Poor Louis Grabu! Seldom has a struggling artist fallen so grievously victim to the cruel blows of malignant fortune as did the onetime Master of the Music at the English court of Charles II. Grabu stands before us as the very model of a distressed royal servant, a salutary picture of loyalty unrewarded and labour misapplied. However dazzling his rise to prominence in the mid-1660s may have seemed, his subsequent fall from favour strikes us as having been all the more precipitous, and of considerably more lasting impact – and hence doubly ruinous to his reputation as both a court functionary and a composer. The campaign of disparagement waged by contemporaries, from Pelham Humfrey's stinging charge that ‘he understands nothing nor can play on any instrument and so cannot compose’,Footnote ² to John Dryden's discovery ‘amongst some English Musicians, and their Scholars’ of ‘a Party, who maliciously endeavour to decry him’,Footnote ³ to the hilarious mockery of his surname in an anonymous satirical poem,Footnote ⁴ would appear to confirm Grabu's overwhelmingly negative reputation among his peers. Coupled with the undeniable facts of his dismissal from office in 1674, his flight from anti-Popish prejudice in 1679, his subsequent inability to secure a position at the French court and the abrupt deflation of his grand operatic project Albion and Albanius, such barbs certainly must have taken their toll on the unfortunate musician's self-esteem.

Sorely buffeted by the social and political perils of the late seventeenth century, the hapless composer has fared little better in our own day. Grabu has been aptly described by Peter Holman as ‘perhaps the most derided figure in English musical history’,Footnote ⁵ and a brief survey of commentary since the eighteenth century bears out this characterization. Charles Burney labelled him ‘an obscure musician, whose name is not to be found in the French annals of the art’, and dismissed Grabu's output as ‘not very agreeable […] to unprejudiced judges of Music’.Footnote ⁶ E. F. Rimbault dubbed him an ‘impudent pretender’,Footnote ⁷ W. J. Lawrence, ‘a mediocre French composer’,Footnote ⁸ Robert Etheridge Moore, ‘a pallid Frenchman’,Footnote ⁹ and Roy Lamson, Jr., with doubly dubious accuracy, ‘a second-rate musician and close friend of Charles II’.Footnote ¹⁰ Henri Dupré similarly described him as ‘an inferior musician […] who had the merit, in the eyes of Charles II, of being a Frenchman’,Footnote ¹¹ while W. H. Cummings, in the only standalone biographical article on Grabu hitherto published, held the musician up as an example of his contention that the Stuart monarch ‘almost invariably patronized the evil and neglected the good’.Footnote ¹² Echoing Lawrence and Dupré (and anticipating Lamson and Moore), A. K. Holland asserted that Grabu was ‘a mediocrity whose chief recommendation for Charles was that he was French’,Footnote ¹³ while in Dennis Arundell's assessment the musician progressively declines from a ‘refugee second-rater’ and ‘a second-rate alien’ to merely ‘third-rate’.Footnote ¹⁴ Edward Dent regarded Grabu's participation in the opera Albion and Albanius as the ‘[w]orst misfortune of all’ to have befallen that ill-starred production,Footnote ¹⁵ and even Franklin Zimmerman, whose comparatively positive appraisal of Grabu's music for Albion in The Works of John Dryden offers an unusual respite from this litany of denigration,Footnote ¹⁶ could not resist concluding that Grabu's post-1684 ‘contributions to the establishment of French opera in London were worse than negligible’.Footnote ¹⁷ Even in the more circumspect twenty-first century, new generations of undergraduates continue to be treated to Donald Jay Grout's dismissal of Grabu as ‘undoubtedly a better courtier than a composer’.Footnote ¹⁸

Considering such a deplorable catalogue of ineptitude, it is hardly surprising that seventeenth-century administrative documents pertaining to Grabu, many of which are couched in bland or formulaic bureaucratic language, are almost invariably read in a derogatory light. His replacement by Nicholas Staggins as Master of the Music in 1674, the lengthy delays afflicting his receipt of salary payments both before and after this date and later characterizations of him by the Lord Chamberlain as ‘very poore and Miserable’ and by Viscount Preston as ‘a poor servant of his Majestyes’Footnote ¹⁹ are all seen as crucial underpinnings of a depressing historia calamitatum from which the unhappy Grabu emerges as not merely beset by adversity, but somehow deservedly so: an object of pity, perhaps, but more properly of ridicule and contempt. Even a reference as benign as that found in Thomas Shadwell's comedy The Humorists (first performed on 10 December 1670), where Grabu is described in passing by a foppish character as ‘a very pretty hopeful man’Footnote ²⁰ is almost instinctively construed as belittlement – notwithstanding the fact that the real target of the satire at this moment in the play is the eccentric musician John Birchensha, against whom Grabu is said to pale in comparison, but only in the opinion of a ridiculous coxcomb who is no qualified judge of music. The resulting account of Grabu's supposedly luckless career certainly promotes the weaving of a compelling narrative,Footnote ²¹ one rendered especially poignant by the Lord Chamberlain's oft-quoted ‘poore and Miserable’ comment of 1677 just cited. In the conventional reading of this remark, ‘the wretched Grabu’Footnote ²² is revealed to us only a few months shy of his ignominious retirement to France, the latest in a string of reversals that would inexorably lead, following further characteristic disappointments, to the abject surrender to fate that drew him back to London in 1683, where he would stake his tattered reputation, with predictably devastating results, on the debacle that was Albion and Albanius.

While there can be no disputing that Grabu suffered his share of professional and even personal setbacks, we might not be surprised to learn that the reality is altogether less colourful than what has just been outlined. Although we regrettably lack any visual evidence necessary to substantiate the characterization of him as ‘very pretty’ (or, conversely, ‘pallid’), a sober assessment of the documentary record offers ample justification to describe Grabu's prospects as, on balance, more ‘hopeful’ than bleak over the 30-year period during which his career is known to us. The fact that Grabu had the undeniable misfortune to hitch his star to a chronically underfunded court beleaguered by a populace inclined to xenophobia should not blind us to his accomplishments, and certainly does not justify any resort to a superficial reading of the quite substantial record of his activities, much of which has hitherto been subject – when it is examined at all – to an overabundance of misinterpretation. As I intend to show in the exploration that follows, notwithstanding the few high-profile barbs from contemporaries and the more leaden disapproval of many modern scholars, a comprehensive survey of Louis Grabu's life and career reveals him to have been a competent administrator, an orchestral director not without merit and even a composer of some distinction. Moreover, in the face of seemingly endless vicissitudes, he managed to reinvent himself as many as four separate times. Indeed, Grabu might be regarded as exemplifying a pattern of survival in the often unforgiving professional music world of late-seventeenth-century London, a pattern whose features have not been clearly delineated in the majority of biographical studies of English court musicians currently available to us. Thus, the aim of the present article is really twofold: first, to reassess Grabu himself, avoiding the judgments of the past, and, second, to demonstrate what can be achieved, even in the case of a subject whose personal qualities are largely opaque to us, by pursuing an investigation that embraces a wide range of materials and opportunities for analysis. The true details of Grabu's biography emerge with clarity only when we dig deeply into the records themselves: administrative and financial documents of the royal court; contemporary diaries and correspondence; manuscript and printed musical sources; theatrical and bibliographical information; and even newspaper advertisements. It is also helpful to sketch out details regarding some of the lesser historical figures with whom Grabu is known to have had significant interactions. When all of these elements are considered together, it might then be possible to say that we have attained a better understanding of Louis Grabu, and that we have glimpsed a way forward that may promise to shed further light on the activities of other musicians associated with the Restoration court. It is therefore hoped that this study can serve as a model for future such explorations, even as it seeks to refurbish the reputation of one unjustly maligned individual.

I. Grabu as court musician, 1665–77

Despite Grabu's frequent appearance in court administrative records and elsewhere throughout the latter part of the seventeenth century, we know precious little about the man himself. As we have already observed, no likenesses of him are known to survive, and there is no evidence of his having left letters or other personal documents of any kind. Even the dates of his birth and death are unknown. Purportedly a native of Catalonia,Footnote ²³ he is believed to have studied in Paris, but was certainly in London by 2 April 1665 (the Sunday after Easter), when he married one Catherine de Loes in a Roman Catholic ceremony at the chapel of Queen Catherine of Braganza in St James's Palace.Footnote ²⁴ This event may have followed shortly on the heels of Grabu's attainment of professional employment: if an entry found in a rough court ‘establishment book’ of c.1660–70 is to be trusted, he may originally have been brought to England under the aegis of the Duke of Buckingham – possibly at first for use in Buckingham's own modest musical ensembleFootnote ²⁵ – and then sponsored by the Duke for a position in the royal service commencing on 31 March 1665.Footnote ²⁶ What this position may have been is not entirely clear: the entry merely describes Grabu as ‘Composer’, a puzzling designation given that (unlike Nicholas Staggins, his successor as Master of the Music) Grabu was never actually appointed to any formal post at Charles II's court as a composer.Footnote ²⁷ It is therefore likely that Grabu's 1665 appointment was not in the royal music per se (where in fact there is no other sign of him, for example among payment records, at this time), but rather in the satellite French musical establishment, which we know was in existence at least from 1663 to 1668, but about which official documents during that period are almost entirely silent.Footnote ²⁸ The six-person group, as sworn in 1663, consisted of five singers (a Master and four others) and a harpsichordist, and it stands to reason that there may have been a need for someone to compose for them, an opening that could have been supplied by Grabu as a nominee of the Duke of Buckingham in 1665. It is at almost precisely this time that another document identifies as ‘Nostri [i.e. the king's] in arte Musicâ Compositores’ the brothers Vincenzo and Bartolomeo Albrici, who were members of Charles II's other foreign musical establishment, the Italians.Footnote ²⁹

Whatever the nature of his earliest contact with the Restoration court may have been, in 1666 Grabu experienced a rise in his fortunes that was nothing short of meteoric. When Charles II's aged Master of the Music, Nicholas Lanier, died in February 1666, the recently arrived expatriate was quickly elevated to the now-vacant post. Grabu's paid appointment was officially dated from the Feast of the Annunciation, or ‘Lady Day’ (25 March), the day immediately preceding the commencement of the fiscal quarter ending at the Feast of St John the Baptist (24 June, a.k.a. ‘Midsummer’),Footnote ³⁰ although, in typical Restoration administrative fashion, he was not formally sworn in until the following November,Footnote ³¹ and only received his patent and grant of £200 annual salary in the spring of 1667.Footnote ³² We do not know the precise reason for Grabu's rapid promotion, within a year of his appearance in England, from a small satellite ensemble to a central position in the Restoration musical establishment, but it may have been a function of the Restoration court's budding interest in the latest French musical styles. In late 1664 or early 1665, the promising young musician Pelham Humfrey had been sent, at royal expense, on a three-year journey to the Continent, which included time in France ostensibly spent studying composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully;Footnote ³³ shortly after Grabu's elevation to Nicholas Lanier's former mastership, the younger Humfrey (still in absentia) was appointed to Lanier's position as Lutenist for the Private Music.Footnote ³⁴ Evidently, the Grabu–Humfrey partnership did not go smoothly: towards the end of 1667, Samuel Pepys recorded Humfrey's now-famous boast

In assessing this accusation, however, it is worth recalling Pepys's judgment of his interlocutor in this case: ‘an absolute Monsieur, as full of form and confidence and vanity, and disparages everything and everybody's skill but his own’, whose scornful invective, the diarist drily observed, was enough to ‘make a man piss’. At the same time, there is no reason to suppose that Pepys would have been secretly sympathetic to Grabu in this exchange: despite his wide-ranging musical activities, he seems to have had no personal contact with Grabu at all, at least not during the 1660s.Footnote ³⁶

In any event, Humfrey's bluster appears to have been no match for Grabu's solid administrative credentials: as Peter Holman has shown, the new Master of the Music quickly extended his authority over his new subordinates.Footnote ³⁷ On 24 December 1666, exactly a month after his formal swearing-in, he secured an order from the Lord Chamberlain requiring all members of the 24 Violins as well as the Private Music to rehearse under his tutelage and to ‘obey the directions of Louis Grabu, master of the private musick, both for their time of meeting to practise, and also for the time of playing in consort’.Footnote ³⁸ This order expressly covered the ‘Select Band’ of 12 violinists who formed the core of Charles II's increasingly professional musical establishment, and it came at a time when that band's convenor John Banister was already under suspicion of having diverted royal funds allocated to pay its members. Matters progressed further in March 1667, when Grabu was assigned responsibility for distributing the quite substantial arrears to the Select Band, as well as future payments of the annual £600 ‘augmentation’ that had originally been granted to Banister to remunerate the band's members.Footnote ³⁹ The transfer of oversight probably had the effect of endearing Grabu to the rest of the musicians, although it certainly did not sit well with the disgraced Banister. On 20 February 1667, Pepys had heard of Banister's fury that ‘the King hath a Frenchman come to be chief of some part of the King's music’,Footnote ⁴⁰ and on 30 March the pugnacious violinist submitted a petitionFootnote ⁴¹ in response to a remonstrance presented by the members of the Select Band the preceding day.Footnote ⁴² As a result of this, Grabu's control over the arrears of the augmentation was briefly suspended, but was restored on 4 August,Footnote ⁴³ though in the meantime Banister had been arrested (25 May) ‘for abusing the master of his Majesty's musick and several of his Majesty's musicians’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Banister's determined resistance notwithstanding, Grabu's consolidation of power continued apace: by April 1668, the Select Band had been abolished altogether, replaced with a monthly shift system whereby all 24 of the king's violins were granted access to the royal Privy Chamber.Footnote ⁴⁵

With Grabu firmly established at the helm of Charles II's musical establishment, our picture of him once again clouds over. It is in the nature of seventeenth-century administrative documents that little or no trace is left of the Master of the Music's quotidian activities;Footnote ⁴⁶ instead, he tends only to emerge when crises arise,Footnote ⁴⁷ such as that involving the scheme advanced in July 1668 for a retrenchment of royal expenditure, which affected a number of the king's musiciansFootnote ⁴⁸ – among them the erstwhile French ensemble, which appears to have been disbanded at this time. This scheme, which officially went into effect at Michaelmas (29 September, a.k.a. the Feast of St Michael and All Angels, a date associated in medieval and early-modern administrative practice with the transition to a new fiscal year), seems to have specifically targeted those royal servants who received their pay directly out of the Chamber, that is, the funds allocated to the Royal Household.Footnote ⁴⁹ When the musicians belatedly discovered their plight, sometime around the end of 1668, they petitioned for a reprieveFootnote ⁵⁰ – which the indulgent king readily granted.Footnote ⁵¹ Grabu, whose salary was paid through the Exchequer, appears to have been a minor player in these events: he stood only to lose support for the training of two boys, but his name on the petition may have lent gravity to his colleagues’ more pressing cause.

