The Pre-Civil War University of Cambridge:

Some Musical and Cultural Contexts

Tom Dixon

The known facts of musical life in pre-Civil War Cambridge (as in many
other cultures) are susceptible to isolation and analysis, and to approach
them in this way is one aim of the present chapter.1 Behind empirical
material of this kind, however, lie less explicit, often unspoken modes of
experience and understanding. In what follows we shall also see how
patterns of musical interaction could reflect broader connections, divisions
and solutions within Cambridge life. As one of Englands two university
towns, Cambridge shared with Oxford a number of characteristics which in
many ways separated both communities from the culture of the country
as a whole, but in other respects made them a kind of concentrated
microcosm of that culture. While some of what I have to say might be
applied to both universities (and I will use examples relating to Oxford
where appropriate), I also intend to establish aspects of Cambridges
individual context and its unique contribution and response to history
through music.

The pre-Civil War university towns were distinguished by two

characteristics of particular relevance to the present enquiry. First, they
were sites which hosted a high concentration of professional and amateur
musicians, as well as scholars conversant with music as dealt with in
biblical, classical, medieval and more recent sources, and those interested
in areas such as musics mathematical aspects or, incipiently, the
empirical study of sound.2 In practice, some of these identities
overlapped, but they also represented a range of conflicting priorities and

1 My thanks go to those who have read and provided valued comments on

various versions of this chapter, including Barbara Coulton, Chlo Dixon,
Christopher Godden, Penelope Gouk, Jeremy Gregory, Sarah Hutton,
Stuart Jones and Michael Mullett.

2 Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-

Century England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999),
40.

1
interests. If music was at times perceived as simply functional, both its
performance and the investigation of its underlying principles also
presented competing models of civilised manhood. Secondly, the
universities were in effect stages on which the bitter religious differences
of the time were publicly played out in the wake of Archbishop William
Lauds sweeping religious reforms, and where clashes between supporters
and opponents of those reforms found expression.3 While it may be
tempting to approach disputes relating to the place of music in worship
simply in terms of aesthetic value, we need to be aware that their
protagonists marshalled the full weight of available biblical and doctrinal
scholarship in support of either side. Thus questions of practical musical
proficiency, academic expertise in music and the kinds of music
appropriate to worship all had ramifications extending significantly beyond
the realm of music itself.

In order, then, to form some idea of Cambridge musical culture at

this time it will be necessary to address the wider contexts surrounding
sacred and secular performance and relating to understandings of the
nature of music and its appropriateness to particular circumstances. To
complement these, a related concern of this chapter will be to consider
the capacity of music as a concept, rooted in but not limited to the
circumstances of composition, performance and theoretical
understanding, to contribute to the formation of religious and
philosophical ideas. By way of establishing this point, and moving our
discussion of Cambridge musical culture in unaccustomed directions, I aim
to show how that culture helped to inculcate an internalised sense of
musical beauty in thinkers not usually associated with this area of
scholarship. For this reason I have integrated into the chapter some
discussion of the musical aspects of Cambridge Platonism, about which
some brief introductory observations will be necessary.

3 For a perceptive study of the Laudian reforms and their reception in the
universities, see Hugh Trevor-Roper, Laudianism and Political Power, in
idem, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays, first
published 1987 (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 40-119.

2
 The Cambridge Platonists are best thought of, not as a fully or self-
consciously coherent group, but as a collection of individuals broadly
sharing a number of intellectual positions and interests, of which
Platonism is only one of the more obvious although for reasons of
space I shall emphasise their shared values rather than their differences.
Those who are most relevant for present purposes are Henry More (1614-
87), Ralph Cudworth (1617-88), John Smith (1618-52), Nathaniel Culverwel
(c. 1619-51), and especially Peter Sterry (1613-72).4 While the body of
their published work dates from subsequent decades, they received their
academic grounding and encountered their formative experiences at
Cambridge in the 1630s, as students and fellows of the puritan colleges,
and predominantly of the most puritan of all: Emmanuel. Here direct
exposure to music must have been relatively limited, but they were open
to the broader musical culture of the university in ways which will become
apparent. They may even have been among those reported to have
received harm by their frequent going to Peterhouse Chapel, contrary to
the orders and government of the college, partly in order to experience
the music of the Laudian services.5 While not directly verifiable, that
image neatly encapsulates the potentially conciliatory effect of Laudian
music on minds initially conditioned by a far different religious ethic.

There is no reason to believe that the Platonists were the only

individuals affected by the music of the Laudian era in a relatively non-
partisan way, but considered as a group their work does provide us with a
good deal of convincing internal evidence for the existence of such a
process. Moulded by sympathetic college tutors such as Benjamin
Whichcote and Robert Gell, this generation of syncretists approached the
Christian religion in a way that lent itself intrinsically to music; for
Whichcote, Christianity was a doctrine sent from God both to elevate and
4 For the significance of music in Sterrys work, see Tom Dixon,
Meditation is the Musick of Souls: The Silent Music of Peter Sterry
(1613-1672), in Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor, eds, Silence, Music, Silent
Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 187-203.

5 Sarah Bendall, Christopher Brooke and Patrick Collinson, A History of Emmanuel

College, Cambridge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1999), 207.

3
sweeten human nature.6 The musical language so often employed in their
prose was no arbitrary choice, but was (I shall go on to suggest) firmly
rooted in sacred and secular Cambridge performance practices
encompassing choir, lute and string consort. None of them left writings
devoted directly and exclusively to the subject of music, and for that
reason it is a topic that rarely surfaces in any historical discussion of these
thinkers.7 Nevertheless, as a conspicuous referent in the language they
employed, it did play some considerable role in the formulation and
expression of their ideas, not least in a re-gendering of Christian concepts
that questioned dominant modes of controversy.

Mention of re-gendering signals a timely reminder that the

seventeenth-century English universities were in most respects
exclusively male establishments where conflicting masculinities were
continually negotiated, a process in which music was closely implicated. 8
Few if any university members were directly concerned with issues of
gender as related to the lives of men and women in society, so that
gender in any modern feminist sense scarcely seems a relevant issue. On
the other hand, questions of control and subservience did consistently
exercise their minds, and music may have played a more formative part in
competing models of authority than is often recognised. To point to
established understandings of music as a medium of both rationality
(traditionally, its proportions helped to structure both the universe and the
mind of man as its microcosm) and the absence of rationality (it always
threatened to give free rein to the sensual) is another way of saying that
its gendered identity was variable and contested. If some found in it a
defence of civilising masculinity in the adaptation of the established
6 James Bass Mullinger, Cambridge Characteristics in the Seventeenth
Century (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1867), 49.

7 For further discussion of this context, see Tom Dixon, Music and
Aesthetics in Cambridge Platonism and Beyond, Musica e Storia 15/2
(2007), 475-504.

8 For the background to this point, see Ruth Karras, From Boys to Men:
Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), chapter 3.

4
liberal arts curriculum to the ideals of modern gentlemanly education,
others warned against its dangerously feminising appeal to the emotions.
If some enlisted music as a means of appropriate Protestant clerical
control, others attacked its abuse as an indicator of an irrationality and
abandonment to the passions traceable to the corrupting influence of
Rome.9 For still others, though, its capacity to link mans inner being to the
divine nature, its potential to escape the limitations of verbal
referentiality, above all its validity as a living metaphor for divine love,
lent it another dimension in the context of the time. Music is always in
danger of being appropriated by elements of conflict, but it also has the
capacity to transcend them, to bring together as well as to divide. We
rightly see a source such as the Peterhouse part-books as vitally important
in preserving a fragile repertoire. It is nevertheless true that, at the time,
the music they contained was made to represent one side of a widening
chasm of belief and practice. Yet it is also arguable that the healing power
of music of this and other kinds in pre-Civil War Cambridge made a more
subtle and indirect contribution to English culture through inculcating an
inner musical aesthetic in some of those who experienced it.

The Musical Life of Pre-Civil War Cambridge

Before these issues can be explored further, the scene needs to be set
and something of the shape of Cambridges musical culture delineated.
Cambridge traces its origins as a university to the early thirteenth
century, but in the decades prior to 1630 its academic population had
grown considerably, albeit with some fluctuations, thanks mainly to the
increasing intake of new entrants.10 To meet the extra numbers, several
more colleges had been instituted and buildings erected or extended.
Expansion was only partially held in check by the fact that the fen town
was a very sickly place, for there die many every week of agues and
other diseases the plague of 1630 alone carried off almost four hundred

9 On the issue of clerical control, see Peter Lake, The Laudian Style:
Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s,
in Kenneth Fincham, ed. The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642 (Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press, 1993), 161-182.

5
souls.11 This can only have been exacerbated by the fact that university
conditions were generally overcrowded; even if things improved
somewhat after about 1600, multiple occupation of rooms continued to be
the norm, with partitioned studies measuring as little as six feet square.12
Even by the 1630s, only a fellow commoner could expect to have a room
to himself.13 Some of the colleges owned a small number of musical
instruments, but for the most part musically inclined fellows and students
would presumably have been obliged to keep instruments along with their
other personal possessions, and to practice them in the cramped and
anything but private accommodation available.14

Beyond the college corridors, among the first aural experiences to

be encountered by a newly arrived student were the strains of the local
musicians. These provided a sonic backdrop to the September fair on

10 Elisabeth Leedham-Green, A Concise History of the University of

Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3-4;
Alexandra Shepard, Contesting Communities? Town and Gown in
Cambridge, c. 1560-1640, in eadem and Phil Withington, eds,
Communities in Early Modern England (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 224; Lawrence Stone, The Size and
Composition of the Oxford Student Body 1580-1910, in idem, ed., The
University in Society, Volume I: Oxford and Cambridge from the
Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1974), 92; Edward Miller, Portrait of a College: A History
of the College of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1961), 24.

