[30] Flood cites a Vatican record of 1561 from Catholic Record Soc. i. 21, ‘Sebastianus, qui organa pulsabat apud D. Paulum Londini, cum vellet eiici, tamen tum ita charus Elizabethae fuit, ut nihil schismatice agens locum suum in ea ecclesia retineat’; also Grindal’s letter of 1563 to Dudley in Strype, Grindal (ed. 1821), 113. Hillebrand adds from Libri Vicarii Generalis (Huick 1561–74), iii, f. 77, that in July 1563 Westcott failed to appear before the Consistory Court and was excommunicated as ‘contumacem’, and from St. Paul’s records (A. Box 77, 2059) that on 8 Nov. 1564 he gave a bond to conform or resign by the following Easter. Gee, 230, gives a list of deprived clergy from N. Sanders, De Visibili Monarchia (1571), 688, which includes among Magistri Musices ‘Sebastianus in Cathedrali ecclesia Londinensi’.
[31] Fleay, 15, 60, has some inaccuracies in these dates, and conjectures that among the early Paul’s plays were a revival of Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister and Ulpian Fulwell’s Like Will to Like, and that these contained satire of Richard Edwards and the Chapel.
[32] Dasent, ix. 56.
[33] Hillebrand from Repertory, xix, f. 18, ‘For asmoche as this Court ys enformed that one Sebastian that wyll not communicate with the Church of England kepe the playes and resorte of the people to great gaine and peryll of the coruptinge of the Chyldren wyth papistrie And therefore master Morten ys appoynted to goe to the Deane of Powles and to gyve him notyce of that dysorder, and to praye him to gyve suche remeadye therein, within his iurysdyccion, as he shall see meete, for Christian Relygion and good order’.
[34] Dasent, x. 127. Cath. Record Soc. i. 70 gives the date of Westcott’s committal ‘for papistry’ from S. P. D. Eliz. cxl. 40, as 21 Dec. 1577, and that of release as 19 March 1578. According to S. P. D. Eliz. cxviii. 73, Westcott was Master of the Children in 1577 and valued at £100 in goods.
[35] Gosson, P. C. 188.
[36] Flood (Mus. Ant. iv. 187) gives an abstract of his will, dated on 3 April and proved on 14 April 1582. He describes himself as almoner of St. Paul’s, dwelling in the almonry and born at Chimley in Devonshire; appoints Henry Evans overseer and Justinian Kyd executor, and leaves legacies to relatives (apparently he had no children or wife), to members of the Redford family, to ‘Gyles Clothier’, to the ten choristers, to ‘sometimes children of the said almenerey’, by name Bromeham, Richard Huse, Robert Knight, Nicholas Carleton, Baylye, Nasion, and Gregory Bowringe, to ‘Shepard that keepeth the door at playes’, and to Pole ‘the keper of the gate’. Wallace, i. 171, cites the will from P. C. C. 14 and 31, Tirwhite, giving the date of confirmation as 3 July 1582. One name may be added to Westcott’s list of boys from a Court Minute of Christ’s Hospital on 5 March 1580 (Musical Times, 1 Jan. 1907), ‘Mr. Sebastian, of Paulls, is appointed to have Hallawaie the younger out of this House to be one of the singing children of the Cathedral Church of Paulls in this Citie’.
[37] Gosson (1582) speaks of the plays as ‘at Paules’; and Rawlidge (1628) mentions a house ‘nigh Pauls’ as one of those pulled down by the City, apparently in 1596 (cf. ch. xvi). The Paul’s boys, however, can hardly have been playing for some years before that date. Howes (1629) definitely specifies the singing school (cf. ch. xvi). On the other hand, Flecknoe, a late authority and in a passage dealing (inaccurately) with Jacobean rather than Elizabethan conditions, assigns the plays to ‘behinde the Convocation-house in Paul’s’ (App. I). This is expanded by Malone (Variorum, iii. 46) into ‘in St. Paul’s school-room, behind the Convocation-house’, and Baker, 45, suggests that they used a small yard or cloister before the doors of the Convocation House and shut off by a high wall from the main churchyard (cf. Hollar’s prints in Baker, 95, 115). But I doubt if Flecknoe had anything in mind except St. Gregory’s, which stood just west of the Convocation House. The hall of the College of Minor Canons is perhaps also a possibility; but neither this nor the church is likely to have afforded a circular auditorium (cf. ch. xviii). Can they have used the Convocation House itself?
[38] McDonnell, 27, argues for the participation of the grammar school in the plays. Obviously the phrase ‘children of Paul’s’, ordinarily used of the playing-boys, proves nothing one way or the other. That the plays were mainly an affair of the choir is a fair inference from the fact that they were presented at Court by the song-school masters. But there is no reason to doubt that the mediaeval give and take between the two schools continued through the sixteenth century. Hunter, Chorus Vatum, v. 542, quotes a manuscript life of Sir Thomas Offley, ‘This Thomas Offley became a good grammarian under Mr. [William] Lillie and understood the Latin tongue perfectly; and because he had a sweet voice he was put to learn prick-song among the choristers of St. Paul’s, for that learned Mr. Lillie knew full well that knowledge in music was a help and a furtherance to all arts’. On the other hand, Dean Nowell (Churton, Life of A. Nowell, 190) instructed Thomas Giles in 1584 to teach the choristers catechism, writing, and music, and then to ‘suffer them to resort to Paul’s School that they may learn the principles of Grammar’. Some seventeenth-century performances by the grammar school, after the regular Paul’s plays ceased, are upon record.
[39] Cf. infra (Chapel, Oxford’s); ch. xvii (Blackfriars).