The retrenchment crisis of 1668–9 actually masked a more significant issue. As the 1668 proposal methodically stipulated, individual payments to royal servants were to be made only ‘after all y^e Ordnary [sic] charge […] with interest & deduccõns’ had been satisfied: ‘those who haue Pencõns or Sallaries for present service’ were given third priority on that list (behind ‘those who had a hand in y^e Kings esape [sic] from Worcester’ and the Coldstream Guards), while retainers who had provided ‘Past service’ came fifth, following ‘those who haue Grants on valuable consideracõn’ and immediately preceding ‘Grants on meere Grace’.Footnote ⁵² Thus, as the musicians were quick to point out in their petition, individuals released from royal service not only lost their future livelihood, but were unlikely to collect any back pay that they might still be owed. This was a serious worry, given the perpetual lateness of salary payments throughout Charles II's reign, a state of affairs that sometimes allowed arrears to accumulate for years at a time. Although scholars of the Restoration court constantly cite this phenomenon, much more detailed study is still needed in order to illuminate the nature and specific features of the problem. Even so, an examination of the situation as it relates specifically to Louis Grabu's circumstances can help us to see the issue more clearly. The disjointed nature of Grabu's appointment process, as described earlier, may explain some of the anomalous features of his early finances: his first year's salary (26 March 1666–25 March 1667) remained unpaid for over four and a half years, even as later salary disbursements went forward, and official calculations of his arrears recorded in April 1668 and June 1669 figured only seven quarters’ worth of outstanding back pay (i.e., dating only from June 1666, the time of the earliest order for his swearing-in) instead of the expected eight.Footnote ⁵³ Whatever their source, these discrepancies do seem to have been corrected over time, since Grabu was ultimately paid in full for his first four quarters of service, but only after substantial delays and considerable efforts on his part. He seems to have submitted his first request for arrears in October 1667, which was deferred for consideration, along with several others, until ‘a week after Christmas’,Footnote ⁵⁴ and was not actually revisited until the end of January 1668, when the Treasury Commissioners promised to consider it ‘when there is money’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the royal establishment as a whole was already caught up in a general fiscal squeeze, and the intervening retrenchment scare meant further delays, even for those who, like Grabu, managed to weather it successfully. Having petitioned again for his first year's salary in the autumn of 1669, Grabu received the discouraging news that ‘My Lords can pay no arrears’,Footnote ⁵⁶ and was left to initiate a further round of importunities to the Treasury a year later.Footnote ⁵⁷ Finally, in October 1671, mid-way through his sixth year as Master of the Music, Grabu was belatedly compensated for his first year in the position.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the meantime, while subsequent disbursements came more quickly, they too required considerable effort to obtain from Charles II's cash-strapped administration. The climb-down in early 1669 on the retrenchment scheme, while it promised to preserve the musicians’ places in the royal establishment, offered no guarantee of actual money in recompense for their attendance, and the remuneration for Grabu's second year of service (26 March 1667–25 March 1668) suffered its own set of delays and, one imagines, frustrations. In the latter part of April 1668 the Treasury issued a flurry of warrants for many of the royal servants, listing arrears alongside the annual salaries that had recently come due; this was followed by an order in early July authorizing payment for the newly accrued salaries, though (as we have seen) not the arrears.Footnote ⁵⁹ The administration's surprisingly rapid movement on this issue seems to have been the result of an earlier promise from the king to alleviate what had developed into a critical situation for many of his servants: in an undated petition, probably from the late winter or early spring of 1667, the king's musicians, ‘most […] being betwixt six and seaven yeares in Arreare of their Sallaries’, pleaded with their employer to ‘have one yeares Sallary of their Areares forthwith payd them, for and towards the Releife of their pressing necessities’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The desperation of this request, from a group of needy but loyal retainers who had ‘all this Winter given their constant attendance morning and evening on this present Maske’,Footnote ⁶¹ must have moved Charles, who undertook to pay the requested year's worth of salary as promptly as possible.Footnote ⁶² Grabu, who had yet to complete his first year of service at the time of this group petition, was probably not a party to it, but by mid-1668, with the king's pledged punctuality still not forthcoming, he too would have been in fairly serious financial straits. Thus, the warrant and order of April and July 1668 looked like good news, despite coming more than a year after the other musicians’ initial request. But the decision to draw the payment from the receipts of the farm of the Hearth Tax led to further delays, as the planned revenue from this source had signally failed to materialize,Footnote ⁶³ and individual warrants for actual payment only began to appear the following summer, after another year of waiting. Grabu's warrant, dated 9 June 1669,Footnote ⁶⁴ was one of the first, but was placed in abeyance in July when it was found to be ‘out of course, for my Lords ought first to have been acquainted with it’.Footnote ⁶⁵ An inquiry was launched ‘as to what secretary passed it’, and Grabu had to demonstrate the legitimacy of his claimFootnote ⁶⁶ before he was finally able to receive the funds, paid out in two instalments on 1 September and 11 October 1669,Footnote ⁶⁷ by which time over a year and a half had elapsed since the conclusion of his second year in the royal musical establishment, three and a half – with not so much as a penny paid on his salary during that time – since his initial appointment as Master of the Music.Footnote ⁶⁸

Ensuing salary payments appear to have been less fraught with difficulty, although the characteristic delays continued. That for Grabu's third year (26 March 1668–25 March 1669) was disbursed on 27 July 1670, seemingly without major exertions and a mere 16 months behind schedule,Footnote ⁶⁹ while the following year's salary (26 March 1669–25 March 1670) was warranted in record time, on 18 July 1670, with the treasury order issued nine days later on the 27th, the same day Grabu collected his previous year's payment.Footnote ⁷⁰ Unfortunately, this did not mean that the money was actually forthcoming, since the Treasury had recently issued a warrant limiting all outstanding salary payments to a maximum of one year's-worth per person,Footnote ⁷¹ and Grabu was among a large number of royal servants subjected to what was effectively a forced loan to Charles II's government. The terms of the loan did, however, promise interest payments of six per cent annually,Footnote ⁷² and Grabu was able to collect £6 on his £200 salary at six-month intervals for nearly a year and a half while he waited for the principal to be ‘returned’ to him,Footnote ⁷³ which was finally accomplished in combination with his last interest instalment on 24 January 1672.Footnote ⁷⁴ In one respect Grabu was fortunate: according to the original warrant his fourth-year's salary was assigned on the receipts of the Fee Farm Rents (proceeds from the sale of crown lands), which had been exempted from the Stop of the Exchequer, the royal bankruptcy announced at the beginning of January 1672 that was to continue through the end of the year. Given that his 1666–7 salary had at long last been paid just three months earlier, Grabu, having now received all of his arrears up to Lady Day 1670, and with the royal administration only a year and ten months behind on its current debt to him, could finally imagine his personal finances to be established on a solid footing. Indeed, things may have been going relatively smoothly for the Master of the Music, for from January 1672 to September 1673 he drops almost entirely out of sight in the administrative records.

Even so, the accumulation of unpaid arrears must have taken its toll. Having received his annual livery payment of £16 2s 6d for 1668 nearly on time, but with little hope of collecting those for the previous two yearsFootnote ⁷⁵ and with his 1669 livery also remaining unpaid, Grabu appears to have joined a group of other musicians in borrowing money from two of their more well-off colleagues, the viol player and ‘repairer and tuner of organs’ John Hingeston and the violinist Humphrey Madge.Footnote ⁷⁶ On 10 October 1671, with the 1669 livery allotment now more than a year and ten months overdue, Grabu and several others assigned payment of the money to Madge, which the latter managed to obtain from the Great Wardrobe the following month.Footnote ⁷⁷ (Curiously, Grabu had already himself collected his 1670 livery payment nine months earlier on 4 February 1671, an astonishingly brief two months after it had come due.Footnote ⁷⁸) And on 11 March 1672 two incidental reimbursements to Grabu, dating back as far as three years, were finally ordered to be paid: £20 to cover his expenses for riding to Dover with Charles II in May and June 1670,Footnote ⁷⁹ and £117 4s 6d for costs related to the copying and arrangement of music for the king's ensembles over a period of ten months in 1668 and 1669.Footnote ⁸⁰ Fourteen and a half months later, however, with these reimbursements still outstanding, Grabu assigned the total sum of £137 4s 6d to the London mercer Walter Lapp.Footnote ⁸¹ The nature of the two men's relationship is not entirely clear; Lapp, who is described in one contemporary account as being ‘of a tenacious and difficult humour’,Footnote ⁸² was a well established figure in London commercial circlesFootnote ⁸³ and may have lent money as part of his business activities, although no other court servants seem to have borrowed from him. Grabu, however, must have relied fairly heavily on Lapp for funding: a second document, dated 4 April 1674, assigned to Lapp ‘all sums due’ to Grabu,Footnote ⁸⁴ which, if the full contingent of arrears remaining unpaid as of that date are taken into account, would have amounted to an impressive £567 17s.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the event, Lapp seems to have suffered heavy losses on his investment, possibly receiving no more than £32 5s for Grabu's 1671 and 1672 liveries, which appear to have been paid to him together at the end of December 1674.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, Grabu may have been strategic with the money due to him from the crown: prior to making his blanket assignment to Lapp, he managed to collect nine quarters’ worth of arrears over a span of slightly more than three months, the first payment warranted on 26 September 1673,Footnote ⁸⁷ and a second ordered on 29 DecemberFootnote ⁸⁸ and received by Grabu later that same week, on 3 January 1674.Footnote ⁸⁹

This rush of payment, representing an unusual £450 windfall to the Master of the Music, may indicate more than just aberrant good luck with the normally dispiriting operations of Charles II's inefficient fiscal machinery.Footnote ⁹⁰ Grabu's circumstances were changing in the autumn of 1673: the stipulations of the Test Act, passed by Parliament the preceding March, had already begun to have an effect at court in November when the Privy Council issued an order banning any ‘person who is a Roman Catholicke or reputed to be of y^e Roman Catholique Religion’ from ‘His Ma^ties Royall p^rsence or […] His Palace or […] y^e place where his court shalbe.’Footnote ⁹¹ Several of the less important members of the royal musical establishment appear already to have been dismissed by Midsummer 1673, with the king's trumpeters being particularly hard hit.Footnote ⁹² But their erstwhile Master must have been deemed more valuable, as he managed to hang on for some months thereafter and was evidently the beneficiary of some kind of special treatment, as the payments of late 1673 and early 1674 suggest.

The process by which Grabu was deprived of his court post is complicated, and has not been sufficiently understood, resulting in confusion about the date of (and, hence, the reason for) his displacement. Grabu had been a relative newcomer to the royal establishment in 1666 when he was elevated to Master of the Music, and the same can be said of his successor Nicholas Staggins in 1674: Staggins had held posts in the wind music and the violin band only since the latter part of 1670 (his father, Isaac, having served in both ensembles since the Restoration), and had just received his patent for the wind position in late 1673.Footnote ⁹³ Also like Grabu, Staggins amassed the formal accoutrements of the Mastership of the Music piecemeal: the actual date of his patent is unknown, but warrants to swear him as Master and granting him his salary are dated 29 January 1675, with the salary itself backdated to Michaelmas (29 September) 1674.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet Staggins's circumstance is different from Grabu's and slightly more complex, since he was directed to be sworn as ‘master of his Majesty's violins in ordinary’ on 10 August 1674, more than a month and a half before his salary even began to accumulate.Footnote ⁹⁵ Whereas Grabu's appointment to the Mastership had been occasioned by the death of his predecessor, Staggins's was the result of a politically dictated, and possibly unwelcome, personnel shuffle, with the added complication that Grabu's patent clearly stipulated a life tenure (though the provisions of the Test Act were designed to circumvent this problemFootnote ⁹⁶). At some point in the summer of 1674 Grabu must have agreed informally to withdraw his claim to the post, allowing Staggins to be sworn in almost immediately and his official appointment to go forward as of the next quarterFootnote ⁹⁷ – although (as we shall see) the ex-Master was careful to hold on to the physical patent itself, a decision that would prove beneficial to him in the years to come.