11 William Gaudy, c.1632, quoted in John Venn, Early Collegiate Life

(Cambridge: Heffer, 1913), 208.

12 Miller, Portrait of a College, 26; Christopher Brooke, A History of

Gonville and Caius College (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1985), 118.

13 Venn, Early Collegiate Life, 230.

14 Ian Payne, The Provision and Practice of Sacred Music at Cambridge

Colleges and Selected Cathedrals, c.1547-c.1647: A Comparative Study of
the Archival Evidence (New York: Garland, 1993), 60; Nan Cooke
Carpenter, The Study of Music at the University of Oxford in the Middle
Ages (to 1450), Journal of Research in Music Education 1/1 (1953), 15;
Arthur Gray and Frederick Brittain, A History of Jesus College, Cambridge
(London: Heinemann, 1960), 56.

6
Sturbridge common, where the necessities of academic life could be
purchased, and where friendships were begun and renewed. If Sturbridge
Fair provided temporary work for some of the less privileged students, it
also enjoyed a continuing reputation for inducing idleness, encouraged by
the less wholesome diversions which immediately presented themselves:
it was later to be the model for Bunyans Vanity Fair.15 This rowdy
atmosphere provided one conspicuous instance of the suspicion music
could engender through its association with the seedier side of life. It was
regularly performed at the towns inns, some of which were owned or
leased by musicians: the association of the Bear with the Gibbons family is
perhaps the most famous of a number of examples.16 Thomas Randolphs
plays, the leading theatrical attraction in Cambridge immediately before
the Civil Wars, abound with references both to the local taverns and to the
fiddlers who supplied their entertainment usually emphasising the
abject penury of these dull scrapers.17 Discourses of authority linked

15 Miller, Portrait of a College, 35; Alan H. Nelson, ed., Records of Early

English Drama: Cambridge, 2 vols (Toronto and London: University of
Toronto Press, 1989), II, 733; Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge,
Volume III (Cambridge, 1845), 220; Bendall et al., History of Emmanuel
College, 66; Anon., A Pattern for Young Students in the University, Set
Forth in the Life of Mr Ambrose Bonwicke (London, 1729); Leedham-
Green, Concise History, 43; John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress, ed. Roger
Sharrock (London: Penguin, 1965), 78ff and n. 74. Students were known to
frequent questionable attractions such as the booth of ill fame which put
William Cummins in trouble with the Queens College authorities: John
Twigg, A History of Queens College, Cambridge, 1448-1986 (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 1987), 96.

16 Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, I, 97. There

were c. 300 inns in Oxford in 1639, although shortly afterwards Lauds
licensing strictures temporarily reduced the number to 100: Stephen
Porter, University and Society, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the
University of Oxford, Volume IV: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 72, n. 207; H.R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud,
1573-1645, first published 1940, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1962), 277.
17 Thomas Randolph, Poetical and Dramatic Works, ed. W. Carew Hazlitt (London,
1875): see, for example, 19 and 120. It could, however, also be claimed
retrospectively that, before the wars, the
towns musicians scorned to come to a tavern under 20s. salary for two hours: Frida
Knight,
Cambridge Music, from the Middle Ages to Modern Times (Cambridge and New York:
Oleander, 1980),

7
music with strong drink and sexual misbehaviour, and, predictably
enough, such temptations often proved too much for the universitys
growing student cohort.18 Even at Emmanuel despite the statutes of its
Elizabethan founder, Sir Walter Mildmay, imposing severe restrictions on
leaving the college after dark the Admonition Book solemnly noted
instances of students staying out all night and indulging in drinking wine
and clamorous singinge.19 On the other hand, perhaps some early
impressions were of a more serene, poetic nature; it is easy to imagine,
though of course impossible to prove, that some of Peter Sterrys musical
images directly recall his experiences of Cambridge:

As music is conveyed sweetest and furthest upon a river in the

night, so is the music of the heavenly voice carried most clearly,
pleasantly to the understanding when all the outward senses lie
wrapped up in darkness and the depth of night.20

Other ceremonies and festivities provided further opportunities for

academics to experience musics more public manifestations. It seems
likely that Cambridge college members took part in ritual celebrations
comparable to that of the Lord of the Mallard at All Souls, Oxford, where
an appropriate song accompanied a ceremonial procession thrice about

31. Cf. Randolphs contemporary Cambridge playwright, Robert Davenport, who refers to
That Tap-
house trick of ffidling: A Survey of the Sciences (CambridgeUniversity Library, MS
Dd.10.30). As
Peter Holman points out, the word fiddle did not always refer to a bowed instrument; he
cites an
instance of fiddler being used for lutenist: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the
English Court,
1540-1690, first published 1993, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 140.

18 Kirsten Gibson, Music, Melancholy and Masculinity in Early Modern England, in Ian
Biddle and Kirsten Gibson, eds, Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2009), 52; Shepard, Contesting Communities?, 228.

19 Bendall et al., History of Emmanuel College, 58.

20 Vivian de Sola Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan (1613-1672): A Biographical
and Critical Study with Passages Selected from his Writings, reprint of 1934 edition (New
York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 184.

8
the quadrangle.21 In dEwes account for 1618, the excursion down the
Cam associated with John Ports Latin Day was accompanied by a band of
loud music; presumably, it was provided by the town waits.22 The
presence of these civic musicians must have been well nigh inescapable
to members of the university; as well as playing outside the gates of
colleges, they figured prominently in university events such as the Great
Commencement, held annually on the first Tuesday in July, and the
culmination of a series of award ceremonies.23 Here, current students and
fellows mingled with former colleagues returning for the occasion,
advancing new ideas and discussing prospective career moves or the
question of emigration.24 Great St Marys church, fitted with a new stage in
the 1590s for the performance of music at the Commencement services,
was by the 1630s the subject of censure for being made a theatre where
men, women and scholars thrust together promiscuously.25 On the
relatively rare occasions when a degree in music was to be awarded, the

21 Humphrey Baskerville, ed., Thomas Baskervilles Account of Oxford, c.

1670-1700, in Collectanea, Fourth Series, Oxford Historical Society No. 47
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 202.

22 Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, II, 741; Nan
Cooke Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 195-6.

23 John Harley, Orlando Gibbons and the Gibbons Family of Musicians (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999), 7; Victor Morgan, Cambridge University and the Country, in Lawrence
Stone, ed., The University in Society, Volume I: Oxford and Cambridge from the
Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1974), 227; Victor Morgan with Christopher Brooke, A History of the University of
Cambridge, Volume II: 1546-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222-3.
For dates of the commencements, see Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama, II,
1037.

24 H.C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1958), 254; Tom Webster, Godly Clergy in Early Stuart England: The
Caroline Puritan Movement, c.1620-1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
21-2.

25 Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres, 78-9; Trevor Cooper, ed., The

Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English
Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press and the Ecclesiological Society,
2001), 197.

9
ceremony would include a Music Act, which combined the performance
of a specially composed piece with a debate on theory.26

Music was a prominent feature of Cambridge college plays, and

performances are known to have attracted musically literate audiences
from across the university as well as from the town.27 The connection
between drama and music was at times explicitly recognised; in 1620 the
Bishop of Carlisle acknowledged the role of St Johns College in instilling in
his son his skill in music and towardliness to act a part in comedies and
tragedies.28 An autograph manuscript of the Cambridge composer,
George Jeffreys, reveals one instance of music written specifically for a
play during the 1630s.29 The participation of Jeffreys and other
outstanding local musicians such as the virtuoso lutenist and viol player,
John Lilly, gives a likely indication of the high standard of performance,
with critics on hand to expose any occasional lapse.30 Other music of an

26 Edward Thompson, Robert Ramsey, Musical Quarterly, 49 (1963), 210; John

Worthington, Diary and Correspondence, Vol. 1, ed. James Crossley, Chetham Society Vol.
13 (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1847), 112ff; Charles Cudworth, Five Hundred
Years of Music Degrees, Musical Times, 105 (1964), 98; Carpenter, Music in the Medieval
and Renaissance Universities, 196.

27 For music in Caroline Cambridge plays, see Julia K. Wood, Two Latin
Play Songs, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle, 21 (1988), 47;
Alan H. Nelson, Early Cambridge Theatres: College, University and Town
Stages, 1464-1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 36.

28 Miller, Portrait of a College, 36.

29 Songs made for Dr Hausteds Comedy called ye Rivall Friends Acted

1631 19 March, in BL, Add. MS 10338, f. 101 ff.

30 We have good Musick and Musicians here [at Cambridge], wrote

Nicholas Hookes in a poem addressed to John Lilly, If not the best, as
good as any where: N[icholas] H[ookes], To Mr. LILLY, Musick-Master in
Cambridge, in idem, Amanda, A Sacrifice to an Unknown Goddesse
(London, 1653), 58. Lilly probably took part in William Johnsons
Valetudinarium at Queens in 1637/8: Pamela Willetts, John Lilly: A
Redating, Chelys, 21 (1992), 29. Examples of criticism are found in the
correspondence of Joseph Mead, who reported on one occasion in
September, 1629 that the Musick was not so well supplied as heretofore,
as sayd those that have skill that way: quoted in Cooper, Annals of
Cambridge, III, 219.

