Preamble: Ravenscroft's reputation

From Ravenscroft's lifetime and most of the following century there survives no known comment on the value ascribed to him as a composer or to his musical works, although one may draw certain inferences from the record of the music's collection and performance. The critical tradition proper begins in 1776 with Hawkins, for whom the focal point was his discovery of a so-called ‘Opera settima’ of Corelli – published in Amsterdam by Michel-Charles Le Cène and purporting to contain works earlier than those in the ‘canonic’ series initiated (in 1681) with Op. 1 – that in reality comprised the first nine sonatas of Ravenscroft's Op. 1 as published in Rome by Mascardi in 1695.Footnote ³ Perhaps unaware of the late date of Le Cène's edition (1730–3) and certainly ignorant of Ravenscroft's year of death (1697), Hawkins believed the latter to have been a deliberate plagiarist, writing: ‘Ravenscroft professed to imitate Corelli in those Sonatas which Roger published, and hoped to make the world believe were some of the earliest of his work.’Footnote ⁴ Hawkins was uncomplimentary in general towards the imitators of his idol Corelli, observing sententiously: ‘the experiment [of imitation] has been made, and has failed’.Footnote ⁵

Hawkins's view prevailed, without any significant addition of new factual information or modification of critical stance, for a century and a half. The first crack opened when Alfred Einstein, while not suggesting that Ravenscroft's sonatas were equal to, let alone an improvement on, Corelli's own, reportedly praised them for the fidelity of their imitation.Footnote ⁶ This compliment acted as the stimulus for a short article (1957) by William S. Newman, at that time engaged on his panoramic study of the sonata genre, which compared the trio sonatas of the two men in a little more detail. Aware from his study of Ravenscroft's Op. 2 that the composer was already dead by 1708, Newman exonerated him from the charge of plagiarism, although he was in his turn perhaps a little over-hasty to assume that Le Cène acted in bad faith when he issued the sonatas under Corelli's name.Footnote ⁷ Newman describes the Op. 1 sonatas as ‘much like Corelli's and very skillful, too’; he appears to regard the greater regularity and thematic economy of Ravenscroft's sonatas in comparison with their model as a strong point (whereas most other modern commentators have attributed it to a lack of imagination), although he concedes: ‘his writing for the violins is idiomatic but not quite as advanced or free as Corelli's’.Footnote ⁸ In his study of the Baroque sonata that appeared two years later Newman presented the same content in slightly condensed form.Footnote ⁹

Two substantial studies of Ravenscroft's Op. 1 – one focused on source criticism, the other on musical analysis – appeared towards the end of the twentieth century. Fabio Zanzotto (1982) reviewed the sources, printed and manuscript, for this collection, directing his attention especially towards the editio princeps by Mascardi, a set of manuscript parts in Florence transmitting the sonatas under Corelli's name, and the Le Cène edition of sonatas I–IX.Footnote ¹⁰ He hypothesised a connection between the Florentine manuscript and the Le Cène edition, thereby raising the possibility of exculpating the publisher, and – even more interesting – showed that, in the latter source, many small musical modifications were introduced to the original text, perhaps with a view to maximising the stylistic similarity to Corelli. Zanzotto also made an important contribution to Ravenscroft's biography by finding in the Archivio di Stato of Florence the composer's handwritten letter of dedication of the opus to Grand Prince Ferdinando III of Tuscany (which differs in wording, if not very much in substance, from the dedication published with the music) and a minute of the Grand Prince's reply. The second article (1990), by Sergio Durante, compared Ravenscroft's fugal movements with their Corellian counterparts.Footnote ¹¹ Durante argued, via a close reading of the text, that in this type of movement, at least, Ravenscroft diverged more considerably from Corelli's style than Einstein or Newman would lead one to expect – and usually to his disadvantage.

A reversion to the thoroughly negative stance taken by Hawkins occurs in Peter Allsop's book on Corelli (1999), which finds Ravenscroft's music over-reliant on ‘stock harmonies’ and ‘sequential harmonic devices’, as well as being epigonistic in the worst sense.Footnote ¹² Whether or not future research or the experience of hearing the music performed will mitigate or even overturn this verdict is hard to say. Certainly, more attention needs to be paid to Op. 2, which scholars and performers alike have so far rather overlooked, and there is also a fascinating manuscript collection of fugues attributed to Ravenscroft, briefly described later, which, although by a recently identified earlier composer, may yet have a genuine connection to him.

It is unnecessary here to mention the dozens of passing references in books, articles and dictionary entries that mention Ravenscroft's music. So far as criticism and musical analysis are concerned, the sources discussed above are the main ones, the rest doing little more than recycle the information and views that these transmit.