The traditional account of Grabu's loss of the Mastership of the Music – even when the obvious problem of his Catholicism is acknowledged – has focused on his supposed fall from favour, anecdotally attributed to his notorious incompetence, as testified by contemporary critics from Pelham Humfrey and John Banister in the 1660s to the detractors of Albion and Albanius 20 years later. But the documents tell a different story, of a court under pressure doing the best it could to retain Grabu's services, even as it was forced reluctantly to ease him out of his official post. The order (or, more properly, ‘note’) of 29 December 1673 is telling in this regard: referencing a certificate of the preceding 22 October, it records that Grabu is now owed £500 in salary arrears and ordains one year's worth (£200) to be paid forthwith ‘by vertue of his Maj^ts let[ter]s Pattents in y^t behalfe’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The £200 disbursement (released to Grabu, as we have seen, in record time on 3 January 1674) may seem like a small concession, given the £500 actually due at that moment, but, particularly coming on the heels of the additional £250 payment made over the three months preceding, it bespeaks a remarkable effort on the part of Charles II's administration to move as much of the money owed as possible out of the royal coffers and into Grabu's pocket while it was still able to do so. The summer of 1674 must have been an exceptionally uncertain time for Grabu, and it may even be that Staggins was beginning to take over some of the responsibilities of the position before he was officially named as Grabu's replacement. Some measure of the confusion occasioned by the unorthodox transition from one Master of Music to the other can be seen in the granting of Staggins's livery for the post. Grabu's name still appears in a 1674 document itemizing livery payments due to royal servants,Footnote ⁹⁹ but neither he nor Staggins is listed in the Wardrobe account of liveries for 1674–5 (which covered the November 1674 annual payment).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ On 3 November 1675, nearly 15 months after Staggins had first stepped into the position and nine months after his formal swearing-in as Grabu's replacement, the Clerk of the Great Wardrobe was at last ordered

The formal warrant (on parchment) was duly prepared, and was signed by the king on 10 December 1675.Footnote ¹⁰² But by this time, a month having elapsed since the original order for the document, there seems to have been a question about Staggins's retroactive right to the 1674 livery (which did fall within the period of his salaried employment), now that a second annual payment date of 30 November had passed.Footnote ¹⁰³ A clarification had to be issued,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ and, after another eight months, the two livery payments were authorized together, with both entered in the 1675–6 Wardrobe account.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

All of these legal and administrative machinations would, we might imagine, have been cold comfort to Grabu, who had lost not only his post as Master of the Music, along with the legal protections that his status as a court servant had afforded, but also his right to collect his arrears (which, by Michaelmas 1674, after which Staggins began receiving the salary, had once again risen to £450, covering the two and one-quarter years since Midsummer 1672). Yet the end of Grabu's official appointment in 1674, and the cessation of his income from this source, do not necessarily tell the whole story. As I have shown in detail elsewhere, during the latter months of his tenure as Master of the Music, Grabu appears also to have served as the director of the ephemeral ‘Royall Academy of Musick’, whose performance of Pierre Perrin and Robert Cambert's opera Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus premiered at the Drury Lane Theatre on 30 March 1674.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ His name crops up in nearly every document associated with the production, including an order of 27 March to deliver ‘unto Mons^r Grabu or to such as he shall appoynt such of the Scenes remayning in the Theatre at Whitehall as shalbe usefull for the french Opera at the Theatre in Bridges street’, and another order to return the scenes again at the end of the run on 27 April,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ as well as an entry recording the circumstances of a contract dispute between a group of French dancers and the managers of the King's Company that arose early in May.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ We cannot know whether the ‘Royall Academy of Musick’ provided Grabu with an extra infusion of cash, and in any case the ill-fated opera company does not appear to have survived very long after these events. Yet despite the fact that Grabu's activities become much harder to trace at this point, scraps of evidence suggest that he may have maintained some sort of connection with the royal court, and hence that neither his financial condition nor his relationship with Staggins may have been altogether as fraught as the circumstances might at first suggest. Although no records survive of any further grants of income to Grabu, it may be noteworthy that several other French musicians – including the singer Claude des Granges and the wind players Jacques Paisible and François Mariens – received ongoing covert salary payments throughout the remainder of Charles II's reign, in spite of the strictures of the Test Act.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Moreover, on 17 January 1677, the Lord Chamberlain ordered 12 of the royal violinists to ‘attend to practise Monsr Grabues Musick’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and it is even possible that Grabu was available to assist unofficially in his former capacity during Staggins's prolonged absence abroad between spring 1676 and June 1678.Footnote ¹¹¹

These proposals must, of course, remain speculative; apart from the spate of documents surrounding the production of Ariane by the Royall Academy (in which Grabu, we should note, seems quite comfortably settled in his altered circumstances), his only appearances in the documentary record during this time concern the ongoing attempts of Walter Lapp to obtain satisfaction for his debt and Grabu's corollary efforts to collect arrears from the crown. As we have seen, Grabu's initial assignment of £137 4s 6d in incidental reimbursements to Lapp in May 1673 was supplemented by the more sweeping grant of ‘all sums due’ ten and a half months later, on 4 April 1674.Footnote ¹¹² We have also observed how Grabu seems to have been careful first to solidify his own financial position, by waiting until the previous £450 in arrears, dating back to Lady Day 1670, had been disbursed before allocating the more uncertain subsequent payments to his creditor. It may be significant that Grabu's second and larger assignment to Lapp was made in the middle of the run of Ariane at Drury Lane: the successful opening of the opera may have emboldened the former Master of the Music to hope that his still-growing arrears might ultimately be paid out, or at least that royal favour would protect him if they were not.Footnote ¹¹³ Grabu's large debt to Lapp, or at least the part assigned in 1674, may even have had something to do with the activities of the Royall Academy of Musick itself. Lapp was, after all, a mercer by trade, who at some point in the 12-month period ending at Michaelmas 1674 had supplied the Great Wardrobe with ‘24 wreathes for the King's musicians in the theatre at Whitehall’,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and the money Grabu owed Lapp was later described as being ‘for satisfaction of some goods he had of him’,Footnote ¹¹⁵ rather than for repayment of a loan of cash (which, atypically, Grabu probably did not need at this particular moment in his career). The Ariane production, unlike the more forthrightly court-sponsored masque Calisto of the following year, has left only minimal traces in official records, and it may have fallen to Grabu, as the supposed director of the new company, to make the necessary arrangements for the show by seeking credit on his own recognizance. Thus, the ‘goods he had of’ the mercer Lapp – at substantial cost, we should note – might have been for costumes or other necessaries for the opera (in contrast to the more technically sophisticated scenery, which was borrowed directly from WhitehallFootnote ¹¹⁶). The success of the venture – performances appear to have continued well beyond the two-week period originally anticipated – could then have caused Lapp to seek payment of his bill. We know from the report of the Florentine ambassador Giovanni Salvetti that the Academy's performances were ultimately curtailed as a result of the ‘tragic accident’ of Wednesday, 22 April 1674 whereby ‘the leader of the French troupe, who had been made prisoner for debt, was forcibly liberated by his fellows from the hands of the justice, two of whose officers were wounded.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ Could Salvetti's ‘leader of the French troupe’ (‘il maestro di questa Truppa francese’) have been Grabu himself, called to account by Lapp, who had grown tired of waiting for his money?Footnote ¹¹⁸

Whatever the circumstances, the debt remained for the most part unsatisfied. Lapp may have been able to collect Grabu's 1671 and 1672 livery payments at the end of 1674, as already noted, but otherwise both men disappear from the records for over a year and a half before the frustrated mercer revived his efforts in early 1676, petitioning the Treasury for payment of the money due him. The petition was read on 18 January, with the Lord Treasurer Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby, requesting further details regarding Lapp's claim,Footnote ¹¹⁹ and a decision was rendered on 23 March granting Lapp one year's worth of Grabu's unpaid salary.Footnote ¹²⁰ This was technically all that could be offered, given that a new, 15-month retrenchment scheme had been imposed as of the beginning of 1676, which mandated that the Treasury ‘for and during the time of suspension […] pay no more than […] one moiety of the fees, salaries and pensions to all or any the persons to whom the same shall grow due by virtue of his Majesty's several grants thereof’.Footnote ¹²¹ The terms of the retrenchment did, however, promise that royal servants owed more than a single year's payment ‘shall have a good right to and may clayme the same as formerly immediately from and after the expiration of this order’,Footnote ¹²² and thus, in June 1676, two and a half months after the £200 grant to Lapp, Grabu was himself issued a warrant for payment of the remaining five quarters of his arrears, the money to be collected in or after April 1677.Footnote ¹²³ Lapp responded in September by petitioning to receive this £250 as well (thus claiming more, in fact, than he was owed by the terms of Grabu's 1674 assignment to him), but the Lord Treasurer laconically counselled ‘patience’,Footnote ¹²⁴ given that Grabu's warrant was in any case not about to be honoured. In the interim, Grabu appears to have collected his 1673 livery in October,Footnote ¹²⁵ following an audit of his livery warrant conducted the previous spring by Brook Bridges, Auditor of the Imprest of the TreasuryFootnote ¹²⁶ – this despite the money supposedly being encompassed by his earlier pledge of ‘all sums’ to Lapp.Footnote ¹²⁷

Whether or to what extent Lapp continued to hound Grabu is not known, but the impasse on payment of his arrears must have finally broken the musician's resolve. In the spring of 1677, the 15-month retrenchment having recently expired, Grabu appears to have received a verbal promise from the king to address the issue if the musician would submit a full accounting of the money owed him. His subsequent petition, which accompanied the requested tabulation, betrays a sense of desperation. Noting that ‘yo^r pet^r being servant to yo^r Ma^tie under the Greate Seale during life hath lately fallen under very greivous misfortune, the greatest of which hath beene yo^r Ma^ties willingness to receive another person into his place dureing pleasure’, Grabu humbly requested that Charles, ‘according to y^r Royal compassion to a poore servant, guilty of noe crime but misfortune, […] give Effectuall order for ye speedy paym^t of y^e said arrears […] and that all his sallary may run on till the said arrears be paid’.Footnote ¹²⁸ In return for this consideration, which Grabu described as essential ‘for the keeping him from arrests and y^e providing some subsistence for his distressed family’, and citing similar arrangements made with other dispossessed royal servants, he undertook, ‘though with much greife, [to] retire from being a meniall servant to yo^r Ma^ty’, that is, to resign his patent granting life tenure, thereby providing his successor Staggins with clear title to the position. The circumstances surrounding Grabu's petition deserve some scrutiny: though the continuing demands of Walter Lapp may have been a primary factor, it is noteworthy that Grabu, despite his assertions regarding his ‘very greivous misfortune’ and his need for ‘subsistence for his distressed family’, seems to have been in a position to get the king's attention, even if only for a few precious moments. Whether or not this encounter is related to the Lord Chamberlain's order of the previous January (1677) that 12 of the royal violinists ‘attend to practise Mons^r Grabues Musick’,Footnote ¹²⁹ it is evident that the ex-Master of the Music had some limited access to Charles II, the restraints of the Test Act notwithstanding. Moreover, Grabu's request ‘that in the meanwhile he may be maintained & supported as others are under all circumstances in the like case w^th him’ could be taken to refer to the ongoing special arrangement for certain other Catholic musicians noted earlier.Footnote ¹³⁰ Also telling is the vigorous administrative process triggered by the king's promise and Grabu's petition: though the dubious assurance of ‘the Growing benefitt’ of the Master's salary subsequent to Staggins's acquisition of the post appears to have been ignored,Footnote ¹³¹ the request for back pay received serious attention. On 5 May Sir Joseph Williamson, one of the Secretaries of State, referred it on the king's orders to the Lord Chamberlain,Footnote ¹³² who in turn requested, on the 14th, reports from four fiscal departments: the Treasurer of the Chamber; the Great Wardrobe; the Privy Purse; and the Auditor of the Exchequer.Footnote ¹³³ Having obtained relevant particulars from three of these departments, the Lord Chamberlain reported back to the king on 5 June, certifying that Grabu was owed a total of £627 9s 6d Footnote ¹³⁴ and adding that ‘I find his Condition to be very poore and Miserable, all which I humbly submitt to Your Majesty's wisdome.’Footnote ¹³⁵ Two weeks later the king responded, declaring ‘his intention […] that the petitioner be paid his arrears due till his places were otherwise disposed of’, and Secretary Williamson forwarded the order to Lord Treasurer Danby for payment.Footnote ¹³⁶ Thus, despite having agreed to relinquish his patent, the only document that might provide him some hope of legal recourse in the future, Grabu seemed at last to have navigated his way successfully through the slough of Restoration administrative inertia, and financial solvency appeared to be just around the corner.

Unfortunately for Grabu, however, his ever-vigilant creditor had gotten wind of these developments. Two days after the Lord Chamberlain submitted his report to the king, the indefatigable Lapp pounced, petitioning the Lord Treasurer for consideration, whereupon Danby, as yet not in the loop regarding Grabu's request, appears to have consulted privately with Sir George Wakeman, an associate of Secretary of State Williamson.Footnote ¹³⁷ Lapp's claim was, of course, a legitimate one, and his intervention seems to have stopped the payment process in its tracks. In response, the disappointed musician apparently sought to outmanoeuvre his opponent by entering a caveat revoking the assignment to Lapp of April 1674. This counter-move was only partially effective: with Lapp in possession not only of the original letter of assignment (a legal document, signed by witnesses), but also of the order for payment of £200 of 23 March 1676, Grabu lacked the documentation necessary to collect the money himself, and a legal stalemate ensued. On 14 December 1677 Grabu was summoned to explain his caveat to the Lord Treasurer,Footnote ¹³⁸ and on the 19th both parties were called in, accompanied by their respective attorneys, to clear up the matter.Footnote ¹³⁹ In the hearing that ensued, Grabu ‘Confest by his Councell that he had made a letter of atturny to M^r Lapp to Receive an order for mony due out of the Excheq^r for sattisfaction of some goods he had of him, but that being under some former obligations to trustees at marriage he thought fitt to revoke it, and soe he had.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Lapp, represented by the recently knighted Sir George Jeffreys (future Chief Justice of the King's Bench and Lord Chancellor), sought deferral of the payment ‘till they were Agreed’, and Danby effectively ratified this request by noting that neither party possessed documentation sufficient to claim the money. With this ambivalent determination, the records regarding the dispute cease, and we have no further information about how the issue may have been resolved, although it appears that Lapp never did receive satisfaction, given that both the £450 in salary arrears and the long-overdue 1666 and 1667 livery allowances would ultimately be paid to Grabu following the accession of James II in 1685.