10
essentially dramatic character, though not necessarily intended for the
stage, was also written by Cambridge musicians. The dialogue genre
associated with Robert Ramsey and John Hilton the younger (both
composers represented in the Peterhouse part-books) was particularly
popular, one work even commemorating Hobson the carrier, on whose
weekly wagon of experience many an incipient student made his first
journey to the university town: with a touch of macabre humour, Hobson
was characterised in Hiltons piece as Charon the boatman.31

The academics who made up the audiences for ceremonies and

plays were not simply passive musical consumers. Proficiency in both
vocal and instrumental music was being increasingly prized as a
gentlemanly attribute, an aspiration which nevertheless attracted criticism
on account of the effort expended on the acquisition of such skills to the
detriment of more useful pursuits. I have seen some spend eight years in
learning music, complained one sceptic time which, in his estimation,
could have been far better employed in occupations which might have
done the Commonwealth good.32 Even John Wallis, who learned the
rudiments of music as a Cambridge student in the 1630s and was later to
emerge as Englands leading scholar of ancient musical theory, came to
regret that the business of dancing, singing, playing on musick and the
like was, in an university...rather an hindrance, than a promotion, of
other studies.33 Still, the musical ambitions of university members at least
provided employment for the lowly professional musicians who made up
the Cambridge waits, as well as the lay clerks or singing men at the

31 Ian Spink, English Song, Dowland to Purcell (London: Batsford, 1974), 49; Mary Chan,
The Witch of Endor and Seventeenth-Century Propaganda, Musica Disciplina, 34 (1980),
208; Randolph, Poetical and Dramatic Works, 44; David Anthony John Cockburn, A
Critical Edition of the Letters of the Reverend Joseph Mead, 1626-1627, Contained in
British Library Harleian MS 390, PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 1994), 51.

32 George Atwell, The Faithfull Surveyour (Cambridge, 1658), 5. This reflects the
common opinion of unsympathetic critics such as Owen Feltham (1620), who considered
that a mans inordinate skill in music argue[d] his neglect of better employment, and
that he ha[d] spent much time on a thing unnecessary: Holman, Four and Twenty
Fiddlers, 140. There was a distinction to be made between spending a considerable
amount of time and money on music in order to develop some degree of expertise...and
treating it as an occasional pastime and acquiring the ability to play for recreation:
Porter, University and Society, 70.

11
choral foundations. The singer and instrumentalist Thomas Mace,
associated with Trinity College for several decades from the 1630s and an
important link between the Platonists and practical music, taught
privileged students such as Robert Bolles, but demand for his services
also came from career academics. The future vice-chancellor, John
Worthington, a close associate of the Platonists, was one of Maces pupils,
while it may be significant that More and Cudworth were among the
subscribers to the Trinity musicians eventual publication venture,
Musicks Monument.34 Teaching was central to Maces activities; many of
the lute pieces in Musicks Monument seem to have been composed as
exercises for this purpose, and indeed the whole work was directed toward
passing on the fast disappearing musical idioms of the ageing musicians
earlier Cambridge years.35 Before the Civil Wars, at least, Mace and his ilk
seem to have had no shortage of customers. Purchases of instruments,
strings and music books on behalf of students, recorded in the accounts of
Joseph Mead (or Mede), tutor at Christs College between 1618 and his
death in 1638, provide evidence of their participation in music.36 Perhaps
the rate of 6s.8d. per month paid out for their tuition was directed to waits
or local instrumentalists like Michael Palmer or the chronically
impecunious Seatree, since it is somewhat lower than the 10s.
commanded by the more reputable Mace.37

Gentlemanly instruments were generally those most favoured by

Cambridge students at this time. The lute, the medium of cultivated
amateur and professional expert alike, had long enjoyed a special
33 Letter of John Wallis (1700), in Collectanea, First Series, Oxford
Historical Society No. 47 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 317; William T.
Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century
Cambridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 141.

34 Thomas Mace, Musicks Monument (London, 1676), list of subscribers

and 235; Worthington, Diary and Correspondence, I, 27-30.

35 Mace, Musicks Monument, 122-3.

36 Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 2 vols (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956-61), II, 77ff and 553ff. For the responsibilities of tutors
in managing the financial affairs of their aristocratic students, see Morgan, History of the
University of Cambridge, Volume II, 326-7.

12
association with the university town, and renowned Elizabethan lutenists
such as Anthony Holborne and Thomas Robinson may have been
Cambridge-educated.38 The connection had been signalled as early as the
1560s, when John Alford of Pembroke College published a translation of
Adrien Le Roys treatise on playing the instrument, and the tradition was
confirmed retrospectively by the nostalgic Mace (recalling eminent
Performancesby divers very Worthy Persons), as well as in the mid-
century celebration of musical Cambridge in Nicholas Hookes poem
dedicated to John Lilly.39 Hookes oblique reference to the hybrid style
characteristic of 1630s Cambridge lute music also captures Maces
particular idiom: English or French way few or none out-go Our
Lutanists.40

Notwithstanding its widespread appeal, acceptance of the lute and

its music was neither straightforward nor universal. Indeed, further
consideration of this instrument provides a practical illustration of the
gender-ambivalence of music and the way in which this was often
highlighted in the university environment. Despite the lutes extensive
cultivation by gentlemanly amateurs and professional (male) experts,

37 Nelson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Cambridge, I, 669; II,

1016; Worthington, Diary and Correspondence, I, 27-9. Twenty years after
the Restoration, George Loosemore was still charging 20s. per quarter
(equivalent to 6s. 8d. per month) for teaching singing and viol playing; for
that sum, he was obliged to visit his pupil three times every weeke, vizt at
9 of the Clock in the morning on Mondayes, Wednesdayes, and Frydayes:
J.E. Foster, ed., The Diary of Samuel Newton, Alderman of Cambridge,
1662-1717 (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society Publications,
1854), 77. For information on the cost of music lessons at seventeenth-
century Oxford, see Porter, University and Society, 70, n.112. Mace
would have needed to supplement his income if the payment he received
for his position at Trinity was similar to that of the singing men of St Johns
College, Oxford, in the 1630s, who received only 12 per annum: W.C.
Costin, The History of St Johns College, Oxford: 1598-1860, Oxford
Historical Society, New Series, Vol. 12 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), 68.

38 Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, 208.

39 Ibid., 208; Mace, Musicks Monument, 45; H[ookes], Amanda, 56-8.

40 Ibid., 58; Matthew Spring, The Lute in Britain: A History of the

Instrument and its Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 430-1.

13
popular culture continued to associate it with the female sex. While a
man delights in arms and in hearing the rattling drums, wrote Joseph
Swetnam in 1615, a woman loves to hear sweet music on the lute, a
prejudice that continued in circulation for as long as the lifespan of the
instrument itself.41 The lute carried negatively gendered connotations
associated with love and dalliance: the reputed skill of Jacques Gaultier,
Queen Henrietta Marias court lutenist, to charm his way into the Royal
bed through his music was one of many such stories.42 It is perhaps
unsurprising that the Cambridge surveyor, George Atwell, assigned
greater value to pacing out land boundaries than to the implicitly less
masculine pastime of plucking lute lessons, but his dismissive response
typifies a persistent strand of opinion.43 The lutes defenders were no less
aware of its questionable associations. Even in the university environment
Mace felt obliged to mount a defence against the aspersion that the lute
was a womans instrument, while Nathaniel Culverwel praised it in terms
which, though sympathetic, still suggested the connection: it made the
sweetest yet the stillest and softest musick of all.44 The lutes physical
shape might itself be interpreted as a sign of refined grace or of feminine
temptation, and as David Kuchta points out there was a fine and
invisible line...between the proper and improper use of signs, leaving the

41 Linda Phyllis Austern, Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie: Music and the Idea of the
Feminine in Early Modern England, Music and Letters, 74 (1993), 351. In 1722 John Essex could
still include the lute among instruments most agreeable to the ladies: Richard D.
Leppert, Music and Image: Domesticity,
Ideology, and Socio-Cultural Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge
University Press, 1988), 122.

42 Cockburn, Letters of Joseph Mead, 610; Jeanice Brooks, Courtly Song

in Late Sixteenth-Century France (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 197.

43 Atwell, The Faithful Surveyour, 5.

44 Mace, Musicks Monument, 46-7; Nathaniel Culverwel, An Elegant and Learned

Discourse of the Light of Nature, with Several Other Treatises (London, 1652), p. 190.

14
instruments cultural significance open to a number of sometimes
conflicting interpretations.45

Among the many university amateurs who took up the instrument

(or its larger variant, the theorbo) around this time was Henry More,
whose early biographer claimed that he

...had some skill in music, and played sometimes upon the

theorboand the pleasure of this, and of his thoughts with it,
hath been at times so overcomingly great that he hath been
forced to desist; though at other times again, after his hard
studies, he found himself in an extraordinary manner recreated
and composed by the sweetness and solemness of that
instrument.46

Later in life, More continued to find lute playing a proper solace in this
drudgery I labour under.47 Ralph Cudworths evocation of the motor skills
of the performer may even suggest his own involvement in a similar
pastime:

...the fingers of an exercised lutenist are directed to move regularly

and orderly in a long train and series of motions by those artificial
habits in them, which do not themselves at all comprehend those
laws and rules of music or harmony by which they are governed. 48

(One recalls Roland Barthes distinction between the music one hears and
that which one plays, the latter involving the body as inscriber, a music
with no other audience than its participants.49) Culverwels choice of
language often suggests a close familiarity with the lute, as in his
45 David Kuchta, The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaisssance England,
in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern
Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), 239.

46 Richard Ward, The Life of the Learned and Pious Dr Henry More
(London, 1710), 54.

47 Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton, eds, The Conway Letters:
The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More and their
Friends, 1642-1684 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 306-7.

48 Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London,

1678), 157.

