The Elizabethan Stage, Vol. 2

by E. K. Chambers

The Chapel was an ancient part of the establishment of the Household, traceable far back into the twelfth century.[54] Up to the end of the fourteenth, we hear only of chaplains and clerks. These were respectively priests and laymen, and the principal chaplain came to bear the title of Dean.[55] Children of the Chapel first appear under Henry IV, who appointed a chaplain to act as Master of Grammar for them in 1401.[56] In 1420 comes the first of a series of royal commissions authorizing the impressment of boys for the Chapel service, and in 1444 the first appointment of a Master of the Children, John Plummer, by patent.[57] It is probably to the known tastes of Henry VI that the high level of musical accomplishment, which had been reached by the singers of the Chapel during the next reign was due.[58] The status and duties of the Chapel are set out with full detail in the Liber Niger about 1478, at which date the establishment consisted of a Dean, six Chaplains, twenty Clerks, two Yeomen or Epistolers, and eight Children. These were instructed by a Master of Song, chosen by the Dean from ‘the seyd felyshipp of Chapell’, and a Master of Grammar, whose services were also available for the royal Henchmen.[59] There is no further record of the Master of Grammar; but with this exception the establishment continued to exist on much the same footing, apart from some increase of numbers, up to the seventeenth century.[60] Although subject to some general supervision from the Lord Chamberlain and to that extent part of the Chamber, it was largely a self-contained organization under its own Dean. Elizabeth, however, left the post of Dean vacant, and the responsibility of the Lord Chamberlain then became more direct.[61] It probably did not follow, at any rate in its full numbers, a progress, but moved with the Court to the larger ‘standing houses’, except possibly to Windsor where there was a separate musical establishment in St. George’s Chapel.[62] It does not seem, at any rate in Tudor times, to have had any relation to the collegiate chapel of St. Stephen in the old palace of Westminster.[63] The number of Children varied between eight and ten up to 1526, when it was finally fixed by Henry VIII at twelve.[64] The chaplains and clerks were collectively known in the sixteenth century as the Gentlemen of the Chapel, and the most important of them, next to one who acted as subdean, was the Master of the Children, who trained them in music and, as time went on, also formed them into a dramatic company. The Master generally held office under a patent during pleasure, and was entitled in addition to his fee of 7½d. a day or £91 8s. 1½d. a year as Gentleman and his share in the general ‘rewards’ of the Chapel, to a special Exchequer annuity of 40 marks (£26 13s. 4d.), raised in 1526 to £40, ‘pro exhibicione puerorum’, which is further defined in 1510 as ‘pro exhibicione vesturarum et lectorum’ and in 1523 as ‘pro sustencione et diettes’.[65] To this, moreover, several other payments came to be added in the course of Henry VIII’s reign. Originally the Chapel dined and supped in the royal hall; but this proved inconvenient, and a money allowance from the Cofferer of the Household was substituted, which was fixed in 1544 at 1s. a day for each Gentleman and 2s. a week for each Child.[66] The allowance for the Children was afterwards raised to 6d. a day.[67] Long before this, however, the Masters had succeeded in obtaining an exceptional allowance of 8d. a week for the breakfast of each Child, which was reckoned as making £16 a year and paid them in monthly instalments of 26s. 8d. by the Treasurer of the Chamber. The costs of the Masters in their journeys for the impressment of Children were also recouped by the Treasurer of the Chamber. And from him they also received rewards of 20s. when Audivi vocem was sung on All Saints’ Day, £6 13s. 4d. for the Children’s feast of St. Nicholas on 6 December, and 40s. when Gloria in Excelsis was sung on Christmas and St. John’s Days. These were, of course, over and above any special rewards received for dramatic performances.[68] In the provision of vesturae the Masters were helped by the issue from the Great Wardrobe of black and tawny camlet gowns, yellow satin coats, and Milan bonnets, which presumably constituted the festal and penitential arrays of the choir.[69] The boys themselves do not appear to have received any wages but, when their voices had broken, the King made provision for them at the University or otherwise, and until this could be done, the Treasurer of the Chamber sometimes paid allowances to the Master or some other Gentleman for their maintenance and instruction.[70]