Grabu's disappearance from official records after the end of 1677 has tended to be viewed as the penultimate stage in the musician's long decline, a process that began in early 1674 with his displacement as Master of the Music and that can be glimpsed in Grabu's petition and the Lord Chamberlain's characterization of him as ‘very poore and Miserable’ some three years later. In this rather sensationalized depiction, the wretched musician, cast off by his royal master, mercilessly pursued by his creditors, and desperately searching for a way to feed his wife and children (the youngest of whom could not have been more than ten years old, and may have been considerably younger), is the epitome of misfortune – meriting sympathy, of course, but also potentially eliciting scorn, given his supposedly well-attested incompetence. The lurid pleasures of the imagination, however, cannot displace the quite different picture offered by a thorough consideration of the factual record, slim though it may be. As we have seen, the events of 1674, to whatever extent they may have forced an unwelcome change of circumstance on both the musician and his employers, by no means constituted a career-ending calamity. Grabu's musical activities during the three and a half years after the closing of Ariane remain, for the most part, shrouded in obscurity. But the want of evidence – and particularly of any surviving compositions – may itself serve as an indicator of his continued success as an organizer, fixer, director and copyist, tasks that are no more or less in evidence post-1674 than they are for the eight-and-a-half-year period of his Mastership. Furthermore, as we have observed, the lack of any record of a continuing income for Grabu after Michaelmas 1674 does not automatically imply his utter destitution in the years that followed, despite the absence of any documentation comparable with that available for his French colleagues des Granges, Paisible and Mariens, noted earlier. The only thing we know for certain about Grabu's financial condition in mid-1677 is that a large sum of arrears, dating back as much as five years, had not been paid to him.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But these funds were in any case encumbered, long since promised to Walter Lapp, and seemingly also to the unnamed trustees of Grabu's 1665 marriage settlement with Catherine de Loes. Thus, at least through the beginning of 1678, there is no reason to imagine anything other than continuity in Grabu's musical activities, whatever the necessarily selective documentary record might seem to imply.

Indeed, if we seek a watershed moment in Grabu's career as a musician, it is almost certainly not 1674–5, when the modifications to his duties, however involuntarily imposed, seem to have been relatively minor, but rather 1677–8. It is at this point, with a rapidly deteriorating political climate and altered priorities at court, that whatever informal connections Grabu had with Charles II's musical establishment finally became untenable. As early as the spring of 1677 he may have begun to see his position eroded by the rise to favour of Jacques Paisible, which could have occasioned the petition for his arrears as Master of the Music already discussed, as well as offering some rationale for the Lord Chamberlain's comments regarding his less-than-ideal financial and personal circumstances. By the beginning of 1678, the three ‘salaried’ foreigners des Granges, Paisible and Mariens appear to have been joined by two new French musicians, the singers Jacques Arnould and Louis Brunot,Footnote ¹⁴² and by June of that year at the latest Staggins himself had returned to England and, according to one account, been ‘constituted […] lord paramount over all the musick’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Staggins's ‘great credit’ with the king, who reportedly invested him with ‘absolute power’ to ‘raigne […] like Great Turke and cutt whose catts-gutts hee please if the harmony bee not to his liking’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ must have signalled to his discarded predecessor that it was, after all, time to move on. In light of this, it is surely significant that 1678 is the year in which Grabu suddenly emerges as a professional composer-for-hire, an occupation he would continue to pursue for much of the remainder of his life.

This last development is a significant one: whereas Grabu's appearances in administrative documents of the period 1665–77 allow us to piece together some picture, however rough, of his multi-phase career as a member of the royal musical establishment, the details of his compositional output during this time are much more uncertain. From the dozen or so years prior to 1678, only a small number of primarily dance tunes are known to survive. Three can be found as keyboard arrangements in a manuscript with Scottish connections dated 1671, although it is not certain precisely when these pieces, labelled ‘Aires by Munseiur [sic] Grabue’, were copied into the volume.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Another three are more easily datable, as they all came out in print between 1670 and 1672: one is a minuet entitled ‘La Monmouth’, which initially appeared (anonymously) in the inaugural edition of John Playford's instrumental tune collection Apollo's Banquet.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This tune was presumably associated with James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, Charles II's eldest illegitimate son, who is known to have performed in a number of balls and masques (the earliest of which occurred in 1662 when he was just 13 years old), and was regarded as one of the finest dancers at the Restoration court.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ ‘La Monmouth’ was also printed, along with a gavotte and a triple-time ayre (all, in this case, attributed to Grabu), in Thomas Greeting's flageolet tutor The Pleasant Companion, first published in 1672.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Beyond this, we have only reports, and ambiguous ones at that, of Grabu's possible compositional activities. On 1 October 1667 Samuel Pepys recorded hearing ‘an English song upon peace […] with which the King is presented this night by Monsieur Grebus, the master of his music’, and on 15 April the following year the diarist attended a ‘fiddling concert and heard a practice mighty good of Grebus’, but in neither case is Pepys's terminology sufficiently clear to establish whether Grabu was the composer or merely the director of the performance.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The phrase ‘a practice mighty good of Grebus’ does not necessarily imply that it was Grabu's own music being presented: at the October event, Pepys had admired the French-trained musician's improvements to the ensemble's performing discipline,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ and thus ‘mighty good’ may refer to the quality of the performance rather than to the excellence of the composition, which may not have been by Grabu at all. Two days after the ‘practice’ of 15 April 1668 Grabu was ordered to be paid £165 9s 6d ‘for fayre writeing seuerall dances, aires and other musick, and for draweing the said musick into seuerall parts’, as well as incidental expenses, covering a period of nearly 17 months from November 1666, the time of his swearing-in as Master of the Music, to Lady Day 1668Footnote ¹⁵¹ – a similar payment, already mentioned, was ordered in 1672 to cover April (the month of the ‘practice’ heard by Pepys), July, October and December 1668 and February 1669.Footnote ¹⁵² Again, however, the phrases ‘fayre writeing’ and ‘draweing […] into seuerall parts’ found in these documents are probably not references to composition, but rather to the creation of manuscript scores and parts for use by the royal musicians, with Grabu hiring and supervising an unspecified number of ‘prickers & writers’ to copy out music composed by others.Footnote ¹⁵³

Given the evidence of ‘La Monmouth’ and the other pieces, just mentioned, we know that Grabu must have been writing music during his time at court; if nothing else, Pelham Humfrey's disparaging remark in 1667 that Grabu ‘cannot compose’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ would seem to indicate at least some efforts in that direction. Moreover, we can presume that Grabu already possessed compositional skills when he arrived in England from his first appearance in the records as a ‘Composer in his Ma^ties Musique’, possibly for the king's French musical establishment;Footnote ¹⁵⁵ this premise is further supported by the fact that in later years he consistently composed in a French style, even when setting English texts.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Yet beyond these scant details, and Grabu's possible contributions to the refashioned French opera Ariane in 1674,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ we have little sense even of what kinds of music he might have been writing, let alone how much or under what circumstances.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Peter Holman is likely correct in concluding that Grabu's responsibilities after March 1666 were primarily as an organizer and director of Charles II's band of 24 violins (including the ‘Select Band’ prior to April 1668) and the court musical establishment generally. But Grabu's later history shows that he was more than competent as a composer, and he could have penned a fair amount of music even while carrying out his administrative and ‘clerical’ duties, whether as Master of the Music, or during his brief stint with the ‘Royall Academy of Musick’, or in the uncertain period that followed.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ There may be any number of reasons why we now have so little music by Grabu from the years before 1678,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ but in any case there can be no doubt that whatever he may have written during these dozen years, only a tiny remnant appears to have made its way into print and thus become available to a wider public.

II. Grabu in transition, 1678–83

In conjunction with the shift in Grabu's status during the latter half of 1677, the nature of the surviving evidence also undergoes a substantive change. Whereas the pre-1678 period offers a wealth of administrative documentation but virtually no extant musical output, the remainder of Grabu's career is a near-blank with regard to the musician's financial and supervisory activities, and must instead be traced primarily through his compositional work and the occasional public comment that it engendered. The best indicator of the former Master of the Music's new path is his sudden emergence in early 1678 as a composer for the public theatre. Within a relatively short time, Grabu produced music for a number of plays; of those we can identify, all but one are associated with the Duke of York's Company based at the Dorset Garden Theatre, and it is thus possible that he was retained as a ‘house composer’ for that company. Grabu's output included vocal music for Thomas Shadwell's Shakespearean adaptation The History of Timon of Athens (January 1678)Footnote ¹⁶¹ and for Thomas D'Urfey's comedy Squire Oldsapp (June 1678),Footnote ¹⁶² and a seven-movement instrumental suite for John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee's Oedipus (September 1678);Footnote ¹⁶³ as many as five other such suites, ranging in length from five to 12 movements, may also have been composed for unknown plays at this time.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Some of the Timon of Athens music even found its way into print not long after its appearance on the stage: ‘Hark, how the songsters of the grove’, the opening section of the Act 2 masque – the only sung episode in a play that John Downes described as ‘very well Acted, and the Musick in't well Perform'd; it wonderfully pleas'd the Court and City’Footnote ¹⁶⁵ – appeared in simplified form in the second book of John Playford's Choice Ayres & Songs, which was printed sometime in 1679, but had been registered with the Stationers’ Company on 8 April 1678.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Besides these compositions, Grabu wrote one song for a play that is associated with the rival King's Company: ‘One night while all the village slept’, from Act 4 of Nathaniel Lee's Mithridates, King of Pontus, believed to have appeared at the Drury Lane Theatre in February 1678. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is possible that Mithridates was originally written for performance by noble amateurs, and may have been presented at court in late 1677 or very early 1678, during the Christmas or Carnival season, only subsequently being picked up by the King's Company in an elaborated version revised by the playwright.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Assuming this hypothesis to be correct, it is still not entirely certain that Grabu's song, which is incidental to the play, was a part of the original, simpler court version. If such were the case, however, it might constitute evidence of a final contribution by Grabu of music for the Restoration court – which in turn could explain how one of his songs found its way into a Drury Lane play when the other identifiable theatre music Grabu was writing at this time is all connected with Dorset Garden.

All of the above-mentioned activity must have been gratifying for the musician, given the pressing need to reinvent himself following the evaporation of his court affiliation. Moreover, the appearance of some of his works in print had the added effect of situating Grabu among the mainstream of London's composers: when his music was published in contemporary vocal and instrumental collections, it kept company with pieces by the likes of Matthew Locke, John Banister, Pelham Humfrey, John Blow, Alphonso Marsh, James Hart, William Turner, Thomas Farmer, Robert King and even the young Henry Purcell – to say nothing of the lesser musical lights also represented in these volumes. Even after leaving England early in 1679 (see later in this article), Grabu would not be forgotten. In 1678, ‘The Third Edition Enlarged’ of Greeting's The Pleasant Companion had added a fourth instrumental tune by him, this one taken from one of the probable theatre suites just mentioned,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ and new editions of Greeting's compilation, always including the same four tunes, would continue to appear throughout the ensuing decade (in 1680, 1682, 1683 and, ultimately, 1688). The year 1679 saw the publication of another four of Grabu's tunes in John Hudgebut's A Vade Mecum For the Lovers of Musick, Shewing the Excellency of the Rechorder,Footnote ¹⁶⁹ and in 1681 the third book of Choice Ayres and Songs would print two more of Grabu's theatre songs from the 1678 productions: ‘Close in a hollow silent cave’ from Squire Oldsapp Footnote ¹⁷⁰ and ‘One night while all the village slept’ from Mithridates.Footnote ¹⁷¹

In particular, Mithridates, and with it Grabu's song, enjoyed something of an afterlife. The presumed 1677–8 court production already mentioned is believed to have featured the Duke of York's daughter Princess Anne in the lead male role of Ziphares, and the future Queen of Great Britain subsequently appeared in three performances of the play at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh in November 1681, this time as the heroine Semandra.Footnote ¹⁷²Mithridates seems to have been especially favoured by two queens consort, Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena, and it was popular with London audiences, being revived numerous times in the public theatres – in October 1681, February 1686, October and December 1704 and frequently thereafter – its final recorded performance occurring in December 1738.Footnote ¹⁷³ Grabu's strophic song, setting a three-stanza text by the minor court poet Sir Carr Scrope,Footnote ¹⁷⁴ may not have survived quite as long, particularly given that it is essentially a generic insert, performed in response to the despondent Ziphares's request to his page Ismenes to ‘Charm me with some sad Song into a slumber’ (p. 55). However, it may be significant that Grabu's setting constitutes the first item in Playford's 1681 Choice Ayres and Songs,Footnote ¹⁷⁵ and also that it appears to have had a brief run as a ballad tune. In the latter context, it was initially associated with an amplified, 12-stanza version of Scrope's poem,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ and subsequently employed for two other ballads under the title ‘Martellus’,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ based on the earlier ballad texts’ altered rendering of the pastoral name ‘Myrtillo’ from the song as originally performed in Mithridates. This roundabout logic, however, does not definitively prove that Grabu's melody was well known, given that in one broadside the ‘Martellus’ tune is listed among several options, including the popular ‘Hey boys, up go we’, and that both of the earlier ballads based on Scrope's text list the tune ‘Young Phaon’, composed by John Banister in 1677 for Charles Davenant's dramatick opera Circe, as an alternative. Indeed, Scrope's text presents a quite conventional example of the ‘double ballad-meter stanza’ (iambic A₄B₃A₄B₃C₄D₃C₄D₃, a structure also associated with the ‘common meter’ of psalmody), and could have been sung to any number of tunes once it left the playhouse. Grabu's tune, on the other hand, does not particularly lend itself to ballad singing, although Claude Simpson's characterization of it as ‘wretched’ and ‘scarcely singable’ seems unduly harsh.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Instead, as Amanda Eubanks Winkler has observed, the ‘restless and unpredictable’ setting is well suited to the theatrical context in which it appears:

For a composer ostensibly schooled in the refined French style and having only recently moved from the realm of court music into that of the theatre, Grabu in fact displays considerable sensitivity to the task at hand in this early foray into the new genre, and thus ‘One night while all the village slept’ may have merited the continued attention it received in the years after its composition.