15
evocation of a variety of graces, soft and silk touches, quick stings and
pleasant relishes, nimble transitions and delicate closes all feminine-
sounding attributes.50 He stresses, too, the interiority of this most intimate
of instruments, with its propensity to induce mental or noetical
delights.51 Sterry is another writer whose spiritual eroticism often reveals
insights into both the instrumental technique and the subtler performance
skills of the lutenist; for example,

[n]othing is more apt among natural things to delight and ravish our
souls than the music of an excellent hand, carried down in just
degrees by soft and melting strains to the lowest, and there, as it
were, quite silenced; then on a sudden carried up again to a
sprightly and triumphant height.52

Christ himself is depicted as

the figure of a glorious man, playing upon a golden lute, whose

delicious sounds form themselves into rocks, rivers, woods and
caves beneath and at a distance which at once echo and dance to
the melody...the mediator uniting all things created and uncreated,
standing between both states in a glory composed of bothand yet
distinct from both.53

Christ and the individual believer are as two lutes, the one sounding in
sympathy with the love-vibrations emitted by the other.54

49 Roland Barthes, Musica Practica, in idem, Image, Music Text: Essays

Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977),
149.

50 Culverwel, The Light of Nature, 139-140.

51 Ibid., 190.

52 Peter Sterry, The Rise, Race, and Royalty of the Kingdom of God in the
Soul of Man (London, 1683), 205.

53 Idem, The Consort of Musick, in N.I. Matar, ed., Peter Sterry: Select
Writings, University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, Vol. 60 (New York: Peter
Lang, 1994), 171.

54 Idem, The Commings Forth of Christ in the Power of his Death (London,
1650), 18.

16
 The viol was another instrument well suited to the social
environment of the university, its music being written in the main for
small groups or consorts. As surviving records make clear, it was used
extensively in pre-Civil War Cambridge. The prevalence of viol ownership
among professional musicians in Cambridge is suggested by their extant
wills; for example, Stephen Mace (Thomas uncle) owned eight at his
death in 1635, whilst William Tawyer (d.1640) possessed 5 violls great &
small.55 Like the lute, though, the viol also lent itself to performance by
competent amateurs, and a good deal of evidence survives for this level
of practice in the 1630s. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, William
Sancroft the younger, was already playing in his student days at
Emmanuel, his viol remaining a prize possession through later life, while
at neighbouring Sidney Sussex Robert Bolles also developed a lifelong
passion for the instrument; he was, as we have seen, taught by Mace, who
was proficient on both viol and lute.56 The Trinity musician, as well as
giving lessons to Worthington (somewhat later, in the 1640s), may also
have taught the latters friend, Humphrey Babington: it is recorded that
Worthington, Babington and Sancroft sang regularly together, and
Babington possibly owned a set of instruments.57 John Hutchinson, a
student at Peterhouse in the early 1630s, and later a prominent
Parliamenterian army officer and regicide, got a very good hand on the
viol, which afterwards he improved to a great mastery.58 In the same

55 Payne, Provision and Practice, 140, n.3.

56 Worthington, Diary and Correspondence, I, 27-30; Bendall, et al.,

History of Emmanuel College, 250, 251, n.17; L. and H. Fowler, eds,
Cambridge Commemorated: An Anthology of University Life (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 91; Mace, Musicks Monument, 235.

57 Worthington, Diary and Correspondence, I, 28; Robert G. Frank, Jnr.,

Science, Medicine and the Universities of Early Modern England:
Background and Sources, History of Science, 11 (1973), 252. Frank
includes the vials in Babingtons will among scientific instruments and
apparatus, but vial is a common seventeenth-century spelling of viol.

58 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N.H. Keeble (London:
Phoenix Press, 2000), 42. At some point, John Hutchinson was taught by the outstanding
consort composer, Charles Coleman: ibid., 47; David Pinto, For ye Violls: The Consort and
Dance Music of William Lawes (Richmond: Fretwork, 1995), 29.

17
decade, Thomas Brewer taught Roger LEstrange, later a virtuoso on the
bass viol.59 This future Royalist Norfolk family was bound together through
the intimacy of the viol consort: John Jenkins patron, Nicholas LEstrange,
had played while at Trinity a few years earlier, while Hamon LEstrange
was among Meads musically active students.60 At Queens College in the
1620s, Henry Slingsby, later to be a Royalist army officer, played the viol,
whilst a probate inventory of 1634 lists a bass viol among the possessions
of one Glover, a member of the same college.61 At Christs, meanwhile,
Meads account books recorded purchases of violl books, instruments
and strings, and charges for the repair of viols, as well as revealing the
identities of some of his viol-playing students, among them Thomas
Paggitt and Thomas Stuteville.62

A situation in which the performance of music for these instruments

among mixed groups of professionals and amateurs flourished in the
university towns had been created by the combination of two main
factors. Firstly, the cathedral establishments had adopted the teaching of
viols to choristers as part of their musical training in the sixteenth
century, a skill which they subsequently brought with them in their
steady influx...into the universities.63 The tradition persisted at the
university choral foundations; it is known, for example, that Trinity College
owned a chest of viols from c.1595 up to at least 1672, when they were
59 Andrew Ashbee, The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins, Volume I: The Fantasias for
Viols Surbiton: Toccata Press, 1992), 66.

60 Ibid., 52, 66.

61 Twigg, History of Queens College, 95; W.M. Palmer, College Dons,

Country Clergy, and University Coachmen, Proceedings of the Cambridge
Antiquarian Society, 16 (1912), 170-1.

62 Payne, Provision and Practice, 104-5; Nelson, ed., Records of Early

English Drama: Cambridge, II, 1012; II, 1016; Fletcher, Intellectual
Development of John Milton, II, 83 and Appendix I (The Book Purchases in
Medes Accounts, 1614-37); John Peile, On Four MS. Books of Accounts
kept by Joseph Mede, B.D., Fellow of Christs College, with his Pupils
between 1614 and 1633, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian
Society 13 (1909), 256; idem, Biographical Register of Christs College,
1505-1905, Volume I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 303,
397.

18
being repaired.64 At nearby Ely Cathedral, records reveal a consistent level
of expenditure on viol maintenance and tuition in the pre-Civil War
period.65 Secondly, as previously mentioned, changes in the ideal of
gentlemanly education had made the practice of playing relatively
respectable instruments such as the lute and viol in an amateur context
more acceptable to those of higher rank, a pursuit to which, as indicated
by the evidence reviewed here, many career students were no less
attracted. Together, these factors led to a fluid situation in which music
was enabled to mediate between different strata of the social hierarchy
and different shades of religious and political conviction; years later, the
Cambridge graduate Roger North (an ardent Royalist) was to speak of
that respublica among the consortiers.66 Wood identifies the Cambridge
Independents intruded into Oxford during the Interregnum as tending to
value instrumental music (which was relatively free of Laudian
associations), and in some cases as holding music meetings every week
in their chambers.67

Members of the Platonist grouping shared in this Cambridge consort

culture. By way of direct evidence, the will of John Smith reveals that he
owned a sett of viols being Six on his death in 1652: they were valued at
2.68 More circumstantial, though no less compelling, is the internal
evidence of the Platonists writings. For Smith, the unregenerate individual

63 Ian Woodfield, quoted in Andrew Ashbee, The Transmission of Consort

Music in Some Seventeenth-century English Manuscripts, in idem and
Peter Holman, eds., John Jenkins and His Time (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996),
244.

64 Robert Willis and J.W. Clark, The Architectural History of the University
of Cambridge, and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton, 3 vols
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1886), III, 385.

65 Payne, Provision and Practice, 80.

66 John Wilson, ed., Roger North on Music: Being a Selection from his
Essays written during the Years c.1695-1728 (London: Novello, 1959), 222.

67 Bruce Bellingham, The Musical Circle of Anthony Wood in Oxford during the
Commonwealth and Restoration, Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, 19
(1982), 18.

19
was lacking in the life imparted to the instruments of the consort by their
players:

When God restores men to a new and divine life, he doth not make
them like so many dead Instruments, stringing and fitting them,
which yet are able to yield no sound of themselves; but he puts a
living Harmony within them.69

Cudworth held that continued exposure to the influence of fine music led
to the refinement of taste, and for such a person hearing a consort of
exact musicians playing some excellent composure of many parts would
arouse feelings that a vulgar ear will be utterly insensible of.70 Especially
in his enforced retirement after the Restoration, Sterry gave voice to a
more inclusive musical conception of the divine-human relationship which
surely still stemmed from the development of a comparable sense of
aesthetic discrimination during his Cambridge years. In that relationship,
all play a part in the universal consort, and [t]he divine music of the
whole would be changed into confusion and discords, all the sweet
proportions of all the parts would be discorded, and become disagreeable,
if any one, the least and least considered part, were taken out of the
whole.71 This is in effect a spiritualising of Maces recollection of the
Cambridge consort ideal:

And These Things were Performed, upon so many Equal, and Truly-
Scizd Viols; and so Exactly Strung, Tund, and Playd upon, as no
one Part was any Impediment to the Other... For we would never
allow Any Performer to Over-top, or Outcry another by Loud Play,
but our Great Care was, to have All the Parts Equally Heard.72

68 Inventory attached to the will of John Smith, dated 3rd August, 1652:
Vice Chancellors Probate Court, Cambridge, 111/302 (held in Cambridge
University Library).

69 John Smith, Select Discourses (London, 1660), 470.

70 Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality

(London, 1731), 182-4.

71 Peter Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will (London, 1675),

30.