The earlier Masters were John Plummer (1444–55), Henry Abyngdon (1455–78), Gilbert Banaster (1478–83?), probably John Melyonek (1483–5), Lawrence Squier (1486–93), and William Newark (1493–1509).[71] Some of these have left a musical or literary reputation, and Banaster is said to have written an interlude in 1482.[72] But until the end of this period only occasional traces of dramatic performances by the Chapel can be discerned. An alleged play by the Gentlemen at the Christmas of 1485 cannot be verified.[73] The first recorded performance, therefore, is one of the disguisings at the wedding of Prince Arthur and Katharine of Spain in 1501, in which two of the children were concealed in mermaids ‘singing right sweetly and with quaint hermony’.[74]

Towards the end of Henry VII’s reign begins a short series of plays given at the rate of one or two a year by the Gentlemen, which lasted through 1506–12.[75] Thereafter there is no other play by the Gentlemen as such upon record until the Christmas of 1553, when they performed a morality of which the principal character was Genus Humanum.[76] This had been originally planned for the coronation on the previous 1 October, and as a warrant then issued states that a coronation play had customarily been given ‘by the gentlemen of the chappell of our progenitoures’, it may perhaps be inferred that Edward VI’s coronation play of ‘the story of Orpheus’ on 22 February 1547 was also by the Gentlemen.[77] In the meantime the regular series of Chapel plays at Court had been broken after 1512, and when it was taken up again in 1517 it was not by the Gentlemen, but by the Children.[78] This is, of course, characteristic of the Renaissance.[79] But an immediate cause is probably to be found in the personality of William Cornish, a talented and energetic Master of the Children, who succeeded William Newark in the autumn of 1509, and held office until his death in 1523.[80] Cornish appears to have come of a musical family.[81] He took part in a play given by the Gentlemen of the Chapel shortly before his appointment as Master. And although it was some years before he organized the Children into a definite company, he was the ruling spirit and chief organizer of the elaborate disguisings which glorified the youthful court of Henry VIII from the Shrovetide of 1511 to the visit of the Emperor Charles V in 1522, and hold an important place in the story, elsewhere dealt with, of the Court mask.[82] In these revels both the Gentlemen and the Children of the Chapel, as well as the King and his lords and ladies took a part, and they were often designed so as to frame an interlude, which would call for the services of skilled performers.[83]

In view of Cornish’s importance in the history of the stage at Court, it is matter for regret that none of his dramatic writing has been preserved, for it is impossible to attach any value to the fantastic attributions of Professor Wallace, who credits him not only with the anonymous Calisto and Meliboea, Of Gentleness and Nobility, The Pardoner and the Frere, and Johan Johan, but also with The Four Elements and The Four P. P., for the authorship of which by John Rastell and John Heywood respectively there is good contemporary evidence.[84] Cornish was succeeded as Master of the Children by William Crane (1523–45) and Crane by Richard Bower, whose patent was successively renewed by Edward VI, presumably by Mary, and finally by Elizabeth on 30 April 1559.[85] His service was almost certainly continuous, and it is therefore rather puzzling to be told that a commission to take up singing children for the Chapel, similar to that of John Melyonek in 1484, was issued in February 1550 to Philip van Wilder, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber.[86] Neither the full text nor a reference to the source for the warrant is given, and I suspect the explanation to be that it was not for the Chapel at all. Philip van Wilder was a lutenist, one of a family of musicians of whom others were in the royal service, and he may not improbably have had a commission to recruit a body of young minstrels with whom other notices suggest that he may have been connected.[87] Bower himself had a commission for the Chapel on 6 June 1552.[88] Although the Children continued to give performances at Court both under Crane and under Bower, it may be doubted whether they were quite so prominent as they had been in Cornish’s time. Certainly they had to contend with the competition of the Paul’s boys. Crane himself is not known to have been a dramatist. It has been suggested that Bower’s authorship is indicated by the initials R. B. on the title-page of Apius and Virginia (1575), but, in view of the date of the publication, this must be regarded as very doubtful. The chief Marian producer of plays was Nicholas Udall, but it remains uncertain whether he wrote for the Chapel Children. Professor Wallace has no justification whatever for his confident assertions that John Heywood ‘not only could but did’ write plays for the Chapel, that he ‘had grown up in the Chapel under Cornish’, and that ‘as dramatist and Court-entertainer’ he ‘was naturally associated with the performances of the Chapel’.[89] There is no proof whatever that Heywood began as a Chapel boy, and although he certainly wrote plays for boys, they are nowhere said or implied to have been of the Chapel company. There are scraps of evidence which indicate that they may have been the Paul’s boys.[90] It is also conceivable that they may have been Philip van Wilder’s young minstrels.