As the end of the 1670s neared, therefore, Grabu's star seemed to be once again on the rise. Yet his newfound identity as a freelance London composer was to prove short-lived: as England's political climate became increasingly hostile, particularly following the commencement of the ‘Popish Plot’ uproar in the autumn of 1678, the unfortunate Catholic musician was obliged to discard his prospects. On 31 March 1679, just two days before his 14th wedding anniversary, he obtained a pass to travel to France ‘with his wife and three small children’, and probably left shortly thereafter.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ It is impossible to determine what kind of feelings Grabu may have harboured at having to abandon the country in which he had lived, married, and pursued his livelihood over such a considerable length of time, or whether the former Master of the Music to Charles II had any intention of one day returning to the English musical scene in some capacity, but he cannot have welcomed the abrupt termination of this new and potentially promising phase of his career, and with it the need, once again, to start over.

Little is known about the time Grabu spent in France following his decampment from England in the spring of 1679. He surely spent at least some of the next four years in Paris, which was the centre of French musical life, but no documentary records of his whereabouts or movements prior to April 1683 have come to light. However, a number of pieces found in contemporary French manuscripts, none of which appear in any of the pre-1679 English sources, seem to indicate that he continued to be active as a composer during this period. The most important source of information from this time is the set of partbooks compiled by the French royal musician Nicolas Dieupart, now Yale University, MS Filmer 33, which has been explored in detail by Robert Ford.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The titles of several works attributed to Grabu in Dieupart's manuscript betray signs of a French provenance, including ‘Entrée De Nimphes du S^r Grabü 1681’, ‘Jeunes Cruelles’, ‘Amans’ and ‘Ouverture de M^r Grabü 1681’ (see Appendix 1).Footnote ¹⁸² One tune, entitled ‘Simphonye’, would later appear in Grabu's French Pastoralle, published in London in 1684 (see later in this article); as Ford observes, the fact that Dieupart added the further title ‘Vivons’ to his transcription of this short movement suggests that it was already associated with the Pastoralle around 1681,Footnote ¹⁸³ and thus could indicate that that entire work may have been composed during Grabu's French sojourn. This possibility would appear to be strengthened by the appearance of two excerpted vocal duets from the Pastoralle in another manuscript of apparently French origin.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Alongside the identifiably French pieces just noted, Dieupart's partbooks contain another 11 attested works by Grabu, plus as many as six others of less certain attribution. These are mostly generic dances, whose origin is therefore more difficult to pinpoint, but it stands to reason that at least some may also have been composed while Grabu was on the Continent. Not all are explicitly ascribed to him: only one is actually labelled ‘M^r Grabu’, but another ten would later turn up in what is probably the most important English collection of his music, the 1693 ‘Loudoun’ manuscript in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., which will be discussed at the end of this article.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Most of the pieces by Grabu in the Dieupart partbooks appear as single items or scattered groupings of instrumental movements, organized by key, that offer little information regarding the specific projects in which he was engaged.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Yet Dieupart's manuscript assembles the largest surviving quantity of Grabu's work up to this point in his career, and offers a view, however obscured, of the musician's connections at the French court and his activities in and around 1681, when, according to Robert Ford, he may have been involved in composing intermèdes, possibly for members of the aristocracy. Ford even goes so far as to provide some tantalizing, if highly tentative, speculations regarding Grabu's possible role in a week-long series of entertainments for Louis XIV at St Cloud in April 1681.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Whatever Grabu's circumstances after his arrival on the Continent, he would almost certainly have been concerned to seek some sort of appointment that might be commensurate with his former employment in England. To that end, when in the spring of 1683 the French court announced a competition for four sous-maître positions in the Chapelle du Roy, posts that required directing the ensemble and composing motets on a rotating quarterly basis, Grabu put his name forward. As was reported in the indispensible Mercure Galant, each of the 35 contestants in the initial round was obliged to present a motet before the king at Versailles, to be judged ‘par la beauté, & par la bonté de leur Musique’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ However, when 15 semi-finalists were selected, Grabu was not among them – although the Mercure was quick to assure its readers that ‘[c]e n'est pas que les autres n'ayent beaucoup de mérite; on ne leur auroit pas permis de faire chanter devant le Roy, si on ne leur en avoit crû’.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ In such a large field, Grabu's chances of success would not have been especially good, but this disappointment must have convinced him that his prospects in France were not as promising as he had initially hoped. Thus, it is not surprising that Thomas Betterton, encountering Grabu in Paris some four or five months later, found him ‘very willing and ready to go ouer’ to England in order to try his luck in his old haunts once again.Footnote ¹⁹⁰

III. Grabu as public musician, 1684–94

The final decade, roughly speaking, of Grabu's career – from his reappearance in London in the autumn of 1683 to his abrupt departure both from England and from the documentary record some 11 years later – presents two important features that have not thus far coincided: on the one hand a trail of archival evidence, however incomplete, substantiating his activities; on the other a surviving body of music, both instrumental and vocal, that is available for discussion and analysis. Most obviously, we are fortunate to have a good deal of information, both historical and textual, about the opera Albion and Albanius, which can thus provide an important window into the otherwise somewhat clouded vista of Grabu's accomplishments. Yet while Albion and Albanius certainly represents the most prominent component of Grabu's second English residency – and is by far the most extensive and ambitious of all his compositions – there is much else that can be said about his activities during this time. Hence, my aim in the present study is not to undertake a detailed examination of Grabu's and Dryden's monumental work, but rather to fill out the larger picture of Grabu's biography, so as better to elucidate his own particular relationship to the Albion and Albanius production, and how it fit into his efforts to revive his status as a leading London musician.

The circumstances under which Grabu returned to England sometime in the autumn of 1683 are uncommonly well documented, and have been frequently discussed. With Charles II having by this time solidified both his political ascendancy and (albeit to a lesser extent) his financial solvency, the revival of operatic projects at court was an obvious next step. Nicholas Staggins and John Blow, having jointly assumed one of the two court posts of Composer for the Violins as of Midsummer 1682,Footnote ¹⁹¹ submitted their petition proposing the erection of ‘an […] Academy or Opera of Musick’ in late March or early April 1683,Footnote ¹⁹² and Blow's all-sung Venus and Adonis may have been performed at court around this time.Footnote ¹⁹³ But this diminutive ‘masque’, which in the event seems to have spawned only a single progeny in Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, did not offer a blueprint for the revival of large-scale court opera on the model established in the 1670s, first in Paris and subsequently in London – a project in which the now absent Grabu had been a central figure. While there is no doubt that Venus and Adonis represented an important generic innovation, in 1683 Charles II appears to have set his sights on grander plans. On 20/30 July Louis XIV's queen, Marie-Thérèse, died, and as the obligatory period of official mourning set in, the English court sensed an opportunity.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ By mid-August it was reported in a contemporary newsletter that ‘The Managers of y^e Kings Theater intend w^thin Short time to p[er]forme an Opera in like manner of y^t of ffrance’ and that the United Company's leading actor and impresario Thomas Betterton ‘w^th other Acto^rs are gone ov^r to fetch y^t designe’.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Within a day of the newsletter's report, Betterton had met with the English king's Envoy Extraordinary in Paris, Richard Graham, 1st Viscount Preston, to whom he personally delivered a letter from the Secretary of State, Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland, conveying ‘his Majestyes Comands […] to assist him in treating with some Persons capable of representing an Opera in England’.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ The Ambassador's assistance notwithstanding, Betterton's efforts seem to have met with little success; it was not until nearly a month later that Viscount Preston again corresponded on the subject. By this time, Preston reported, the original plan had come to be regarded as ‘impracticable’, but a new opportunity had presented itself in the person of Grabu, who must have been seeking greener pastures in the wake of his elimination from the competition for preferment in Louis XIV's chapel royal. Preston's letter, which is addressed not to Sunderland but to the Duke of York himself, gives us a sense of the scope of the negotiations with Grabu – the relevant passage merits quoting in full:

Several important facts emerge from Preston's remarkably detailed account. First, Grabu is here once again presented as an unfortunate. Though perhaps not as ‘poore and Miserable’ as he had appeared to Lord Chamberlain Arlington back in London in June 1677, this ‘poor servant of his Majestyes’ is nonetheless worthy of ‘Charity’ in the eyes of the English Ambassador, particularly given the ‘mis fortune’ by which he had been ‘obliged’ to relocate to France some four and a half years previously. Grabu's reported readiness to return to London may have arisen in part from his continuing disappointments in the French musical world, but it must also have been influenced by Betterton's tempting offer of ‘a Pension from y^e House’, that is, a salaried post as a composer for the United Company, which would potentially be at least as lucrative as the work for the former Duke's Company in which Grabu appears to have been engaged during 1678–9, and which incidentally reveals something of the esteem in which Grabu was still held in England. On the other hand, Grabu appears to have harboured some doubts, including unpleasant memories of the Popish Plot scare and a justifiable scepticism about the dependability of English employers – we should recall that he was still at this time in possession of his formal patent granting life tenure of the long-abandoned Mastership of Charles II's Music, and was still owed nearly £500 in arrears. Thus, it is understandable that he would have sought to hedge his bets, seeking ‘his Majestyes protection […] whilst he is in England’, presumably both from religious discrimination and against the importunities of creditors, including his old nemesis Walter Lapp. Yet at the same time Grabu judiciously avoided any overt claim to what was, in point of fact, rightfully his, instead modestly requesting only ‘what encouragement his Majestye shall be pleased to giue him if he finds y^t he deserues it’. Betterton's offer of employment, then, was only part of the deal Grabu sought to negotiate, and it seems likely that his request for royal countenance and protection was conveyed personally in conversation with Ambassador Preston, whose ability to write directly to the Duke of York requesting that he ‘speake a good word […] to y^e King’ must have been crucial.

Grabu's return to London, although most proximately a consequence of the Restoration court's desire to have ‘something at least like an Opera’ to mark Charles II's recently attained political ascendancy, was ultimately about more than just the well-known production of Albion and Albanius. Betterton seems to have been as good as his word, and during 1684, while Albion was still in preparation, Grabu was already turning out music for other stage works. These included the late Earl of Rochester's Valentinian (premiered at court on Shrove Monday, 11 February), for which Grabu provided two songs, as well as instrumental music for a pair of dramatically important scenes;Footnote ¹⁹⁸ and an 11-movement suite for Thomas Southerne's The Disappointment, which opened at Drury Lane sometime in April.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In addition, two songs employing instrumental tunes by Grabu were published at around this time. One, a minuet by Grabu that appears in a contemporary manuscriptFootnote ²⁰⁰ was adapted into a patriotic drinking song beginning ‘All loyal hearts, take off your brimmers’, published in Thomas D'Urfey's Choice New Songs of 1684.Footnote ²⁰¹ It is unlikely that Grabu had any involvement in this adaptation, since D'Urfey was a master of the ‘mock-song’, and explicitly described his creation in this case as being ‘Set to an excellent Minuet of Monsieur Grabue's’. The other case is more complicated: the Valentinian music printed in Grabu's Pastoralle in 1684 (see later in this article) includes a two-part gavotte-like instrumental piece that immediately follows the duet ‘Injurious charmer of my vanquished heart’.Footnote ²⁰² The purpose of this untitled piece is not clear: it could have been used in the same scene as ‘Injurious charmer’, where some instrumental background music would be appropriate to the on-stage action. Later that same year, however, the tune reappeared in the first book of Henry Playford's The Theater of Music as a song with the text ‘When Lucinda's blooming beauty / Did the wond'ring town surprise’.Footnote ²⁰³ It is not possible to ascertain in which context the tune was first employed, nor indeed whether Grabu himself was responsible for the marriage of words and music in this case: the text consists of a conventional ABAB stanzaic structure in trochaic tetrameter, and thus could have been matched to the tune by the publisher Playford on his own: it may be noteworthy that Playford's rival Charles Corbet had printed the same (anonymous) text with an entirely different tune at about the same time.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Either way, given Grabu's association with the United Company, we cannot exclude the possibility that ‘When Lucinda's blooming beauty’, with its somewhat more adorned setting of the simple instrumental tune found among the Valentinian music, might have been deployed in this incarnation in some unidentified play.

