Famend historian David Starkey explores the lives of our most musical kings and queens – will King Charles III be a part of the record?
Most musical monarchs
Henry VIII
Henry VIII, as everybody is aware of, is taken into account probably the most musical of English kings. He’s the composer of ‘Greensleeves’, isn’t he? (Truly he’s not, although he did compose plenty of different issues and organized many extra.)
Proof of his musicality contains The Henry VIII music ebook, which comprises the phrases and music of the songs he composed and, most revealing of all when it comes to the king’s private dedication to music, his specifically written and illuminated ebook of psalms, through which the illustrations present Henry as a music-maker king on the coronary heart of a musical courtroom.
However my first discovery, and the most important shock, was that I shouldn’t begin with Henry VIII in any case however with one other Henry – the Fifth.
Henry V
However isn’t Henry V the heroic (in the event you’re English) or brutal (in the event you’re French) victor of Agincourt, the best soldier-king of Shakespeare’s play? He’s. He’s additionally, we found, an incredible patron of church music and – most astonishingly of all – a composer of such music himself.
However the true level is that Henry V was utilizing music as a weapon too. He took the magnificent choir of his Chapel Royal with him to France, and on the morning of Agincourt they carried out mass: not hurriedly, however elaborately sung and with wealthy vestments. For that was the best way, Henry was positive, to win God’s favour. And it labored. Victory was his and luxurious non secular music remained on the coronary heart of the monarchy from that day to this.
Henry V as composer and liturgical reformer was not the one shock. Who would have thought that Henry VIII spent his final years worrying in regards to the legitimacy of church music together with the state of his immortal soul? That Charles II, vulgarian that he was, insisted on the unforgivable sin of beating time to music? (Or maybe in his case it isn’t so shocking in any case.)
That probably the most frequent entries within the younger Queen Victoria’s journal is a criticism about how dreadful the singing of the Chapel Royal at St James’s was and the way unattainable it was to type it out. ‘The Bishop of London ought actually to be spoken to about it,’ she had mentioned to her fatherly outdated prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Melbourne had replied, ‘They’re such obstinate canines, these bishops; I consider in the event you was to say it was excellent, he could be extra prone to change it!’
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Musicians converse to monarchs as effectively, and infrequently boldly. William Cornysh the Youthful, composer and grasp of the boys of Henry VIII’s Chapel Royal, was on joking phrases along with his formidable sovereign. Courtiers, like Cornysh, have been entitled to ‘bouge of courtroom’, a each day allowance of wine and bread. As soon as, when horse provisions have been operating low, Cornysh spoke for his fellow courtiers by taking part in on the ‘bouge of courtroom’ thought and petitioning the king for its equine equal: may he have, he requested with a flourish, ‘a bottle of hay and an horse-loaf!’. Alas, one other courtroom musician, Mark Smeaton, dared to sigh for Anne Boleyn… and paid for it along with his head.
Georges I, II and III
Maybe it’s as effectively that Handel didn’t have a Henry VIII to cope with. However he argued vigorously with George II in regards to the orchestration of the Music for the Royal Fireworks: the king needed it to be scored for war-like devices – brass, wind and timpani – solely; Handel, with an eye fixed on cashing in on future indoor performances, insisted on violins as effectively. And he appears to have received. Handel had earlier taken on the Archbishop of Canterbury over the textual content of the Coronation Anthems. ‘I do know my Bible very effectively’, he’s presupposed to have mentioned, ‘and shall selected for myself’. Which he did, to the immense good thing about each the phrases and the music.
There are gentler scenes too. Georges I, II and III, who agreed about nothing else, have been at one in adoring Handel. George IV and Rossini received on famously. The composer accompanied the king, who had a nice singing voice. He even – to the scandal of the starchier English courtiers – dared to sit down subsequent to him informally.
Queen Victoria
Mendelssohn, too, was admitted to the intimate circle of Victoria and Albert. The three made music collectively and chatted away animatedly (in German in fact), whereas Mendelssohn made himself at dwelling within the just lately accomplished Buckingham Palace – ‘the one actually snug home in England’, he noticed complacently.
Edward VII
With Elgar and Edward VII the connection is totally different once more. Elgar was by no means one of many king’s intimates; certainly he may need been shocked on the courtroom carryings-on if he had been. As an alternative, he idolised the king-emperor from afar because the embodiment of royal model and magnificence and noticed himself, in his personal phrases, as a troubadour, transmuting his personal royalist fervour into huge, well-liked tunes that catch the throat – as they nonetheless triumphantly do.
Elgar was correspondingly disillusioned with Edward’s son and successor, the down-to-earth, sailor-king George V. He railed in his non-public correspondence in opposition to ‘the irredeemable vulgarity’ of George’s courtroom and his fondness for affordable little tunes, just like the numbers from No, No, Nanette!.
George V certainly marks a watershed: he’s the primary actually unmusical monarch in our historical past – or at the least for tons of of years. This may occasionally shock too. We have a tendency to not have a excessive opinion of the inventive patronage of the British monarchy and dismiss and denigrate its cultural position.
At the least so far as music is anxious, the reality may be very totally different. It was royal patronage that sustained the good custom of late medieval English polyphony and made it, when it comes to each composition and efficiency, the envy of Europe. It was the monarchy, within the form of Elizabeth I, which prevented the shipwreck of that custom within the harmful upheavals of the Reformation and nurtured a brand new Golden Age of English church music within the late sixteenth century. And when royal patronage was withdrawn, beneath the rigorously Calvinist William III within the late seventeenth century, English music died.
As an alternative of nourishing native expertise, Hanoverian England – the richest, strongest nation on this planet – grew to become the land of alternative for international composers: Handel, JC (the ‘English’) Bach, Haydn, Rossini, Mendelssohn. Solely with the inspiration of the Royal School of Music (now one of many biggest music faculty on this planet) within the later nineteenth century was there a belated English musical renaissance. It was patchy. Nevertheless it did produce some masterpieces. They cluster collectively within the first 20 years of the Twentieth century. A few of them have been written for the coronations of 1902 and 1911 and a lot of the relaxation throughout the royal and patriotic fervour of the First World Conflict.
In different phrases, even at this late stage in our historical past, the most effective music was royal; certainly, other than Handel, this early Twentieth-century burst of creativity gives the core of royal ceremonial music to the current day.