The Ravenscrofts of Barnet

Ravenscroft is a toponym derived from the medieval manor of Ravenscroft in the neighbourhood of Middlewich, Cheshire.Footnote ¹³ The surname was adopted around 1230 by its new owner, Warren de Byley.Footnote ¹⁴ In the fourteenth century the main branch of the family was located in the north-east corner of Wales at Bretton Hall, Flintshire, which lies in the parish of Hawarden, very close to the border with Cheshire and England. Over time, the family acquired through marriage many more properties and landholdings both in the vicinity (such as Broadlane House near Hawarden Castle) and in distant counties. The Bretton branch is ancestral to all the Ravenscrofts with whom this article is concerned.

The family was armigerous: the original and simplest form of its coat of arms is describable in heraldic language as ‘argent a chevron between three ravens’ heads razed sable’.Footnote ¹⁵ Most male members of the family claimed the title of ‘Gentleman’ or the closely related ‘Esquire’. At the time, these were not mere courtesy titles but precise statements that the holder, although not noble, was of independent means, his income usually derived from landed property. This precluded activity in occupations regarded as manual but permitted involvement in commerce and the professions.

The first figure of importance for our story is Ralph (or Raphe) Ravenscroft of Bretton (born 1475), since all the Ravenscrofts with whom we shall be concerned descend from him.Footnote ¹⁶ From his younger son John (born c. 1507), who founded the Hawarden line, descend both the well-known Jacobean composer, theorist and editor Thomas Ravenscroft (born c. 1589) and our John Ravenscroft.Footnote ¹⁷ From the first John the line leads to the composer Thomas (born c. 1589) via Arthur (c. 1536–63), who moved to London, and John (1554–1605); from the same man it leads to the composer John via George (born c. 1534), Thomas (1563/4–1631), who founded the Barnet branch, James (1596–1680) and another Thomas (1628–1708). These genealogies give us a first inkling of how the same quite compact group of male forenames, all of them highly popular in English society at large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Thomas – signifying the martyr rather than the apostle – being a favourite of Catholics and those inclined towards Catholicism), circulates in all branches of the Ravenscroft family in each generation, creating endless opportunities for subsequent confusion.

For the sake of completeness, we have to mention a different Thomas, who, since his first outing in 1915,Footnote ¹⁸ has widely but almost certainly mistakenly been proposed as the Jacobean composer. He is identified as a son of the clergyman Roger Ravenscroft of Bretton (1566–1635), a direct descendant of George (born c. 1490), the eldest son of Ralph Ravenscroft, and younger brother of the dedicatees of Thomas's collection Melismata. The date claimed for this Thomas's birth, 13 June 1592, accords well with reports of his age in later documents. The problem is, however, that despite extensive searching, no documentation from parish records in Flintshire or Cheshire has turned up to support this identification.Footnote ¹⁹

Like a sizable proportion of the nobility and gentry in north-west England and Wales, the Ravenscrofts were, as a whole, resistant to the royal supremacy over the church, initiated by Henry VIII in 1534, and therefore to the Anglican church per se. How this resistance, and fidelity to Catholic belief, became manifest depended on the individual conscience, on the tradition of the branch of the family to which the individual belonged and on the prevalent political and legal situation, which varied considerably over time, although between 1534 and the completion (for ordinary purposes) of Catholic emancipation in the nineteenth century English Catholics were always subject to legal penalties and other disadvantages (if one excepts the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–8), when, momentarily, the boot was on the other foot). The options for Catholic dissenters were basically five: they could go into exile; they could remain in England but go underground; they could refuse attendance at Anglican services, earning themselves the stigmatised and often punished legal status of ‘recusants’; they could become what were sneeringly known as ‘church papists’, outwardly conforming to Anglicanism but privately retaining Catholic belief and perhaps some aspects of Catholic observance; finally, they could at some point embrace Anglicanism genuinely and merge into the majority population. All these categories are encountered among the Ravenscrofts.