The most extravagant of Grabu's compositional efforts to appear in 1684 was his Pastoralle, a semi-dramatic French pastoral for two solo singers, four-part chorus, five-part strings (including a concertino group who play three-part ritornelli) and continuo, the text of which begins with the quatrain ‘Si tu scauois Jeune bergere / combien deux amants sontheureux / quand Ils bailent de mesmes feux / tu ne Serois pas si Seuere’.Footnote ²⁰⁵ This work appeared in a handsomely engraved folio edition dedicated to Charles II's mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, and was offered for sale by several London booksellers, as two advertisements printed in the London Gazette in the summer of 1684 attest.Footnote ²⁰⁶ No printer or publisher is listed on the print itself, but the 28-sheet volume (the music pages are double-sided) might be associated with the work of the London music engraver Thomas Cross, Junior, who would later make a name for himself as a seller of cheaply produced single songsheets.Footnote ²⁰⁷

Besides the actual pastoral, which incorporates an overture as well as several dance movements clustered together both at the beginning of the work and immediately preceding the final chorus, this high-end publication also includes Grabu's vocal and incidental music for Valentinian, as Peter Holman has convincingly demonstrated.Footnote ²⁰⁸ The volume is a curious amalgam: the engraved title page (which carries no imprint) is in English, and announces the composer as ‘Lewis Grabue Gentleman, late Master of his Majesties Musick’; yet aside from this page and the words of the two songs from Valentinian, all other text is in French, including not only the dedication (which infelicitously misspells the Duchess's style as ‘Porstmouth’) and the pastoral itself, but the titles of Valentinian's instrumental movements as well.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Throughout the print, even in the English songs, the continuo line is labelled ‘Basse continue’. The engraving is legible and attractive, with few errors, and the volume has the appearance of a presentation piece, offered to potential patrons – including the public at large, but particularly with an eye to a court interested in French operatic-style entertainments – as a formal exercise calculated to demonstrate Grabu's suitability for new musical-theatrical projects.Footnote ²¹⁰ As we have already observed, the print's eponymous pastoral was probably not a new composition in 1684, having most likely originated no later than about 1681.Footnote ²¹¹ Indeed, its publication in London in the mid-1680s may not have been associated with any actual performance at all: Grabu's dedication to the Duchess of Portsmouth merely cites his patroness's ‘estime dont Il Vous a pleu m'honorer’ and the ‘generosite et l'assistance des muses qujme [sic] l'ont procure’ and, without mentioning a production of the work – which he surely would have done had one taken place – proceeds to express the hope that ‘dans cette Pastorale que Je prens la liberte de uous offrir, elles (i.e., the Muses) m'ont Inspire quelque chose qui puisse vous plaire’.Footnote ²¹² Whatever the circumstance, and despite the subsequent disappearance of all but a single copy of the print, the music appears to have garnered at least some attention: alongside the ritournelle copied in Nicolas Dieupart's partbooks and the two vocal extracts reproduced in another French manuscript (both noted earlier), three dance movements – two from the Pastoralle itself and one from Valentinian – can be found scattered through a set of manuscript partbooks compiled in London by the French-born musician and copyist Charles Babel in the early eighteenth century.Footnote ²¹³

It is noteworthy that the engraved – and technically ‘self-published’ – Pastoralle print was made available through a curious assortment of London booksellers, as indicated in the two advertisements posted in the London Gazette in June and July 1684, which respectively describe the work as ‘Sold by John Hudgbut in St. Pauls Church Yard, John Care [sic] near Temple Bar, and Mr. Nott at the King and Queens Arms in the Pall-Mall’ and ‘sold at the Dukes House by Rowling Gilbert’.Footnote ²¹⁴ John Hudgebut and John Carr were known music publishers: the latter often collaborated with John and Henry Playford, while the former, albeit less prolific, was responsible for the 1679 recorder collection A Vade Mecum, in which four tunes by Grabu had appeared.Footnote ²¹⁵ The other two publishers named in Grabu's advertisements, however, seem to be more unusual choices. William Nott, whose shop was located in an upscale neighbourhood in Westminster, at the entrance to St James's Square, did not normally deal in musical publications, but appears to have had a special relationship with Grabu: he would subsequently act as the primary promoter and selling agent for the composer's Albion and Albanius score in 1687 and his Collection of Several Simphonies and Airs in 1688 (both discussed later in this article).Footnote ²¹⁶ Even more puzzling is the mysterious ‘Rowling Gilbert’, who seems to have set up shop at the entrance to one or both of the United Company's theatre buildings: the second Pastoralle advertisement, which mentions Gilbert exclusively, directs potential customers to Dorset Garden (‘the Dukes House’), but he may also have been the unnamed individual who later sold copies of the Albion and Albanius score ‘at the Door of the Royal Theater’ (i.e., Drury Lane), as indicated in the imprint on that publication's 1687 title page.Footnote ²¹⁷ Together, Hudgebut, Carr, Nott and Gilbert form an unlikely group, but one that was perhaps designed to give Grabu's opus the widest possible circulation.

The publication of Pastoralle may not have represented the musician's only effort to promote his compositional talents in 1684: another advertisement, which appeared in the London Gazette the following November, announced that:

This extraordinary notice, which has hitherto received no attention from either musicologists or theatre historians, is striking in several ways. First, it describes what would have been a relatively novel combination of vocal and instrumental theatre music within a single volume, something along the lines of the mix of songs and incidental tunes for Valentinian included in Pastoralle – a phenomenon previously only seen in Matthew Locke's 1675 The English Opera, an (incomplete) amalgam of music from both Psyche and The Tempest that was, a decade later, still available for purchase at John Carr's shop in Fleet Street.Footnote ²¹⁹ Second, the print advertised in 1684 appears to be, apart from Grabu's Pastoralle and a pair of now-lost song collections associated with two unidentified gentlemen,Footnote ²²⁰ the only book-length engraved publication featuring vocal music to have been issued in England between Pietro Reggio's self-published Songs of 1680 and two 1687 music-seller compilations, John Clark's Quadratum Musicum and John Crouch's A Collection of the Choyest [sic] and Newest Songs.Footnote ²²¹ Finally, and most importantly, the advertisement lists the same odd combination of booksellers who were responsible for the sale of Pastoralle (including the shadowy Rowling/Rowland Gilbert, now apparently ensconced at Drury Lane). This fact alone seems to point to the possibility that Grabu was behind the creation of this print, no copy of which is known to be extant. Might this lost publication, offering ‘lovers of Musick’ a simple two-part scoring of recent theatrical songs and incidental pieces, have served as a kind of companion to Pastoralle, with its French intermède and music from the court-premiered Valentinian, this time in a smaller, more affordable format designed explicitly to expand the reach of Grabu's work from a courtly to a ‘citizen’ audience?Footnote ²²² What ‘newly performed’ music would have been available in 1684 is difficult to determine, however, particularly if, as in the case of Grabu's three attributable publications, this one consisted entirely of his own music. Apart from Valentinian and the suite for The Disappointment found in Thomas Fuller's post-1682 partbooks (Additional MS 29283–5), no other compositions by Grabu are known to have appeared in the theatres in 1684.

While the absence of other attested music from this time is certainly no evidence that none was composed, we must not discount the demands on Grabu's compositional time exerted by Albion and Albanius, on which the composer was probably hard at work by the middle of 1684.Footnote ²²³ Edward Saslow has argued that the opera's librettist John Dryden had most likely completed his text by April of that year,Footnote ²²⁴ and some sort of dry run of a portion of the piece seems to have been presented to Charles II by the end of May,Footnote ²²⁵ although we cannot be certain that this performance would have included all (or perhaps any) of the requisite music. In any case, Grabu's progress on the score would undoubtedly have been well advanced by late summer, when Dryden, writing from Northamptonshire, inquired of his publisher Jacob Tonson ‘whether the Dukes house are makeing cloaths & putting things in a readiness for the singing opera to be playd immediately after Michaelmasse’.Footnote ²²⁶ In the event, the answer to Dryden's question seems to have been negative, since no public performance of the opera occurred in the autumn of 1684. However, additional rehearsals of the work were conducted in Charles II's presence,Footnote ²²⁷ along the lines of those known to have been given for the court masque Calisto a decade earlier. Like the presentation the previous May, at least one of these later rehearsals was said to have taken place in the Duchess of Portsmouth's lodgings, further evidence of Grabu's likely connection with that important court figure.Footnote ²²⁸ The opera was finally almost ready to open at the beginning of January 1685, one correspondent reporting that although the rehearsals at court had engendered a positive response from the king and his circle, the United Company's decision to drastically increase ticket prices in order to recoup their £4000 investment in the production ‘will not take soe well’.Footnote ²²⁹ But before the premiere could take place, Charles II died on 6 February, necessitating both the postponement of all theatrical activity during the period of mourning and a revision of the opera's conclusion so as to take this momentous turn of events into account. Although Dryden shrugged off the added labour as no more than ‘the addition of twenty or thirty lines, in the Apotheosis of Albion’,Footnote ²³⁰ Grabu would have had to expend rather more effort, most likely composing from scratch an extended passage consisting of a ritornel, a lengthy recitative for three gods and the imitative solo/chorus ‘O Thou! Who mount'st th’ Æthereal Throne’, little if any of which would have allowed him to recycle any already written tunes (even if we assume that such a thing would have been permitted in the case of this artistically and politically crucial royal opera).

James II was crowned 11 weeks after Charles II's death, on 23 April 1685 (St George's Day, which fell the Thursday after Easter), and the playhouses reopened the following Monday, the 27th. Footnote ²³¹Albion, however, appears to have been held over for a more politically auspicious moment: the meeting of parliament – for the first time in over four years – which began on 19 May. Two weeks into the parliamentary session, with that body's loyalty to the new king firmly established, the opera finally opened at Dorset Garden on 3 June (the Wednesday before Pentecost). The king and queen and the maids of honour attended the performance, paying a nearly unprecedented £30 for two boxes,Footnote ²³² and were presumably supplied with copies of Dryden's folio printed libretto, which (also exceptionally) was ready for sale at the premiere.Footnote ²³³ Performances of the opera seem to have continued into the following week,Footnote ²³⁴ and, as we shall see, Grabu quickly moved ahead with plans for a lavish printed edition of his score. At the same time, the leading actors of the United Company, who would not have been able to participate in the all-sung Albion, appear to have put on alternating or competing performances of an unidentified play at Drury Lane: at one of these performances, on Wednesday, 10 June, a fight broke out over the actress Elizabeth Barry, and one of the combatants was killed.Footnote ²³⁵ This play may have had a satirical element: a contemporary attack on Albion and Albanius refers to the actors ‘Smith, Nokes, and Leigh in a Feaver with railing’ against the opera's creative team, suggesting some sort of ad libitum performance or a jointly delivered prologue or epilogue that does not survive.Footnote ²³⁶ The United Company's non-singing actors were no doubt justified in their concern: the opera represented a massive investment of company resources, and its promoters must have been counting on a substantial run that would enable them to recover their £4000 outlay, an amount that constituted fully half of the company's annual ‘house charges’ in this period.Footnote ²³⁷ Unfortunately for Albion's producers, larger political events intervened: according to John Downes's later account, the opera was performed only six times before news reached London, on Saturday, 13 June, of the Duke of Monmouth's invasion in the west of England two days earlier, whereupon the production came to a premature end, resulting in a major financial loss for the company as a whole.Footnote ²³⁸

Downes's remark about the United Company suffering financially as a consequence of the truncated run of Albion and Albanius ‘not Answering half the Charge they were at’ has been substantiated by Judith Milhous, who shows that both the amount of dividends for the company's shareholders and, more importantly, the frequency of dividend payments, decreased in 1685.Footnote ²³⁹ Yet the company's shouldering of this liability is surprising, given the remarkable degree to which the royal court appears to have been involved in the production from the start. Indeed, Albion is best considered, like its predecessor Ariane (in which Grabu was also a leading figure) as a kind of joint project of the court and the patent company, in which at least some among the latter party only grudgingly participated, perhaps as a consequence of their official status as servants of the crown. Thomas Betterton, the United Company's manager, clearly played an important role in this seemingly informal arrangement, working to secure personnel by committing the company's finances, both to provide Grabu with the promised pension and to bring the expensive opera to fruition. As Dryden made clear in his Preface to the Albion libretto, Betterton even occupied a significant place in the creative process itself.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Yet ultimately it is the court that emerges as the driving force behind the production, with Betterton serving merely as an agent for his royal master and for Secretary of State Sunderland, while ambassadorial- and ministerial-level conversations, reaching all the way up to the Duke of York, passed back and forth over his head. Such elements of the process as the promise of royal protection for Grabu, the employment of the Poet Laureate Dryden to write the libretto, the multiple rehearsals at court and the likely recruitment of singers from the Private Music to supplement those already formally on the United Company's roster all contribute to a picture of close involvement by the court at every stage of the process. Grabu was even able to follow precedents set with the Royall Academy of Musick's publication of the Ariane libretti by identifying himself on the title page of his 1687 printed score as ‘LEWIS GRABU, Esquire; Master of His late MAJESTY's Musick’Footnote ²⁴¹ and by dedicating the score to King James II.Footnote ²⁴²

In considering the level of court involvement in the creation of Albion and Albanius in 1685, it is also worth noting the context of the earlier production of Valentinian. Although the Earl of Rochester's only serious play was performed (posthumously) by the United Company, John Downes recording that ‘The well performance, and the vast Interest the Author made in Town, Crown'd the Play, with great Gain of Reputation; and Profit to the Actors’,Footnote ²⁴³ it was clearly also a court affair. On 6 February 1684 orders were issued to the United Company ‘to Act the play called the Tragedy of Valentinian at Court before his Majesty’ and to the Office of Works to prepare the Hall Theatre,Footnote ²⁴⁴ and on 9 February the Lord Steward was instructed to provide food, light and heat for the performers at the time of the show and to ‘give order for Coales for ayreing the Play house the day before’.Footnote ²⁴⁵ The court may also have absorbed other costs for the preparation of the production, since Charles II paid only £10 for the command performance at Whitehall, whereas such appearances usually garnered double that amount.Footnote ²⁴⁶ The court premiere – an uncommon event at the time – presumably kicked off a run in the public theatre: the 1685 printed playbook refers to the play as being ‘Acted at the Theatre-Royal’, and includes separate prologues spoken by Sarah Cooke on the first and second days (the former written by Aphra Behn), as well as a ‘Prologue intended for VALENTINIAN, to be spoken by Mrs. Barrey’.Footnote ²⁴⁷Valentinian was presented again at Whitehall for James II on 16 May 1687 (the court this time paying the full £20),Footnote ²⁴⁸ and there is a printed copy of the play that contains two manuscript cast lists that, according to The London Stage, indicate possible productions at Drury Lane sometime in 1688–90 and 1691–2.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Although it is curious that the 1685 playbook makes no mention of the work's court provenance, and that (as we have noted) the play is not named in the Pastoralle print, Valentinian must nonetheless be regarded as a significant theatrical event, and hence an important means, alongside Albion and Albanius, for Grabu to advance his career.Footnote ²⁵⁰