When Elizabeth came to the throne, then, the Chapel had already a considerable dramatic tradition behind it. But for a decade its share in the Court revels remains somewhat obscure. The Treasurer of the Chamber records no payments for performances to its Masters before 1568.[91] A note in a Revels inventory of 1560 of the employment of some white sarcenet ‘in ffurnishinge of a pley by the children of the Chapple’ may apparently refer to any year from 1555 to 1560, and it is therefore hazardous to identify the Chapel with the anonymous players of the interlude of 31 December 1559 which contained ‘suche matter that they wher commondyd to leyff off’.[92] Bower may of course have retained Catholic sympathies, but he died on 26 July 1561, and it is difficult to suppose that the high dramatic reputation of his successor Richard Edwardes was not based upon a greater number of Court productions than actually stand to his name.[93] Edwardes had been a Gentleman of the Chapel from 1556 or earlier. His patent as Master is dated on 27 October 1561, and on the following 10 December he received a commission the terms of which served as a model for those of the next two Masterships:[94]

Memorandum quod x^o die Januarii anno infra scripto istud breve deliberatum fuit domino custodi magni Sigilli apud Westmonasterium exequendum.

Elizabeth by the grace of God Quene of England Fraunce & Ireland defender of the faythe &c. To our right welbeloved & faythfull counsaylour Sir Nicholas Bacon knight Keper of our great Seale of Englande, commaundinge you that vnder our great Seale aforsayd ye cause to be made our lettres patentes in forme followinge. To all mayours sherifs bayliefes constables & all other our officers gretinge. For that it is mete that our chappell royall should be furnysshed with well singing children from tyme to tyme we have & by these presentes do authorise our welbeloved servaunt Richard Edwardes master of our children of our sayd chappell or his deputie beinge by his bill subscribed & sealed so authorised, & havinge this our presente comyssion with hym, to take as manye well singinge children as he or his sufficient deputie shall thinke mete in all chathedrall & collegiate churches as well within libertie as without within this our realme of England whatsoever they be, And also at tymes necessarie, horses, boates, barges, cartes, & carres, as he for the conveyaunce of the sayd children from any place to our sayd chappell royall [shall thinke mete] with all maner of necessaries apperteynyng to the sayd children as well by lande as water at our prices ordynarye to be redely payed when they for our service shall remove to any place or places, Provided also that if our sayd servaunt or his deputie or deputies bearers hereof in his name cannot forthwith remove the chyld or children when he by vertue of this our commyssyon hathe taken hym or them that then the sayd child or children shall remayne there vntill suche tyme as our sayd servaunt Rychard Edwardes shall send for him or them. Wherfore we will & commaunde you & everie of you to whom this our comyssion shall come to be helpinge aydinge & assistinge to the vttermost of your powers as ye will answer at your vttermoste perylles. In wytnes wherof &c. Geven vnder our privie seale at our Manor of St James the fourth daye of Decembre in the fourth yere of our Raigne.

R. Jones.

At Christmas 1564–5 the boys appeared at Court in a tragedy by Edwardes, which may have been his extant Damon and Pythias.[95] On 2 February 1565 and 2 February 1566 they gave performances before the lawyers at the Candlemas feasts of Lincoln’s Inn.[96] There is nothing to show that the Chapel had any concern with the successful play of Palamon and Arcite, written and produced by Edwardes for Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford in September 1566. Edwardes died on the following 31 October, and on 15 November William Hunnis was appointed Master of the Children.[97] His formal patent of appointment is dated 22 April 1567, and the bill for his commission, which only differs from that of Edwardes in minor points of detail, on 18 April.[98] Hunnis had been a Gentleman at least since about 1553, with an interval of disgrace under Mary, owing to his participation in Protestant plots. He was certainly himself a dramatist, but none of his plays are known to be extant, and a contemporary eulogy speaks of his ‘enterludes’ as if they dated from an earlier period than that of his Mastership. It is, however, natural to suppose that he may have had a hand in some at least of the pieces which his Children produced at Court. The first of these was a tragedy at Shrovetide 1568. In the following year is said to have been published a pamphlet entitled The Children of the Chapel Stript and Whipt, which apparently originated in some gross offence given by the dramatic activities of the Chapel to the growing Puritan sentiment. ‘Plaies’, said the writer, ‘will never be supprest, while her maiesties unfledged minions flaunt it in silkes and sattens. They had as well be at their Popish service, in the deuils garments.’ And again, ‘Even in her maiesties chappel do these pretty upstart youthes profane the Lordes Day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparell, in feigning bawdie fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets’. I should feel more easy in drawing inferences from this, were the book extant.[99] But it seems to indicate either that the controversialist of 1569 was less careful than his successors to avoid attacks upon Elizabeth’s private ‘solace’, or that the idea had already occurred to the Master of turning his rehearsals of Court plays to profit by giving open performances in the Chapel. That the Court performances themselves took place in the Chapel is possible, but not very likely; the usual places for them seem to have been the Hall or the Great Chamber.[100] But no doubt they sometimes fell on a Sunday.