Before turning our attention specifically to the Ravenscrofts of Barnet, it will be useful to mention some landmark events in the history of anti-Catholic legislation between the accession of Elizabeth I in 1558 and the end of the seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁰ The year 1559 saw both an Act of Supremacy reconfirming the monarch as Supreme Governor of the English church and an Act of Uniformity enforcing the use of the Book of Common Prayer and making attendance at church compulsory, with fines for non-compliance. Particular attention was paid to schools and the two universities in an effort to stamp out the teaching of Catholic doctrine. (Throughout the period of penalisation there was more emphasis on preventing the young from becoming Catholic – in extreme cases, through their forced removal from their parents – than on punishing adults.) In 1570, following the unsuccessful rising of the Northern Earls, the pope excommunicated Elizabeth. From this point onwards, Catholicism was always associated with political disloyalty and work on behalf of Continental Catholic powers (initially, Spain). In 1571 an Act ‘against fugitives over the sea’ was passed; this entailed the forfeiture of all wealth and property of anyone leaving England without permission and not returning within six months of a warning. This was aimed both at those undergoing schooling abroad and at those who might be recruited as agents or missioners. Since the Reformation had destroyed the diocesan structure and seminaries of the Catholic church, the maintenance of necessarily clandestine Catholic education and practice in England depended increasingly on a flow of native-born missioners trained on the Continent. The secret arrival of the Jesuits Edmund Campion and Robert Persons in 1580 began the process. This provoked, in 1585, a special Act against Jesuits that treated all incoming priests as traitors to the realm.

Under James I (reigned 1603–25) and Charles I (1625–49) this body of legislation, with periodic small revisions, remained in force. The first two Stuart kings, although not personally hostile to Catholic belief (Charles I had a French Catholic wife), found it convenient as well as politic to maintain the existing situation, especially since memories of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, cementing the majority population's perception of Catholic disloyalty, made any relaxation of the penalties inadvisable. Ironically, during the Cromwellian Commonwealth (1649–60) following the Civil War the position of Catholics temporarily improved, since the policy of toleration towards Protestant dissenters (Nonconformists) benefited them as well. The Restoration, which began with the installation of Charles II as king in 1660, led to the reimposition of absolute Anglican dominance and the penalties against Catholics. His exile in France had increased Charles's personal sympathies for Catholicism, and in the secret Treaty of Dover made with Louis XIV (1670) the king in fact undertook to profess Catholicism publicly at some unspecified future point. In the event, this point never arrived, and in the Test Act of 1673 all holders of public office of any kind were required to take oaths of allegiance to the monarch and of acknowledgement of his supremacy over the church. In 1678 the strange Titus Oates affair (Oates was an adventurer and agent provocateur who implicated numerous Catholics in an alleged but probably unfounded ‘Popish Plot’) reinforced the trope of Catholic conspiracy.

A short time earlier (1675), however, Charles's younger brother and expected successor James had made public avowal of his Catholicism. As Protestants feared, when he came to the throne as James II in 1685, he set about doing whatever he could to reinstate Catholicism as a tolerated religion, if not yet one preferred by the state. Almost immediately, the rebuilding of the Catholic diocesan structures and of the houses of the major religious orders commenced, and two Declarations of Indulgence removing disadvantages from Catholics were forced through against great public opposition in 1687 and 1688. James also had a project to institute a powerful Catholic presence in the universities. Taking advantage of the death of the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1687, he succeeded, against fierce opposition, in having a Catholic Bishop, Bonaventure Gifford, appointed to the post. In September 1688 a group of theologians and scholastics, and in October a second group of group of teachers and students, arrived at the college from Douay. But their residence in Oxford was short-lived: in October anti-Catholic riots broke out all over England; on 5 November William of Orange landed at Torbay with an invading force; on 11 December James fled to France. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution the penalties were reintroduced with extra vehemence, and a low point in Catholic fortunes ensued for a century.

English Catholic parents wealthy enough (and sufficiently accepting of all the risks) to send their sons abroad to receive a Catholic education during penal times had a wide choice. A whole network of English-speaking educational institutions, combined with seminaries, sprang up on the Continent.Footnote ²¹ The oldest and best known was the English College at Douay (a city originally in the Spanish Netherlands but acquired in 1668 by France) founded by Thomas Allen in 1568, which provided an all-round education at all levels from the rudiments up to university degrees. Noteworthy, too, was the Venerabile, the English College at Rome founded (again by Allen) in 1579. Provision also existed for the daughters of English Catholics to profess their religion as nuns in an English-speaking milieu. We will mention later the Franciscan convent at Bruges (previously located at Brussels and then Nieuport), where several female Ravenscrofts and their close relatives took the veil.

The Barnet branch of the Ravenscrofts was the most Catholic-inclined (and in its day the most prominent) of the entire family. It was founded by Thomas Ravenscroft (1563/4–1631), who was probably born in Hawarden but early in the seventeenth century erected a house at Fold (or Fould) Farm in South Mimms, Middlesex, near the town of Chipping Barnet.Footnote ²² This Thomas became a benefactor of Chipping Barnet. He was a governor of Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, founded there in 1573, and financed the building of the vestry in the church of St John the Baptist (also known as Barnet Parish Church), where his son James erected a magnificent monument to him.

