All this time Calvinist teaching, like the growth of a noxious weed, was spreading far and wide, so that English music was being assailed by two fatal influences at the same time.
This condition of things lasted through the entire reign.
With the Commonwealth the voice of music was altogether silenced.
It needs no keen discernment to see the infinite possibilities of harm to the musical instincts of the country such a state of things opens out.
Imagine the thousands or millions of children born and brought up bereft of the happiness that music might have brought them.
We are told by the biologist that the continued disuse of muscles first renders them ineffective, and eventually leads to their extinction.
Similarly, completely severed from music as many were, they first became indifferent to it, and eventually lost all ear for it. Insistence upon the immense number of people in England to-day, of all classes, who are so situated, is unnecessary.
The Restoration ushered in a period of delirious excitement,[20] such as had never been known in the history of this country. Unhappily, it was accompanied by an equally unprecedented display of license, in which the common people seemed to vie with the Court for supremacy. To account for this latter fact, one need only recall the policy pursued under the Commonwealth, that drove the whilom vagrant "musician" to take refuge in the cities, and thus materially go to swell the more turbulent portion of the population.
Music was again heard in the churches, but it was not such as the people remembered. It was, at once, novel and unliked. Largely of foreign origin, foreign musicians were engaged to perform it. For such innovations, the wives of Charles I. and Charles II. were doubtless largely responsible, one being French and the other Portuguese, but the Continental wanderings of the latter King had made him familiar with such music, and, being of a much lighter kind than that of the old English church, would, naturally, be more congenial to such a character.