Valentinian's shelf-life as a theatrical work was, of course, considerably greater than that of Albion, whose exceptionally politicized and temporally specific plot made it inappropriate for revival after 1685, and utterly anathema in the wake of the Revolution of 1688–9. Yet Grabu does not seem to have suffered any great loss from the premature closing of the latter production: Roger North's verdict, written some 40 years after the event, that the opera ‘proved y^e Ruin of the poor man for the Kings death supplanted al his hopes, & so it dyed’Footnote ²⁵¹ is probably grounded principally on Grabu's own extravagant remark in his dedication to the printed score about ‘the Shipwrack of all my fairest Hopes and Expectations, in the Death of the late King my Master’,Footnote ²⁵² and not to any actual decline in the composer's fortunes. Indeed, with the new regime solidly in place, Grabu found himself in a position to benefit from James II's efforts to clear the books of his predecessor's arrears. As early as August 1685, the former Master of the Music was able to collect his long-neglected livery payments for the years 1666 and 1667, totalling £32 5s (from which two fees of 5s were subtracted),Footnote ²⁵³ and on the 18th of that month he appears to have been issued a ‘certificate’, no longer extant, promising payment of his outstanding £450 of salary (covering the last nine quarters of his appointment, from Midsummer 1672 to Michaelmas 1674).Footnote ²⁵⁴ The actual receipt of the funds, however, was still not guaranteed: the court drove a hard bargain, requiring that Grabu formally surrender his 1667 patent stipulating payment ‘for life’ from the Exchequer and accept in exchange the disbursement of his arrears out of the household funds controlled by the Treasurer of the Chamber.Footnote ²⁵⁵ On 2 December 1686, more than a year after receiving the ‘certificate’ and over a dozen years after his displacement in favour of Nicholas Staggins, Grabu submitted the requested resignation, thereby clearing the way for his long overdue remuneration to proceed.Footnote ²⁵⁶ Within five days the court had issued a blanket warrant for the entire amountFootnote ²⁵⁷ as well as a separate warrant authorizing an initial payment of £225, technically amounting to four and a half quarters of his annual salary, but really calculated as 50 per cent of the outstanding sum;Footnote ²⁵⁸ just over a week later, on 15 December, Grabu had this money in his hands.Footnote ²⁵⁹ Two subsequent payments, each ostensibly for £112 10s, or 25 per cent of the £450 arrears, were made to him in the early months of 1687, on 21 FebruaryFootnote ²⁶⁰ and 5 April,Footnote ²⁶¹ thus completing Grabu's compensation for his eight and a half years of official service to the crown. It should be noted that the ex-Master of the Music received a degree of special consideration in this process: James II's order in council of 20 October 1685, which set the arrears-payment process in motion, technically applied only to current royal servants, not to those who had already (or long since) left their court posts. But as was observed in the subsequent consideration of a petition from the viol player John Smith, another of Charles II's musicians displaced by the Test Act for his Roman Catholicism, Grabu's case constituted a potential precedent for flexibility in such instances, given that he had ‘rec[eive]^d all his arreares as Master of the Musicke to his late Ma^tie although not actually in his said Ma^ts service at the tyme of his decease, Nicholas Staggins being admitted unto that place many years before.’Footnote ²⁶²

The payment of Grabu's £450 of arrears over a relatively short span of less than four months – a process akin to the similar sequence of payments, constituting an equivalent amount, that had been made in late 1673 and early 1674 – must have been a welcome windfall (although even as the government gave, it took away, requiring Grabu to pay £22 2s to cover his outstanding liability for the poll tax of 1667Footnote ²⁶³). One thing certainly worked in his favour: there is no sign of Walter Lapp coming forward to claim any of the money, much of which, we should recall, was still legally Lapp's due. Moreover, Grabu remained active as a composer for the United Company, writing instrumental music for three plays performed between January 1687 and February 1688: a nine-movement theatre suite for Beaumont and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, probably as adapted by Edmund Waller;Footnote ²⁶⁴ a group of seven airs including an overture and a trumpet tune, most likely composed for Aphra Behn's elaborate machine farce The Emperor of the Moon;Footnote ²⁶⁵ and another nine-movement suite for a revival of Fletcher and Massinger's The Double Marriage Footnote ²⁶⁶ that was performed at court on 6 February 1688 to celebrate the third anniversary of James II's accession.Footnote ²⁶⁷ Grabu may also have provided other services for James's court: little is known about the circumstances surrounding the performance of Lully and Quinault's early tragédie en musique, Cadmus et Hermione, by an imported French company at one of the public theatres, most likely Dorset Garden, in February 1686;Footnote ²⁶⁸ however, it is entirely possible that Grabu may have been involved in bringing this company to London and helping to get the production set up in the theatre.Footnote ²⁶⁹ As I have observed elsewhere, Cadmus was well suited to a London performance, given that its allegorical prologue was sufficiently vague to enable its application to any particular monarch, James II included.Footnote ²⁷⁰ On the other hand, we might imagine Grabu being commissioned to prepare a new, more topical prologue extolling the English king, just as he may have done for Ariane in 1674. All of this is pure speculation, but Grabu would in any case have been the obvious choice to serve as a liaison between the French performers and both the court and the United Company, or even to act in a more pivotal capacity in this significant (if curiously underreported) venture.Footnote ²⁷¹

One activity that must have consumed a fair amount of Grabu's time and effort between 1685 and 1687 was the project to publish the music for Albion and Albanius in a lavish full score, modelled on the contemporary printed folio editions of Lully's operas produced in Paris by Christophe Ballard beginning in 1679 – editions Grabu would undoubtedly have seen during his stay on the Continent.Footnote ²⁷² Given the obvious prestige attaching to the operatic publications of Ballard (who held the privilege of ‘seul Imprimeur du Roy pour la Musique’), not to mention the exalted stature of the monopolist Lully, it is reasonable to imagine Grabu, having at last created his own grand royal opera, aspiring to establish himself on some sort of comparable footing.Footnote ²⁷³ The difficulty, of course, was that London was not Paris (nor James II Louis XIV, however much the literary and performative rhetoric of Albion and Albanius might seek to suggest otherwise), and Grabu's access to the resources necessary to create and market a Ballard-like publication was considerably more circumscribed than that of his well-connected French counterpart. Standard commercial publication was out of the question: as Rebecca Herissone has shown, London's leading music publisher John Playford, who well understood the business side of his profession, had not published a single-authored volume since 1662, leaving ambitious composers to fend for themselves through self-publication.Footnote ²⁷⁴ Moreover, all such self-publications created since 1675 (Grabu's own Pastoralle and the mysterious ‘Vocal and Instrumental Musick newly performed at the Kings Theatre’ among them) had been engraved, a format that would have proven prohibitively expensive for a capacious opera score like that of Albion. The obstacles Grabu faced were thus twofold: first, finding a way to finance the project on his own (perhaps with the hope of a royal subvention or reward somewhere down the lineFootnote ²⁷⁵) and then, once the money was available, engaging a London printer in the mould of Ballard who had both the means and the will to take on the substantial workload that producing an opera in full score entailed.Footnote ²⁷⁶

The obvious solution to the former problem, particularly for such a high-profile work as Albion and Albanius, was to pursue the relatively new method of subscription publication, which had recently been tried in two other instances: Pietro Reggio's Songs in 1680 and Henry Purcell's Sonnata's of III Parts in 1683.Footnote ²⁷⁷ Accordingly, in June 1685, even while Albion was still in production at Dorset Garden, Grabu took out an advertisement in the London Gazette announcing that:

Several items in this announcement are noteworthy. First, Grabu chose to employ both the established music publisher Carr and the more fashionable Westminster bookseller Nott – both of whom had already been associated with the Pastoralle and the ephemeral ‘Vocal and Instrumental Musick’ publication of 1684 – to collect subscription payments on his behalf. Second, the composer clearly wished to distinguish his publication as a luxury item, charging a guinea (a gold coin of fluctuating value, but worth somewhere around 21s 6d in the 1680s) for the subscription, and warning of an even higher price for latecomers; yet at the same time he sought to attract an initial flurry of commitments by offering to collect only half the subscription money up front. In a subsequent advertisement taken out six weeks later, following the premature closing of the Dorset Garden production, Grabu was less sanguine, noting that ‘the Charge being great’, subscribers would need to produce ‘a Guinea in hand’ in order to reserve their copies.Footnote ²⁷⁹ Third, even at the early date of June 1685 Grabu seems to have had a clear sense of what the project would entail: although presumably few, if any, pages had been printed by this time, someone had already carried out the ‘casting off’ process for the entire volume, resulting in a remarkably accurate calculation of 160 folio sheets for the finished publication.Footnote ²⁸⁰

We cannot know whether or not Grabu came to regret ‘the advice of his Friends’ to pursue the subscription route; as he might have learnt from his own experience with Charles II in the 1660s and 1670s, it is one thing to promise recompense for an economic exchange – whether a salary for services rendered or a printed book for money subscribed – but quite another to actually deliver the goods. Progress on the score appears to have been slower than expected: after the initial solicitations of June and July 1685, there were no public announcements about the anticipated publication for more than a year (during which time John Carr seems to have withdrawn from the scheme). It may have been that the ambitious project to bring the opera to press was proving unprofitable and, in the absence of new subscription revenue, Grabu had no means to cover his mounting costs. What most likely got the production process moving again was the welcome influx of cash from the payment of Grabu's arrears, already discussed. Within less than a week of receiving his first disbursement of £225 on 15 December 1686, Grabu was back in the London Gazette, announcing that the opera was ‘almost Finished, there remaining no more to be Printed but Ten Sheets in Folio’, and soliciting additional one-guinea subscriptions.Footnote ²⁸¹ William Nott was now listed as the sole receiver of subscription payments, and the anticipated price for non-subscribers was revised from 25s to at least 30s. It is not clear whether any additional subscriptions were forthcoming, for from this point there seems to be a correlation between the court's arrears payments to Grabu and progress on the completion of the score. His receipt of £112 10s on 21 February 1687Footnote ²⁸² was followed in short order by his printer's assertion sometime in late February or early March that the opera was ‘almost Finished’ (discussed later in this article) and by the licensing of the publication by the surveyor of the press, Sir Roger L'Estrange, on 15 March.Footnote ²⁸³ Similarly, the final payment to Grabu of £112 on 5 AprilFootnote ²⁸⁴ may have spurred the announcement in the London Gazette at the beginning of June that the opera was now ‘quite finished’ and ready for collection, and confirming the post-subscription price of 30s and the availability of copies through William NottFootnote ²⁸⁵ – although, as we have seen, the colophon on the title page of the printed score mentions the sale of the volume both at Nott's shop and ‘at the Door of the Royal Theater’, possibly by the enigmatic Rowland (or Rowling?) Gilbert.

Grabu's second challenge, that is, the engagement of a printer who both could and would actually produce his grand score for him, was no less fraught with pitfalls. Apart from those who serviced the publisher John Playford, few London printers were equipped to create music books of any sophistication, let alone the luxury product Grabu envisaged. Moreover, in April 1685, just as Albion and Albanius was undergoing its final preparations for the stage, John Playford's primary music printer, his 30-year-old nephew John Playford, Junior, died, leaving his printing shop in Little-Britain, just outside Aldersgate, to his unmarried sister Eleanor.Footnote ²⁸⁶ By the terms of the Licensing Act of 1662, only the widows of printers were allowed to assume their late husbands’ professions, but with the Act in abeyance since May 1679, when the First Exclusion Parliament had failed to renew the legislation,Footnote ²⁸⁷ Eleanor Playford must have determined to carry on the family business, and hence agreed to accept Grabu's commission. As events turned out, however, her seeming opportunity proved illusory: the newly enthroned James II had made the revival of the Act a priority, and his new parliament passed it into law effective 24 June 1685,Footnote ²⁸⁸ leaving the unfortunate legatee in possession of a business that she was not legally authorized to run. Faced with this dilemma, Eleanor seems to have pursued a four-pronged approach. First, she temporized, probably continuing to print music for her uncle John Playford the elder and his son Henry, albeit surreptitiously, without identifying herself on the prints.Footnote ²⁸⁹ Second, she pressed forward with a trio of court-connected specialist projects that might demonstrate the value of her contribution to the profession while enhancing her chances of special consideration. Having already taken on the task of printing Grabu's opera score, she also became involved in the selling of – and most likely printed – Captain Daniel Newhouse's elaborate mathematical and astronomical treatise The VVhole Art of Navigation, which appeared late in 1685 with a special imprimatur/privilege from, and dedication to, the king.Footnote ²⁹⁰ In addition, sometime in the summer or early autumn of 1686, with Grabu's project evidently dormant and her music type sitting idle, she appears to have undertaken another private commission, the court violinist Thomas Farmer's ‘Consort of Musick in Four Parts’, which was advertised for sale in early November.Footnote ²⁹¹ As a third line of attack, Mistress Playford hedged her bets, taking out an advertisement in the London Gazette in May 1686 in which she offered to sell or lease the printing shop along with its entire stock of equipment.Footnote ²⁹² Such a move would certainly have given Grabu cause for concern, mired as he was at the time in what looks to have been mid-production doldrums. Indeed, it appears that the solicitation was at least partially successful, as Henry Hills, one of the king's official printers would later attest that he had bought up some portion of Playford's specialized apparatus (see later in this article). Fourthly, in February or early March 1687, shortly after the death of her uncle, the elder John Playford, and with both Newhouse's treatise and Farmer's partbooks available for perusal and Grabu's score nearing completion, Eleanor Playford sought to legitimize her intrusion into the profession, submitting a petition to James II requesting a special royal dispensation to continue in business.Footnote ²⁹³ The petition emphasized both the legacy and the uniqueness within the trade of ‘a house that has been a Printing house aboue Forty years, whose Cheife buissenes was to Print Musick, the Mathemattics, & Algebray, there being no other that could Print the same, only one man who does some small matters in Musick’. Noting that her brother had ‘dyed some time before the late restraint on the Printers’ occasioned by the renewal of the Licensing Act, and that he had ‘left his Printing house to yo^r Pet^r who did Exercise the said Art before the restraint’, Playford strategically affirmed her intention to sell the business ‘as soone as Possible’, pointing out that she had already ‘sold great Part as she would do the rest’, while at the same time arguing that