72 Mace, Musicks Monument, 234-6.

20
If this is music in which the individual takes an active part in collective co-
operation, it is also the source of a passive experience of psychological
healing: [o]pen open your ears to hear it, let it sing all your thoughts to a
divine Calme, and rest.73 Altogether, the evidence suggests that those
who experienced the Cambridge viol groups so nostalgically recalled by
Mace, no less than the more visible participants of the Oxford consort
meetings of the Interregnum and early Restoration, represented a
relatively wide cross-section of social, political, religious and intellectual
groupings.74

The prevalence of private music at Cambridge was also

encouraged by the intersection of these groups of aficionados with
systems of local patronage, in which musically inclined aristocrats such as
Christopher, Baron Hatton played a leading role. Hattons familiarity with
current musical trends extended to John Coprarios ground-breaking
fantasia suites, later an important model for Interregnum consort
composers. In parallel with this, though, his attachment to the polyphony
of the sixteenth-century Italian prima prattica was reflected in the musical
tastes of the Christs College academic Michael Honeywood, also a close
friend of Mead, and a connoisseur of the consort.75 Francis Sambrooke
who later inherited Henry Lawes viols, but was also very well acquainted
with the future Parliamentarian Moses Wall, helping to suggest the broad,
non-partisan nature of these networks moved in circles in which these

73 Peter Sterry, letter to his son, MS 292 (Emmanuel College Library,

Cambridge), f. 156. All quotations from the Sterry MSS are included with
the kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Emmanuel College.

74 Penelope Gouk, Performance Practice: Music, Medicine and Natural Philosophy in

Interregnum Oxford, British Journal for the History of Science, 29 (1996), 278 ff.

75 Christopher D.S. Field, Formality and Rhetoric in English Fantasia-Suites, in Andrew

Ashbee, ed., William Lawes, 1602-1645: Essays on his Life, Times and Work (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998), 207; Sarah Boyer and Jonathan Wainwright, From Barnard to Purcell: The
Copying Activities of Stephen Bing, Early Music, 23 (1995), 24; Iain Fenlon, Michael
Honeywoods Music Books, in Chris Banks et al., eds., Sundry Sorts of Music Books:
Essays on the British Library Collections (London: The British Library, 1993), 183-200. For
the relationship between the prima prattica and seventeenth-century English consort
music, see David Pinto, The Fantasy Manner: The Seventeenth-Century Context, Chelys,
10 (1981), 17-28; Joan Wess, Musica Transalpina, Parody, and the Emerging Jacobean
Viol Fantasia, Chelys, 15 (1986), 3-25.

21
genres were valued.76 The cleric Stephen Bing, part of a group of copyists
of consort music at Cambridge, and a client of Hatton, later found
advancement in the service of the music-loving Sancroft.77

In the context of the history of music, evidence of practice such as

that provided by records of university consort meetings has generally
been viewed in isolation, but it is also possible to see these gatherings as
part of a broader cultural phenomenon. Small private groups of individuals
brought together by a common purpose, whether involving music or not,
were a key factor in helping to disseminate ideas at both university
towns.78 Despite the scarcity of evidence, it is probable that more work on
private study groups of this kind at the universities would enhance our
understanding of their musical culture: the intimacy of the consort, after
all, has something in common with the informal conference of such
groups.79 Wherever possible, it is necessary to look beyond the prima
facie purposes of these meetings and to recognise the potential richness
of their frames of reference. Modern categorisation, for example, does not
encourage the association of music and alchemy; yet both had spiritual
dimensions which are not immediately visible from our perspective, but
which tended to draw such pursuits closer together, a convergence to be
found only in a private space where both were highly valued.80 There is
76 Samuel Hartlib, Ephemerides (1643), in The Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and
Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (ca.1600-1662), Held in Sheffield
University Library, Sheffield, England, CD-ROM (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1995), 30/4/92B.
Later, as a beneficiary under the will of Henry Lawes, Sambrooke inherited the
composers viols as well as his brothers consort mss: Ian Spink, Henry Lawes: Cavalier
Songwriter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 133; Pinto, For ye Violls, 21; Mary
Chan, Edward Lowes Manuscript, British Library Add. MS 29396: The Case for Redating,
Music and Letters, 59 (1978), 440.

77 Boyer and Wainwright, From Barnard to Purcell, 630.

78 See for example Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians

Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560-1640
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 132.

79 Ashbee, John Jenkins, 150-1.

80 Penelope Gouk, Doctors and Practitioners: Music and Medicine as

Paradigms of the Arts-Science Divide in Early Modern Europe, in Barbara
Mahlmann-Bauer, ed., Scientiae et Artes. Die Vermittlung alten und neuen
Wissens in Literatur, Kunst und Musik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004),

22
evidence for the existence of private alchemical groups at Cambridge in
the first half of the seventeenth century, and their more tangible aspects
have been noted by historians of science and antiquarians.81 In some
cases, music was specifically present; at Queens, in the earlier part the
seventeenth century, John Rodeknight owned a base viall and a little [i.e.,
treble] viall as well as assorted alchemical apparatus.82 Patrons of
Cambridge academics helped to maintain this dual interest; the
Barrington family, leading Essex puritans, collected old alchemical
manuscripts and supported both chymists and musicians.83 But a depth of
spirituality was characteristic of the family, the unworldly Samuel Rogers
recalling his sweet discourse with that precious woman Mrs Barrington, as
well as, apparently, having commun:[ion] with an alchemical client of
hers.84 Rogers, we may note, took part in the regular meetings of a
Cambridge spiritual group in the 1630s, along with the musically inclined
Sterry, Sambrookes friend Moses Wall, and the cultivated mathematician
Walter Frost.85 Others continued to draw spiritual sustenance from the
informal practice of alchemy at the university during the Civil Wars and
the Interregnum. Thomas Jollie, later a Nonconformist divine, was
described as a kind of Rosicrucian or adeptus; like the celebrator of
Cambridge lute culture, Nicholas Hookes, he moved in the circles of the
Chymically given Trinity College tutor Alexander Akehurst, at around the
same time that Charles Hotham, who kept an alchemical laboratory in his

182.

81 See, for example, John Gascoigne, The Universities and the Scientific
Revolution: The Case of Newton and Restoration Cambridge, History of
Science, 23 (1985), 397-8, 403-4; Palmer, College Dons, 188.

82 Palmer, College Dons, 188.

83 Hartlib, Ephemerides (1640), Hartlib Papers, 30/4/67A, 30/4/68A; Arthur Searle, ed.,
The Barrington Family Letters, 1628-1632, Camden 4th Series, Vol. 28 (London: Royal
Historical Society, 1983), 155; William Hunt, The Puritan Moment: The Coming of
Revolution in an English County (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 220,
225.

84 Samuel Rogers, Diary, Percy MS 7 (Queens University Library, Belfast),

ff. 48, 166; Webster, Godly Clergy, 21.

85 Rogers Diary, ff. 22, 37, 107.

23
rooms at Peterhouse, was developing his defining interest in Jacob
Boehmes theosophy of universal harmony.86

Music and the University Curriculum

The pursuit of music in extra-curricular circumstances may have been all
the more necessary due to the absence of instruction in practical music
from official teaching programmes at the English universities. The number
of music degrees awarded was always very small in this period, and in any
case such awards did not result from any form of institutional teaching
structure, but were given in recognition for the achievements of already
established musicians.87 Continuation of the pre-Reformation choir-school
tradition was patchy; while the more musical colleges such as Trinity, and
schools such as Eton, continued to offer instruction, its broader availability
was severely limited by a number of factors ranging from financial
strictures to religious disapproval and competing models of worship. 88 The
older tradition of a rounded education in both philosophical and practical
music had been eroded by its post-Reformation association with Roman
Catholic values.89 The university environment, as we have seen, provided
many opportunities for individuals to learn singing or instrumental
technique from experienced tutors, or as apparently in Lord Herbert of

86 Hartlib, Ephemerides (1653), Hartlib Papers, 28/2/53A; Mordechai

Feingold, Isaac Barrow: Divine, Scholar, Mathematician, in idem., ed.,
Before Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 34;
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform,
1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 135; Peter Davidson and Ian
William McLellan, Hookes, Nicholas (16321712), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13700, accessed 11 July 2010;
Mordechai Feingold, Barrow, Isaac (16301677), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004, online edn, May
2007 http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1541, accessed 11 July 2010;
J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Alchemy and Politics in England, 1649-1665, Past
and Present 135 (1992), 35.

87 Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, 207, n.

196; Cudworth, Five Hundred Years of Music Degrees, 98.

88 Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance Universities, 190;

Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic, 227-8.

24
Cherburys case encouraged students to teach themselves.90 What was
being promoted, however, was the attainment of a variable level of
competence in a gentlemanly attribute, rather than entry to the much
smaller and less culturally favoured categories of future professional
musicians or specialist music theorists.

Music, did, nevertheless, figure in teaching curricula by virtue of its

status as one of the seven liberal arts, although the extent to which its
continued presence in this form in the seventeenth century reflected more
than a nominal aspiration is open to debate, and was no doubt dependent
on contextual factors.91 As part of the quadrivium (along with arithmetic,
geometry and astronomy), music claimed a crucial status in an
educational ethos rooted in ancient precedent.92 This quadrivial role,
codified in late antiquity in Boethius De musica (which retained its
nominal authority into this period) and supplemented via medieval
scholastic and encyclopaedic sources, was aimed at giving students an
insight into the abstract rational, mathematical properties of music, quite
independently of any conventions of performance. Indeed, in the context
of music at the universities, mastery of the subject as a quadrivial
discipline helped to distinguish those who knew from those who merely

89 For the relation of speculative to practical music in pre-Reformation

England, see Roger Bray, Music and the Quadrivium in Early Tudor
England, Music and Letters 76/1 (1995), 1-18. For their later separation,
see Susan Wollenberg, Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 70.

