (published in the British Academy series, Early English Church Music, of which he is currently chairman). He has led numerous publicly-funded research projects (for instance, Tudor Partbooks: Arts & Humanities Research Council, 2014–17), and is currently engaged in a Leverhulme Trust collaborative research project investigating the music theorist, grammarian and beekeeper, Charles Butler (1571–1647). For two decades he has been associated with the Early English Organ Project whose investigations of Tudor organs have led to several CD recordings, broadcasts and research projects.

Formed by Magnus Williamson and Richard Wistreich in 2003, New Vocal Ensemble is Newcastle University’s principal a cappella ensemble. It specialises in unaccompanied choral music from the Middle Ages to the present day, with particular emphasis on Renaissance polyphony.

Anna Semple

Tenor

David De Winter

James Robinson

Baritone

Gavin Cranmer-Moralee

Humphrey Thompson

Bass

Piers Connor Kennedy

Stuart O’Hara

New Vocal Ensemble

Soprano

Alessia Lotto

Bridget Tiller

Isabella Wickham

Alto

Laura Oldfield

Emogene Shaw

Isabel Thomas Bass

Timothy Cranfield

James Watson

Michael Winter

Chorus vel Organa: Music from the lost Palace of Westminster Choir of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge / Geoffrey Webber; Magnus Williamson organ

DCD34158

Great Britain’s modern Houses of Parliament conceal a lost royal foundation: the chapel of St Stephen, begun by Edward I and raised into a college by his grandson Edward III. The foundation maintained an outstanding musical tradition for almost exactly two hundred years before the college was dissolved in 1548, when the building became the first permanent meetingplace of the House of Commons. This recording reflects the musical life of the college in its final years under Henry VIII, and reconstructs both the wide range of singing practices in the great chapels and cathedrals and the hitherto largely unexplored place of organ music in the pre-Reformation period.

‘The resourceful Geoffrey Webber’s choir sounds invigoratingly individual. Magnus Williamson’s improvised chamber organ responses and interludes, based on surviving partbooks, add to the atmospheric archaeology … An extremely worthwhile compilation’ — The Observer, June 2016

Robert Fayrfax (1464–1521): Music for Tudor Kings & Queens

Ensemble Pro Victoria / Toby Ward DCD34265

In that golden age of British choral music half a millennium ago, when polyphonic voices soared in the vaulting of the great late-Gothic churches and chapels that seemed to have been built for them to fill, one composer was in especial favour with the royal family: Robert Fayrfax. A newly reconstructed movement from a mass for the private wedding of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, later treasured in darker times by the recusant gentry for its Catholic associations, sits here alongside exuberant masterpieces from the Eton Choirbook and, in intimate contrast, Fayrfax’s seven surviving courtly songs, brought together on a single recording for the first time. An exciting new signing for Delphian, Ensemble Pro Victoria’s young professionals bring both freshness and individuality to Fayrfax’s music in the five hundredth anniversary year of his death.

‘one of Britain’s finest young vocal ensembles … supported by musical scholarship of the highest order’ — Early Music Review, October 2021

Tudor Music Afterlives

Ensemble Pro Victoria, Toby Carr lute, Magnus Williamson organ/ Toby Ward DCD34295

Following the freshness and vigour of their quincentenary portrait celebration of Robert Fayrfax, Ensemble Pro Victoria’s second Delphian album brings a similar boldness of approach to a wider-ranging collection, charting some rarely explored territory from a time of great religious, societal and musical change. Broken fragments of huge pre-Reformation works, preserved only in lute tablature; the first reconstruction and recording of some of the earliest Anglican psalm settings ever written; French chansons and motets once popular in England; improvisatory organ verses within Lady Mass movements by Ludford; and an English-texted version of a much-loved Tallis anthem that shows it in a quite different light: these forgotten ‘afterlives’ of earlier Tudor music help build a much more complete picture of music in sixteenth-century England.

‘This combination of cutting-edge scholarship and outstanding performance gives us a recording of the highest quality, apt for edification and pleasure’ — Early Music Review, November 2022

Loquebantur: Music from the Baldwin Partbooks

The Marian Consort, Rose Consort of Viols DCD34160

John Baldwin was a lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1575 and became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1598. The so-called ‘Baldwin partbooks’, held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation – a very personal collection, representing his individual tastes and interests from a wealth of English and Continental polyphony and consort music. As in their previous collaboration, an exploration of the similarly conceived partbooks of Robert Dow, the Rose Consort of Viols and The Marian Consort have kept faith with Baldwin’s own intentions, bringing to light some of the rarer gems preserved by this great advocate and music-lover and providing the listener with ‘such sweete musicke: as dothe much delite yeelde’.

‘spartan but severely beautiful … The acoustic of Merton College chapel provides ideal focus and warmth’

— The Observer, November 2015