Reaching for the ultimate prize, Playford therefore requested not only permission to continue as a printer, but ‘that she may have the Hono^r to be yo^r Ma^ty Servant for Printing the said Musick, Mathematticks and Algebray, There being no other that can doe the same at p[re]sent’. On 4 March 1687 the petition was considered by the Privy Council, which ordered the king's official printers, Henry Hills the elder and Thomas Newcomb the younger, to ‘shew Cause, if any they can, why the Pet^r should not be gratified in her Request’. Hills and Newcomb replied on 16 March, rejecting Playford's claim of special status on several grounds. First, they pointed out, her brother had printed much more than just music and mathematics during his lifetime, ‘that being the least part of the Art or Trade of a Printer, there not being Work enough of that kind to maintain one Master Printer’. Given this, there was no justification for establishing another King's Printer, a position that carried special exemption from the terms of the Licensing Act. Moreover, they argued, as Hills had already purchased some of the printing materials offered for sale by Eleanor Playford, the royal printers were now ‘ready on all occasions to Serve your Majesty in the Printing of Musick, Mathematicks, and Algebra, as well as the Peticõner, or any other Printer whatsoever, upon the least Signification of your Majesties pleasure therein’.Footnote ²⁹⁴ Two days later, on the 18th, Hills's and Newcomb's response was read by the Privy Council, and Eleanor Playford's petition was summarily dismissed. Fortunately, she had managed to obtain Sir Roger L'Estrange's imprimatur for Grabu's Albion score on the 15th, one day before Hills and Newcomb submitted their rejoinder, and the printing of that volume was able to be completed over the ensuing three months. But nothing more is heard of the Playford printing house after this, and self-publishing composers like Grabu and Farmer would henceforth be obliged to turn elsewhere for assistance.Footnote ²⁹⁵

The publication of Albion and Albanius was certainly a monumental undertaking. At 320 pages it was the longest strictly musical print to have appeared hitherto in England.Footnote ²⁹⁶ Its grand size was also reflected in its typeface: rather than employ the smaller ‘Granjon’ fount that can be found in many of the shop's earlier productions, Eleanor Playford utilized an admixture of three larger partbook founts – the so-called Haultin (1570), Morley (1599) and Windet (1604) faces (see Figure 1) – that had been assembled and passed down by her predecessors over the course of the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁹⁷ Despite the somewhat jumbled appearance this generated, the publication overall shows signs of considerable care on the part of its creators: while Bryan White has identified only a single stop-press correction made in the course of the print run, he has demonstrated that a majority of the surviving copies were subjected to a fairly consistent process of hand-correctionFootnote ²⁹⁸ – although other errors seem to have passed unnoticed.Footnote ²⁹⁹ We cannot be sure whether or not Grabu himself oversaw this process and, if so, why he would have considered the careful insertion of the minor corrections identified by White to be so important, given that the score must have been intended more as a collector's item than as a working performance document.Footnote ³⁰⁰ Perhaps he viewed it not just as a status symbol to be displayed on the shelves of wealthy bibliophiles, but as a record of what, especially before the revolutionary events of 1688–9, must have seemed like an important watershed moment in English opera and court culture more generally.

Figure 1.

Comparison of G clefs (in G1 position) from the Haultin, Morley and Windet founts, used by Eleanor Playford in the production of the printed score of Albion and Albanius.

In either case, Grabu can hardly have expected his publication venture to be an overwhelming commercial success, especially given what the succession of London Gazette advertisements for the volume reveals, and Rebecca Herissone is probably right to assert that Albion was indeed a poor seller.Footnote ³⁰¹ Twenty-six copies are known to be extant today,Footnote ³⁰² and some of these were undoubtedly sold for Grabu's immediate benefit, either through the subscription process or post-publication both by Nott and ‘at the Door of the Royal Theater’. But a substantial number of copies must have remained in stock even after Grabu left England permanently in late 1694: Henry Playford seems to have possessed one or more copies, which he offered for sale in his General Catalogue of 1697,Footnote ³⁰³ a copy was offered for auction in May 1699 by the auctioneer and bookseller Edward MillingtonFootnote ³⁰⁴ and one Jean de Beaulieu, the proprietor of a bookshop at the lower end of St Martin's Lane, near Charing Cross, took out four advertisements in London newspapers in 1697 and 1698, apparently in an effort to unload his remaining stock of the volume.Footnote ³⁰⁵ Beaulieu was a major London supplier of French, Italian, Spanish and Latin books published abroad,Footnote ³⁰⁶ and Grabu had probably selected him to sell the leftover copies of the opera on consignment. Albion, of course, was in English, and thus not obviously connected to Beaulieu's main trade in foreign-language publications, but the bookseller (‘who buys also and exchanges all sorts of Books’, according to two of the advertisements) gamely sought to move the copies by cleverly, if somewhat incongruously, emphasizing the utilitarian nature of the publication, which he described as

Beaulieu must have been a motivated seller, since one of the advertisements reveals that copies are available for a mere 8s, a discount of nearly 75 per cent from the original post-subscription price of 30s a decade earlier.Footnote ³⁰⁸ The necessity of offering price reductions like this seems to have been a common hazard of musical subscription publications, although they were not always so deep: Reggio's Songs had been tendered for subscription in 1680 under the terms ‘That whosoever shall subscribe and pay Ten shilling, shall have one of the said Books, the Book (being so fair and large) will not be afforded to any but the Subscribers, under Twenty shillings’,Footnote ³⁰⁹ but in 1692, seven years after Reggio's death, the volume was advertised (with dubious accuracy) as ‘newly Re-printed, and […] to be sold at 10s per Book, which was subscribed at a Guinea’.Footnote ³¹⁰ The reprinting of the Reggio volume, of course, was an easy matter, the music having been engraved ‘in Copper in an extraordinary manner’, as the original advertisement put it; the same was true of Purcell's Sonnata's of 1683. Albion and Albanius, on the other hand, was typeset, and thus Grabu had to make a once-and-for-all decision about how many copies to produce in 1685, with the understanding that after the sheets had been run off and the type distributed, the score could not be reprinted without starting over entirely from scratch. The publication of the Albion score thus represented a substantial risk for the composer and, in the final analysis, it is difficult to know whether or not Grabu would have considered the likely financial loss really worth whatever limited dividends in prestige he may have reaped from his exertions.

Whatever the ultimate outcome may have been with respect to Albion and Albanius, it appears that Grabu did not entirely abandon the idea of self-publication as a means of advancing his career. With the massive opera score at last in print, he seems to have turned his attention to the more modest venture of circulating a selection of his instrumental music. The result was A Collection of Several Simphonies and Airs In Three Parts; Composed for Violins, Flutes and Hoe-boys, Printed for all Lovers of Musick, which was advertised for sale at the shop of Grabu's now-familiar agent William Nott in April 1688.Footnote ³¹¹ Grabu's name appears nowhere in the publication, but his authorship is confirmed by an advertisement found in another work issued by the same printerFootnote ³¹² (it is hard to understand why Grabu would have chosen to maintain anonymity in this case, given all his previous efforts at self-promotion). Nott, as we have observed, was not a publisher of music, and seems to have carried no other musical items in his inventory apart from the works of Grabu (Pastoralle, Albion and Albanius, A Collection and, presumably, the 1684 ‘Vocal and Instrumental Musick newly performed at the Kings Theatre’).Footnote ³¹³ With the neutralization of Eleanor Playford and the disappearance of her printing stock, therefore, the composer evidently opted to have his actual production work done abroad: the title page of A Collection pointedly omits to give London as the place of publication, and the print contains the only English exemplar of the crudely rendered Rosier music typeface, a nested typefount designed in two different sizes that had been developed for the Amsterdam publisher Antoine Pointel for use in his pirated editions of French operas.Footnote ³¹⁴ It is uncertain why Grabu would have taken such a course: with a total of 72 pages for the three partbooks, A Collection is not inordinately longer than the 52-page Pastoralle, which had been successfully engraved just four years earlier. Perhaps cost was a factor, and Pointel may have offered to do the job cheaply, especially if he was anxious to try out his untested larger-size fount, which appears on all but six of the print's pages.Footnote ³¹⁵

The Collection itself consists of three upright quarto partbooks, each comprising three gatherings signed A–C, all prefaced by a single title page.Footnote ³¹⁶ It contains 36 assorted airs and dances in a variety of keys, presented in no discernable order – in fact, there are only 35 items, since one appears twice in the book, under two different rubrics.Footnote ³¹⁷ The principles governing the set's compilation are not clear: all but nine of the pieces are known from other sources, among them four found in Nicolas Dieupart's partbooks of the early 1680s (Yale MS Filmer 33) and two in the 1679 treble-only publication A Vade Mecum (see Appendix 2);Footnote ³¹⁸ however, it is notable that none of these sources has been exploited with any consistency for the 1688 compilation,Footnote ³¹⁹ and that 15 of the concordant movements in A Collection do not appear in any earlier extant source.Footnote ³²⁰

The publication of A Collection of Several Simphonies and Airs in early April 1688 came only two months after the performance of Grabu's music in The Double Marriage at court to mark James II's accession day (6 February). With his compositions now widely disseminated, his arrears paid and his standing with the monarchy seemingly reestablished, Grabu might have felt that real success as a composer of music for England's resurgent absolutist court was finally at hand. But James's political and religious missteps proved too much for his subjects, and the tidal wave of revolution swept away not only the unfortunate king, but Stuart dreams of unchecked monarchical power as well, and with them the long-impeded aspirations of Grabu. We cannot be certain whether he retained his pension from the United Company,Footnote ³²¹ but in any case no further theatrical compositions were forthcoming after 1688, and by 1690 John Dryden, who five years earlier had commended Grabu's ‘extraordinary Tallent […] above any Man, who shall pretend to be his Rival on our Stage’,Footnote ³²² was now singing the praises of a relative newcomer to the theatrical scene, Henry Purcell, ‘in whose Person we have at length found an English-man, equal with the best abroad’.Footnote ³²³ From this point forward, signs of activity from Grabu are meagre indeed. Apart from the undated performances of Valentinian in 1688–90 and 1691–2,Footnote ³²⁴ revivals of The Emperor of the Moon in November 1691Footnote ³²⁵ and of Oedipus in October 1692,Footnote ³²⁶ and the (still anonymous) reprinting of the old tune ‘La Monmouth’ in 1690 and 1693,Footnote ³²⁷ there is little evidence that either he or his music were much in the public eye during the half-dozen years following the 1688–9 Revolution.Footnote ³²⁸

Grabu's sudden descent into obscurity after 1688 would seem to represent one more indignity in a life plagued by frequent setbacks: yet even here there is some cause to reassess that purely negative appraisal. The evidence comes in the form of a significant compilation of Grabu's works – the largest single source, apart from the Albion and Albanius score – found in a manuscript now in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The manuscript, catalogued using the library's own well-known classification system as ‘M2.1 .L9 Case’,Footnote ³²⁹ is endorsed on the rear endpaper ‘Loudoun’ and ‘Edinburgh, E: Loudoun 22 May 1693’ (accompanied by several elaborate pen-trials of the letter ‘L’). Similar inscriptions, including the same date, appear on the front endpaper, suggesting an association with the Campbell family, who held the Scottish peerage title of Earls of Loudoun. The manuscript is an unfoliated, oblong volume consisting of 96 leaves, plus two endpapers, with a loose smaller bifolium inserted between ff. 95 and 96. It is written in tablebook format, using French terminology (e.g., ‘dessus’) and G1 violin clefs but, as Robert Ford has observed, copied ‘almost certainly by an English or Scottish musician, judging by the spelling of titles’.Footnote ³³⁰ While the latter portion of the volume includes numerous unascribed tunes, along with a sonata by Gottfried Finger, the first 38 leaves present a consecutively numbered group of 60 three-part airs, headed (on ff. 2^v and 3^r) ‘airs a 3 Parties Pour La flutte Par M^r. Grabü’.Footnote ³³¹ The Loudoun manuscript represents perhaps the most important compendium of Grabu's output now available to us. While 25 of the 60 tunes appear to be unique, others can be found in a variety of earlier sources: 24 are in A Collection of Several Simphonies and Airs,Footnote ³³² ten in Nicolas Dieupart's partbooks (Yale MS Filmer 33), nine in a set of partbooks at Trinity College, Dublin (MS 413),Footnote ³³³ and several individual items in a scattering of other mostly manuscript sources; a full accounting is provided in Appendix 2.Footnote ³³⁴ The apparent selectivity of the Loudoun and other collections, as well as the lack of readily discernible stemmatic relationships among nearly all of the surviving sources of Grabu's music, suggest that his compositions – which, taken together, represent a fairly extensive corpus – may have received considerably more circulation during his lifetime than scholars have imagined. At least some of them appear to have been in demand over a period of at least a decade and a half, and to have passed readily between England and France, and perhaps back again, and there is even evidence of another manuscript compilation, now lost, in which Grabu's music figured prominently.Footnote ³³⁵ Although we still have too little information about Grabu's consequential part in the musical world of the 1670s, 1680s and 1690s – and even less about him as an individual – such insights may at least allow us to understand something of his working practice and the scope of his output.

Even as late as 22 May 1693, the unexplained date on the Loudoun manuscript, Grabu's appearances in the public eye were not quite over. On Saturday, 17 November 1694, he briefly resurfaced as the composer of ‘A Consort of Musick […] performed […] at Mr. Smiths in Charles-street, Covent-Garden, between the hours of Seven and Eight.’Footnote ³³⁶ But this may have been Grabu's swan song: two and a half weeks later, on 4 December, he received a pass for himself, his wife and two children ‘to go to Harwich or Gravesend for Holland or Flanders’,Footnote ³³⁷ and from this date nothing more is known of him.Footnote ³³⁸ After nearly three decades on the English musical scene, during which time he had played a significant role in the advancement of opera and court music – and, perhaps more importantly, had demonstrated a resilience that would be the envy of any musician – the insufficiently lamented Louis Grabu simply faded back into the shadows from which he had first emerged.