90 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who attended Oxford in the 1590s,

claimed that he learned to sing my part at first sight in music, and to play
on the lute withalmost no teaching: Carpenter, Music in the Medieval
and Renaissance Universities, 172.

91 Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic, 227-8.

92 This, together with the trivium (logic, rhetoric and grammar)

constituted the two parts of the system of the seven liberal arts. As well
as the quadriviums established status in classically based learning, there
were traditions linking it to biblical knowledge, for example that Moses
had learned the quadrivial subjects in Egypt: see Robert Gell, Angelokratia
Theou, or, A Sermon Touching Gods Government of the World by Angels
(London, 1650), 36.

25
performed, those who exercised rationality from those who were merely
governed by the senses, and thus those who were men from their less
than fully human (or less than properly masculine) contemporaries.93 The
distinction survived challenges to traditional scholastic values, and was
very much alive throughout the seventeenth century, when experimental
philosophers such as William Holder educated at Pembroke College,
Cambridge, in the 1630s simply adapted the position of their medieval
predecessors in asserting the precedence of the natural part of
harmony...[which] lies deep in nature and requires much research...to
unfold it over the mere delight and pleasure of the ear.94 A Professor of
Musick, explained the Baconian William Petty, need not so much to teach
his Auditors actually to [play] or make Melody as to explaine the grounds
thereof, to teach Men to know the differences of & distances of Tones the
Natures of concord and discord the Nature of sounds and sounding
bodies.95 Even William Heythers endowment of a theoretical lectureship
and a practical masters post at Oxford in 1627 served to underline the
distinction although its recognition of the status of musical performance
is more often stressed.96

At the same time, formal instruction in music as a traditional

quadrivial subject does seem to have declined in practice, scheduled
lectures often being poorly attended or even cancelled due to lack of

93 Elizabeth Eva Leach, Music and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, in Ian Biddle and
Kirsten Gibson, eds, Masculinity and Western Musical Practice (Farnham: Ashgate,
2009), 27.

94 William Holder, A Treatise of the Natural Grounds and Principles of Harmony

(London, 1694), Introduction.

95 Hartlib Papers, 47/18/2b.

96 William Weber, Universities, II: 1600-1750, Grove Music On-line,

http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/42492?
q=universities&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit, accessed 11 July
2010; Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, 267; Wollenberg, Music at
Oxford, 70.

26
interest.97 All those who studied at the universities would certainly have
been confronted with the fundamental significance of speculative musics
historical status as part of the quadrivium, but the extent to which
anything beyond a modicum of familiarity was gained is difficult to
measure.98 Certainly it was of considerable significance for those who, like
the Cambridge graduates John Wallis and Henry Peacham, exhibited a
particular interest in music as part of mathematics.99 More broadly, it
continued to inform the culture without necessarily being a defining
feature for those who were musically inclined.

Such people might encounter related but more spiritually orientated

traditions of musica universalis through their reading of ancient
philosophies, or in works such as Marsilio Ficinos translations of and
commentaries on Plato, or Francesco Giorgis Harmonia Mundi, which were
available in Cambridge libraries they were, of course, of particular
importance to the Platonists.100 In this vein, Sterry could observe that

[n]umber hath been reputed the first seat and measure of

proportion, harmony, music and beauty in every kind. Number, and
beauty or harmony, are both by philosophers and divines

97 P.M. Gouk, Music, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the

University of Oxford, Volume IV: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 623; Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and
Renaissance Universities , 155-6.

98 The process of compressing more branches of learning into the

undergraduate programme is likely to have sidelined speculative music
still further: Mordechai Feingold, Mathematical Sciences and New
Philosophies, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of
Oxford, Volume IV: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 365. Even so, Cambridge may have been stronger than
Oxford in this respect: Carpenter, Music in the Medieval and Renaissance
Universities, 336.

99 Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum, 141; Feingold, The

Mathematicians Apprenticeship, 110.

100 See, for example, Sargent Bush, Jr and Carl J. Rasmussen, The Library of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge,1584-1637 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 133.

27
 appropriated to intellectual spirits, who alone are capable of them
as their proper operations and objects.101

In terms of more recent approaches to theory in the early seventeenth

century, interested students may have been able to gain access to works
of the Italian school, or to the musical content in the works of German
millennial encyclopaedists such as Alsted.102 For many of the newer breed
of student seeking to acquire the social accomplishments of elite
manhood, however, the emphasis was moving toward the dual paths of
suitably refined musical practice and the experimental investigation of the
physical causes of sound; as Peacham wrote in 1638, Our nobility and
gentry do not so much affect the study of good letters as in former times,
loving better the active than the contemplative part of knowledge.103
While active knowledge implied traditional constructions of masculinity,
the fact that newer styles of performed music might often utilise
chromatic melodies and harmonies (musica mollis, soft music, in the
Boethian classification), and instruments with ambivalent gender
associations (such as the lute) left plenty of opportunity for critics to
attack the uses to which music was being put.104

Music in Religious Worship

Nowhere were disputes about music more virulent than in the context of
its place in religious worship; here, music was only one indicator of the
wider crisis that gripped the university in the 1630s and beyond. Where
anti-Laudians pilloried the bawling boys and drunken singing men of the
newly established or augmented choirs in the college chapels, Lauds
101 Sterry, A Discourse of the Freedom of the Will, 27.

102 Peter Toon, Gods Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen, Pastor,
Educator, Theologian (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1971), 44.

103 Mordechai Feingold, The Humanities, in Nicholas Tyacke, ed., The History of the
University of Oxford, Volume IV: The Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 236. It should be noted that, before the Restoration, there is more evidence
for Baconian acoustical investigations being followed at Oxford: see Mordechai Feingold
and Penelope M. Gouk, An Early Critique of Bacons Sylva Sylvarum: Edmund Chilmeads
Treatise on Sound, Annals of Science, 40 (1983), 140, 156.

104 For gendered classification in Boethius, see Leach, Music and

Masculinity, 23.

28
supporters dismissed their opponents as anti-harmonical snarlers.105
Behind the insults, however, lay a background of scholarly exegesis and
doctrinal disagreement dating back to the Reformation and beyond. To
what extent, if at all, were vocal polyphony or the presence of instruments
in church appropriate to Protestant worship? Critics throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often classed intricate music as
enervating and morally suspect, exerting an appeal aimed only at the
senses. Later commentators could cite the view of Erasmus, who
dismissed complex vocal music as a confused noise of voices, signifying
nothing.106 No one could overlook the references in the Old Testament to
the presence in worship of elaborate singing with a variety of instrumental
support, but the circumstances in which this had taken place, and the
meanings to be attached to it, were very much open to interpretation.
Many of the godly were especially uncomfortable with the depictions of
instrumental forces in ancient Hebrew services, which following Calvin
they rationalised as a concession to the spiritual weakness and religious
immaturity of the Jews.107 Moreover there was scant detailed record of
music in the earliest years of the Christian Church, and plenty of evidence
to suggest that it had been introduced in complex form only after
Christianitys corruption by worldly Roman power. Even the sympathetic
Augustine had famously shrunk from musics emotional appeal, preferring
to keep it functionally subordinate to the all-important message of the
text.

On the other hand, there were compelling arguments, and

precedents from the Old Testament prophets, for musics efficacy in

105 William Bridge, quoted in Francis Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical

Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610-1692 (Boston, MA:
Northeastern University Press, 1994), 170; Humphrey Sydenham, Sermons Upon
Solemne Occasions: Preached in Severall Auditories (London, 1637), 16. The
disciplinarian Laud was conscious that his singing men at St Johns, Oxford would much
better their skill by daily practice: Costin, History of St Johns College, 70.

106 Stephen M. Buhler, Counterpoint and Controversy: Milton and the Critiques of
Polyphonic Music, Milton Studies, 36 (1998), 21.

107 H.P. Clive, The Calvinist Attitude to Music, and its Literary Aspects and Sources: Part
I, Bibliothque dhumanisme et Renaissance, 19 (1957), 91-2.

29
raising the affections to a state of mind receptive to divine thoughts.108 In
this view, provided the music set prescribed texts and followed a suitably
grave and sober pattern, avoiding inappropriately secular associations, it
could only be an aid to religion. After all, the defining blueprint for English
Protestantism, the Elizabethan settlement, had offered considerably more
encouragement to music than its more austere continental counterparts.
What is perhaps most likely to strike a chord today is the sheer
reasonableness of the case for Laudian chapel music. Seeing music is one
of the liberal arts, how could it be quarrelled at in an university, if they
sang with understanding both of the matter and the manner thereof?,
asked Thomas Fuller, adding incredulously: [y]et some uttered great
distaste thereat, as a tendency to superstition.109

In Cambridge, the pendulum had already swung back and forth a

number of times before the 1630s. For example, the reputedly pro-
Catholic Thomas Legge who occupied a number of prominent positions
in the university, including that of vice-chancellor, in the late sixteenth
century was well known and widely criticised for his encouragement of
music. During Legges tenure of Jesus College it was claimed that the
Master hath used continual and expressive loud singing and noise of
organs, to the great disturbance of our studies, whereas at Caius he was
said to have presided over a place of lutes, singing and organs.110 On the
other hand, under the influence of puritan divines such as Thomas
Cartwright and William Fulke at St Johns, Popish trash was eradicated
from the college chapel, and Geneva psalters were brought in even if
Fulke was also criticised for keeping a pair of virginals (as well as a

108 Smith, Select Discourses, 238; Foulke Robarts, Gods Holy House and Service
(London, 1639), 54. For more on this latter source, see Graham Parry, Glory, Laud
and Honour: The Arts of the Anglican Counter-
Reformation (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 28-9.

109 Thomas Fuller, The History of the University of Cambridge, since the Conquest, in
idem, The Church History of Britain (London, 1655), 232-3.