The boys played at Court on 6 January 1570 and during Shrovetide 1571. On 6 January 1572 they gave Narcissus, and on 13 February 1575 a play with a hunt in it.[101] On all these occasions Hunnis was payee. An obvious error of the clerk of the Privy Council in entering him as ‘John’ Hunnis in connexion with the issue of a warrant for the payment of 1572 led Chalmers to infer the existence of two Masters of the name of Hunnis.[102] During the progress of 1575 Hunnis contributed shows to the ‘Princely Pleasures’ of Kenilworth, and very likely utilized the services of the boys in these.[103] And herewith his active conduct of the Chapel performances appears to have been suspended for some years. A play of Mutius Scaevola, given jointly at Court by the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Windsor on 6 January 1577, is the first of a series for which the place of Hunnis as payee is taken by Richard Farrant. To this series belong unnamed plays on 27 December 1577 and 27 December 1578, Loyalty and Beauty on 2 March 1579, and Alucius on 27 December 1579.[104] Farrant, who is known as a musician, had been a Gentleman of the Chapel in 1553, and had left on 24 April 1564, doubtless to take up the post of Master of the Children of Windsor, in which capacity he annually presented a play at Court from 1566–7 to 1575–6.[105] But evidently the two offices were not regarded as incompatible, for on 5 November 1570, while still holding his Mastership, he was again sworn in as Gentleman of the Chapel ‘from Winsore’.[106] A recent discovery by M. Feuillerat enables us to see that his taking over of the Chapel Children from Hunnis in 1576 was part of a somewhat considerable theatrical enterprise. Stimulated perhaps by the example of Burbadge’s new-built Theatre, he took a lease of some of the old Priory buildings in the Blackfriars; and here, either for the first time, or in continuation of a similar use of the Chapel itself, which had provoked criticism, the Children appeared under his direction in performances open to the public.[107] The ambiguous relation of the Blackfriars precinct to the jurisdiction of the City Corporation probably explains the inclusion of the Chapel in the list of companies whose exercises the Privy Council instructed the City to tolerate on 24 December 1578. It is, I think, pretty clear that, although Farrant is described as Master of the Chapel Children by the Treasurer of the Chamber from 1577 to 1580, and by Hunnis himself in his petition of 1583,[108] he was never technically Master, but merely acted as deputy to Hunnis, probably even to the extent of taking all the financial risks off his hands. Farrant was paid for a comedy at Lincoln’s Inn at Candlemas 1580 and is described in the entry as ‘one of the Queen’s chaplains’.[109] On 30 November 1580 he died and Hunnis then resumed his normal functions.[110] The Chapel played at Court on 5 February 1581, 31 December 1581, 27 February 1582, and 26 December 1582. One of these plays may have been Peele’s Arraignment of Paris; that of 26 December 1582 was A Game of Cards, possibly the piece which, according to Sir John Harington, was thought ‘somewhat too plaine’, and was championed at rehearsal by ‘a notable wise counseller’.[111] On the first three of these occasions the Treasurer merely entered a payment to the Master of the Children, without giving a name, but in the entry for the last play Hunnis is specified. It is known, moreover, that Hunnis, together with one John Newman, took a sub-lease of the Blackfriars from Farrant’s widow on 20 December 1581. They do not seem to have been very successful financially, for they were irregular in their rent, and neglected their repairs. It was perhaps trepidation at the competition likely to arise from the establishment of the Queen’s men in 1583, which led them to transfer their interest to one Henry Evans, a scrivener of London, from whom, when Sir William More took steps to protect himself against the breach of covenant involved in an alienation without his consent, it was handed on to the Earl of Oxford and ultimately to John Lyly.[112] In November 1583, therefore, Hunnis found himself much dissatisfied with his financial position, and drew up the following memorial, probably for submission to the Board of Green Cloth of the royal household:[113]