110 Gray and Brittain, History of Jesus College, 56; Bendall et al, History of Emmanuel
College, 44.

30
disturbing variety of wildlife) in his chamber.111 By the early seventeenth
century the musical establishments and practices of individual colleges
tended to reflect their history and character, ranging from the old-
established choral foundations of Kings and Trinity to the minimalism of
Emmanuels unadorned psalm singing.112

For opponents of elaborate church music, any sense of balance or

restraint in Cambridge musical practice was rudely dispelled by the
Laudian reformers thoroughgoing imposition of new conditions (or, for
supporters, the reintroduction of venerable ones113) in the college chapels.
Even making allowance for any element of hyperbole in William Bedells
complaint that church services were being celebrated with all manner of
instrumental music, as organs, sackbuts, cornets, viols, etc, as if it had
been at the dedication of Nebuchadnezzars golden image in the plain of
Dura, the fact remains that by the mid-30s a number of colleges had
instituted new choirs, and prominent organ makers like Robert Dallam
were being given plenty of work.114 Scholars, it was claimed, were
increasingly obliged to learn pricksong, to the great loss of their time and
prejudice of their studies.115 At the forefront of this musical expansion was
Peterhouse, where the creation of the Caroline part-books provided an
emblem for this aspect of the Laudian reforms, where the music-loving
John Cosin built on the groundwork put in place by Matthew Wren, and
where even the vituperation of William Dowsings visitation report could
not entirely dispel the ambient aesthetic: on solemn days a pot of incense

111 Miller, Portrait of a College, 18.

112 For more on the musical constitutions of the individual colleges, see
Payne, Provision and Practice, 173.

113 Robarts, Gods Holy House, Preface.

114 Thurston Dart, Henry Loosemores Organ Book, Transactions of the Cambridge
Bibliographical Society, 3 (1959-63), 150; Miller, Portrait of a College, 21-2; Gray and
Brittain, Jesus College, 76; Willis and Clark, Architectural History, II, 142, 294.

115 Payne, Provision and Practice, 159.

31
is set upon the altar, and as the smoke ascends the organs and voices in
the chapel are raised.116

Opponents emphasised and augmented traditional objections to this

concerted musical expansion on a number of fronts. Most obviously, the
employment of complex polyphonic forces was, for many, a clear signal of
a return to Rome on the part of our popish Arminians, no matter how
insistently Laudians retorted that egregious abuses of a practice should
not be taken to invalidate the practice itself.117 Further, the complexity of
the music detracted from the intelligibility of the service a long-standing
issue on both sides of the Reformation divide so that the greatest part
of [it]...is no better understood, than if it were in Hebrew or in Irish.118 For
its detractors, this combination of musical embellishment and
unintelligible content was in effect pagan, suggesting the feasts of
Bacchus, or the Egyptian Isis, or the Phrygian Cybele rather than the
death and passion of our saviour Christ. (Provocatively, the Laudian
divine Humphrey Sydenham linked Christ and David to Orpheus and
Amphion as musical healers of souls.119) Calvin, the Laudians critics
pointed out, had called for music in worship to be limited to simple
settings of the psalms; Laudians responded by advocating a middle way
between this bitter taste of Geneva and the relish of the Romish
synagogue.120 Against objections concerning the presence of instruments

116 Cooper, ed., The Journal of William Dowsing, 157.

117 George Ornsby, ed., The Correspondence of John Cosin, Volume I,

Publications of the Surtees Society, Vol. 52 (Durham: Andrews, 1869), 183;
Sydenham, Sermons, 15.

118 Peter Smart, quoted in Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 2. Smart
complained about Cosins encouragement of Anthems...which none of the
people understand, not all the singers themselves: Correspondence of
John Cosin, I, 183.

119 Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 1; Sydenham, Sermons, 4. Sydenham

was incorporated MA at Cambridge in 1625: J. Sears McGee, Sydenham,
Humphrey (1591c.1650), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online
edn, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004
http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/26862 (accessed 11 July 2010).

120 Sydenham, Sermons, 15.

32
in church, Laudians noted that Solomons temple itself had been
dedicated using Cytterns and Harpes and Cymballs.121 Indeed, the
Hebrews had always graced their worship with fitting music, with the
exception and here we should note the typological, not to say prophetic
connection to current events of when the Philistines to the disgrace of
Israel led it captive.122 Where their opponents valued the congregational
solidarity of plain psalm singing, Laudians linked the beauty of holiness
to the decency of proper worship, placing a premium on musical
excellence, even if it seems clear that in practice some college choirs fell
somewhat short of the ideal.123

Thus music in worship attained a renewed, perhaps unprecedented

level of controversy. Nevertheless, the beauty of holiness had its
aesthetic dimension. For those who attended services in the Laudian
chapels, the musical experience they encountered was passive in both the
modern and older senses. The aim was that the passions, or affections, of
those present should be moved in order to produce a heightened sense of
religious feeling. The moderate Elizabethan churchman Richard Hooker
had written of the capacity of appropriate music to draw forth tears of
devotion. Once again there is ambivalence in musics dangerously
feminising tendency to arouse passion and its exertion of rationally
masculine control over that passion; in Aristotelian vein, the passage from
Hooker continues: to moderate all affections.124 Distrustful of its efficacy
in this latter point, the Genevan approach adopted by the hard-line
English godly subordinated music to a role in which it encouraged
congregational solidarity while keeping the potential for emotional
121 Robarts, Gods Holy House, 11.

122 Sydenham, Sermons, 9.

123 Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 23. Laud is reported to have said at his
trial that [a]ll that I laboured for...was that the external worship of God in
this church might be kept up in uniformity and decency, and in some
beauty of holiness: Mullinger, Cambridge Characteristics, 81. For the
shortcomings of Cambridge college choirs, see for example Cooper,
Annals of Cambridge, Volume III, 282.

124 Quoted in Parry, Glory, Laud and Honour, 157.

33
engagement within the strictest of bounds. Laudian musics allegedly
unchecked arousal of the affections whether spiritual or otherwise
threatened to let in both the corrupting influence of Rome and the no less
insidious persuasions of the feminine. Laudians, however, were capable of
turning this masculinising discourse against their opponents. For
Sydenham, the harmony of fitting music was an emblem of unity in the
church, a unity capable of encompassing a balance of its gendered
qualities, whereas the antagonism of puritans to music was mired in a
narrower and less civilised construction of masculinity, representing their
chiefe engin of warre and discord.125

The Cambridge Platonists and Music

We can detect the playing out of these disputes, and their potential
resolution, in the ways in which the Platonists internalised their early
musical experiences, even if they showed little or no inclination to
pronounce directly on the kinds of music that should or should not form
part of church services. Their aim seems to have been to override
questions of ideology in favour of an inner musical ideal through whose
beauty and inclusiveness they sought to recover a vestige of the divine
harmony itself. The aesthetically refined Sterry could appreciate musical
beauty on its own terms; even the delicious pleasures of...music in the
outward pomp of the Catholic Church were rewarding in themselves.126
Nevertheless, what is expressed time and again in Sterrys writings is the
symbiosis between the variety of outward forms music could take and the
reality, both inward and universal, on which they were based. He
understood the music used in ancient Hebrew worship the music which
helped to provoke so much dispute in pre-Civil War Cambridge as a type,
a prophetic forerunner, of the music of Christ, the master of the universal
music; the music of the Levites round about upon the walls with their

125 Sydenham, Sermons, 23.

126 Peter Sterry, Englands Deliverance from the Northern Presbytery,

Compared with its Deliverance from the Roman Papacy (London, 1652),
21.

34
instruments and voices as figures of the angels; the inner music of the
heart as a strain of the heavenly music of the Christian gospel message.127

For its critics, elaborate church music merely diverted the attention
of the congregation from its proper focus on verbal meaning, with first
half the choir, then the other, tossing the word of God like a tennis ball,
then all yelling together with conjoined noise. More positively, Sterry
recalled heavenly choral sounds, as if all ye angells, & Spheares in two
Quires had plaid, & sung in parts to each other.128 In this instance,
memory supplied the material for a dream sequence whose main object
was psychological healing through the music of divine love. On one level,
this simply reflected a standard discourse; it was of course widely
perceived that there was something intrinsically musical about the
essence of human beings that the soul itself by nature is or hath in it
harmony.129 The harmonious mathematical proportions on which both our
inner and outer worlds were constructed formed the basis of the musica
speculativa of the quadrivium. For the Platonists, however, this was not a
question of paying lip service to tradition but of appropriating a living
language of inner harmony to express the all-pervasiveness of the divine
message of reconciliation of both inner and outer conflict. For Cudworth,
the new law of Christs gospel, the law of love, was a kind of musical

127 Sterry, Commings Forth, 3; idem, Rise, Race, and Royalty, 285.

128 Nathaniel Homes, Gospel Musick; Or, The Singing of Davids Psalms
(London, 1644), 19; Peter Sterry, untitled treatise, MS 292 (Emmanuel
College Library, Cambridge), f. 136. (My thanks are due to the Librarian
and staff of Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, for their kind
assistance in making available the Sterry mss; all quotations from this
source are included with the permission of the Master and Fellows of
Emmanuel College.) Tennis was played at early seventeenth-century
Cambridge; a court was built at St Johns in 1573, and John Hutchinson
was among those who learned to play at Peterhouse in the 1630s: Miller,
Portrait of a College, 27; Hutchinson, Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, 42.
Homes may have borrowed this conceit from Thomas Cartwrights
exchange with Richard Hooker on the subject of church music: Hollander,
The Untuning of the Sky, 247.

129 Richard Hooker, quoted in Mishtooni Bose, Humanism, English Music and the
Rhetoric of Criticism, Music and Letters 77 (1996), 15.

35
soul, making our hearts of their own accord delight to act
harmoniously.130

To a considerable extent, the Platonists cannot have failed to

sympathise with the Laudian attachment to the beauty of holiness, with
musics capacity to inflame the spiritual affections and thus draw the
believer closer to God. In claiming that divinity is something to be
understood rather by a spiritual sensation than by any verbal description,
Smith seems close enough to the ethos of Laudian worship, as does
Sterrys wel tuned instrument...bring[ing] ye mind into an Harmony, and
sutablenes to divine things, which raise it up to a sympathising sence, and
desire of them.131 Indeed, in this respect both Laudians and Platonists
appear far removed from the overwhelming suspicion of musics
propensity to ensnare the unwary mind, to divert humanity toward sin,
characteristic of some forms of seventeenth-century English
Protestantism. They are further still from the anti-aesthetic prejudice of
those who, like the proudly puritan Sir Henry Yelverton, judged polyphonic
choral music in church to be the equivalent of mere whistling: Yelverton
complained that he could never understand a word of it when the organs
plaied.132 Recoiling from aggressive philistinism of this kind, the
Cambridge Platonists were surely on the side of Sir Thomas Browne in
distrust[ing] the symmetry of those heads which declaime against all
Church musicke.133

Yet at heart the Platonists internal music was a private, lyrical

language differing substantially from the Laudians shared collective

130 Cudworth, Sermon to H of C... Ralph Cudworth, A Sermon Preached

before the Honourable House of Commons, at Westminster, March 31.
1647 (Cambridge, 1647),

131 Smith, Select Discourses, 2; Sterry, untitled treatise on philosophy,

MS 291, Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge, f. 18.

132 Douglas Macleane, A History of Pembroke College, Oxford, Oxford

Historical Society [Publications] XXXIII (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society,
1897), 312, n. 4.

133 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (London, 1645)...

36
experience.134 It was out of step with Lauds authoritarian strain, and by
moving the emphasis away from the physical circumstances of performed
music, paradoxically allowed music to have a greater conceptual
autonomy, albeit one ultimately rooted in Cambridge performance culture.
Whereas for the Laudians music itself was always subordinated to the
more pressing demands of appropriate worship, for the Platonists it
became an inward experience of the divine that could arise from a wider
and less restrictive range of circumstances. Sterry in particular seemed to
favour an ideal music independent of the word and rooted instead in the
capacity of voice, lute or viol to ravish the spiritual senses by musical
means alone.

Laudians sought control over music, thereby rendering crucial

practical distinctions between suitable and unsuitable genres and styles.
Consider the following passage from Sydenham:

And doubtless in harmony we may discover the mystic portraitures

both of vice and virtue. There is nothing more betraying us to
sensuality than some kind of music, than other none more
advancing unto God. And therefore there must be a discreet caution
had, that it be grave and sober and not over-wantoned with curiosity
or descantThe over-carving and mincing of the air, either by
ostentation or curiosity of art, lulls too much the outward sense and
leaves the spiritual faculties untouched, whereas a sober mediocrity
and grave mixture of tune with ditty rocks the very soul and carries
it into ecstasies, and for a time seems to cleave and sunder it from
the body.135

A line is being carefully drawn here. On the one hand, Sydenham endorses
a very ordered, rationally controlled form of temporary experience of
musical soul-loss brought about through the use of music appropriate to
the divine service; on the other, he obviates the dangerously irrational,
feminising outcome of submitting to musics uncontrolled sensuality the
gendered language of the opposition of gravity, sobriety and moderation
(male) against sensuality, wantonness and curiosity (female) is
134 I adapt this distinction from Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient
Springs (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 118.

135 Sydenham, Sermons, 22.

37
unmistakable. It was vitally important for Laudians, in the context, to
construct or reaffirm a position of cultivated, masculine, authentically
Protestant civility, equally distinct from boorish puritan anti-aestheticism,
the superficiality, irrationalism and effeminacy of Rome, and the excesses
inherent in music itself when left uncontrolled by doctrinal priorities.

Even so, there is much here with which the Platonists would have agreed,
although, ironically, they might have baulked at Sydenhams citation of
Plato in the same passage to the effect that music should not be
multiplex and effeminate; that is, it must be subjected to rational
masculine control. But then, the diversity of positions taken across the
range of the Platonic oeuvre, and expressed in dialogue by a variety of his
protagonists, is notoriously difficult to reconcile. For the Cambridge
thinkers the most compelling strand of Platonism was that of Plotinus and
other ancient Neoplatonists, or the Plato of the Phaedrus and the
Symposium, where music is the knowledge of that which relates to
love.136 Still, Sydenhams evocation of the achievement of ecstatic states
through music was very much in sympathy with their values. On the face
of it, too, the refined musical taste crystallised in Cudworths prose might
be expected to have coincided with Sydenhams tone of aesthetic
discrimination. But this is counter-balanced, I think, by the conception of
music as a divine force that eludes or transcends merely human priorities
and circumstances; to return to Browne, even vulgar and Taverne Musick
was capable of inducing a deepe fit of devotion, recalling that harmony,
which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.137 The Beautifull Order, &
Harmony of the universal spirit, explains Sterry, descendeth into, &
passeth through all perticular [sic] fformes, reaching even as far as those

136 Plato, Symposium, or Banquet, trans. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in Five

Dialogues of Plato Bearing on Poetic Inspiration (London: J.M. Dent & Sons,
1910), 33; G.P.H. Pawson, The Cambridge Platonists and their Place in
Religious Thought, reprint of the 1930 edn (New York: B. Franklin Reprints,
1974), 49-50.

137 Browne, Religio Medici, 156.

38
fformes of sense, which in themselves seeme most offensive to sense.138
The ultimate measure is not the requirement of proper Protestant worship
with its rational, reasonable image of sober, moderate masculinity,
defining and constraining music but the unconstrained, androgynous
divinity of music itself. Similarly, the internalised conceptualisation of the
lute and the viol consort escapes social instrumentality, the imperative of
the cultured gentleman, in order to realise a more disembodied musical
aesthetic of divine love. As such, it transcends the gender boundaries
imposed by preconceived models of masculinity even one which is itself
set up in opposition to the old idea of warrior-masculinity (with its clichs
of warlike music) and the newer concept of masculinity as utility (with its
implicit degradation of music to the level of mere pleasing entertainment).
In other words, the Cambridge Platonist musical aesthetic rejects the
whole gamut of views of music variously aimed at keeping the female in
its place, in favour of a response to music that gives full recognition to a
broad spectrum of male and female qualities within the ambit of divine
love.

In doing so and remembering the doctrinal background of the Platonists

formative years it also goes some way towards rescuing Cambridge
puritanism from being typecast in its traditional anti-musical role. Of
course, the caricature of the ideologically anti-musical puritan was
exploded many decades ago, and we have already seen how the secular
modes of Cambridge music were capable of creating some level of
consensus, or at least a temporary suspension of doctrinal antagonism.139
In any case, the whole existence of puritanism as a distinctly identifiable
and unified ideology has become increasingly untenable in more recent
scholarship. At the same time, we have seen that, in the specific context
of music in worship, the battle lines were drawn with some clarity,

138 Sterry, Of the Sun, MS 294, Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge,

ff. 84, 86.

139 Percy A. Scholes, The Puritans and Music in England and New England: A
Contribution to the Cultural History of Two Nations (London: Oxford University Press,
1934).

39
whatever nomenclature we choose to apply to either side. It is these
battle lines that the Platonists can be seen to transcend. Sterry, their most
thoroughly musical representative, was Parliamentarian, Cromwellian and
eventually Nonconformist in his loyalties, and is described as puritan in a
significant proportion of the handful of scholarly works devoted to his life
and thought.140 While the epithet is not generally helpful in relation to the
complexity of his religious position, he was arguably in tune with a
broader puritan tendency to spiritualise, and thereby render
transcendently divine, the outward pomp of religious worship. The stance
is encapsulated by his Parliamentarian colleague William Sedgwicks
vision of the spiritual resolution of conflict in the later stages of the Civil
Wars: Religion shall be adorned with solemnity, state, pomp, glory, ease,
music, all heavenly and earthly together, such as may allure and please
the minds of men.141

In comparison with Oxfords often more readily traceable musical

culture, Cambridge has sometimes been thought of as a kind of poor
relation in this area. Seventeenth-century Oxford has been celebrated for
its more empirically verifiable musical characteristics and achievements:
its regular and well-documented consort meetings, the higher profile of its
experimental work on sound, the significantly earlier institution of its
professorship of music. By contrast, historians have lamented the relative
paucity of evidence for Cambridge musical activity, and for the early
part of the century at any rate retained preconceptions about the lack of
encouragement music must have received from a predominantly puritan
culture.142 There is, nevertheless, a good deal of evidence supporting the
existence of a thriving musical culture in pre-Civil War Cambridge, and
140 See, for example, Pinto, Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan; Alison J.
Teply, The Mystical Theology of Peter Sterry: A Study in Neoplatonist
Puritanism, PhD dissertation (University of Cambridge, 2004).

141 William Sedgwick, The Leaves of the Tree of Life for the Healing of the
Nations (London, 1648), 117.

142 See, for example, Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum, 141; Gouk,
Performance Practice, 287.

40
some of it has been assembled for the purposes of this chapter. I have
also tried to show that, to help us move significantly beyond a priori
assumptions about the relative insignificance of music in Cambridge in
this period, it is necessary to read between the lines and to see how forms
of musical practice could interact with a more abstract but no less vital
strand of thought which valued musics capacity to heal division.

41