This James (1596–1680) outdid his father in philanthropy and during his long life earned the appellation of ‘The Great Benefactor’. To this very day, he is commemorated in the Barnet area in many ways, including via street names and the names of a school and a park. James attended Jesus College, Cambridge, from where he graduated in 1616.Footnote ²³ Training as a barrister, he was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1616 and called to the bar in 1626.Footnote ²⁴ On 1 January 1628 he married Mary Peck, or Pecke (1603–89), of Spixworth Hall in Norfolk, by whom, between 1628 and 1644, he had seven sons and four daughters, all of whom except the first (Thomas) and last (Edward) were baptised in Alconbury, Huntingdonshire, where the family had its second residence.Footnote ²⁵ James took the royalist side in the Civil War and reportedly paid a price for it.Footnote ²⁶

He appears to have conducted business as a lawyer and merchant from a rented house in High Holborn, London. At some unspecified point or points between 1644 and the 1670s James spent time on the Continent, perhaps in Brussels, where his brother John (c. 1606–81) was a merchant. He was certainly back in London by 1674, when he made a donation of £100 towards the building of the new St Paul's Cathedral.Footnote ²⁷

During the Titus Oates affair he was arrested on suspicion of participation in the Popish Plot. Joseph Gillow relates what then happened:Footnote ²⁸

James also occupied himself with charitable works. In 1679 he set aside income from his properties in the east end of London, out of which he established both a fund for the perpetual maintenance of Barnet Parish Church and a group of almshouses for indigent widows and spinsters in Wood Street, Chipping Barnet, which he named the ‘Jesus Hospital’ in memory of his alma mater.Footnote ²⁹ In 1889 a Masonic lodge in Barnet was established in his name as the ‘Ravenscroft Lodge’. Since in the document recording its foundation James was given the title ‘Master’, one's initial thought is that he himself was a Freemason, but in the absence of any confirmation of this from Masonic records, it seems much more likely that the title merely refers to his position at the head of the Jesus Hospital.Footnote ³⁰

Gillow also records that James went over formally (if covertly) to Catholicism in later life:Footnote ³¹

Many of the printed books James collected must be among those sold at auction in 1709 after the death of his son Thomas, who had presumably inherited them. Gillow mentions the titles of some manuscript devotional tracts authored by James: ‘Of Living Well’ (3 volumes); ‘Off [sic] Life and the Shortness, Uncertainty, and Miseries thereof’ (also known as ‘Of Dying Well’); ‘Fears and Terrours [sic] of Death’; ‘The Theatre of Afflictions and the Triumphs of Patience’.Footnote ³²

Amid such moralistic sentiments, it is a relief to learn that on his tombstone in the churchyard of Barnet Parish Church James is described as ‘a man of untarnished integrity, of a happy disposition, exceedingly well known for the greatness of his mind’.

Leaving aside for the moment James's eldest son Thomas, there is much of interest to say about his ten other children.

Thomasine (1630–80) became at the age of seventeen a Franciscan choir nun at Nieuport, later Bruges.Footnote ³³ Of Elizabeth (born 1631) nothing more is known.

George (1633–83) achieved fame as a merchant and glass-maker. Sent to Douay College together with his elder brother Thomas in 1643, he presented his thesis in Logic in 1649,Footnote ³⁴ but cut short his subsequent training for the priesthood, moving in 1651 to his uncle John's in Brussels.Footnote ³⁵ Both boys, like all subsequent Ravenscrofts at Douay, adopted the alias of Rider, the surname of a Catholic family of West Bromwich, Staffordshire, to which the Ravenscrofts were related by marriage. It is interesting that in the record of their admission in the journal known as the Fourth Douay Diary their mother Mary is described as ‘schismaticorum’ (i.e. an Anglican), and the reason given for their sending to Douay is partly to escape the commotion of the Civil War (‘ad vitandos tumultus in Anglia’) and partly to acquire a good education (‘ut bonis literis imbuerentur’). George studied at the University of Padua in the late 1650s and lived for several years at Venice, where he acquired a fortune as a merchant, working in partnership with his younger brothers John and Francis.Footnote ³⁶ Returning to London in 1666 or earlier, George was active as an importer of Venetian glass, lace and currants. In 1674 he took out a patent to manufacture a new, English variety of lead crystal glass, on which his fame is based. In view of his status as a gentleman, George probably had little hands-on involvement with the new process, but he had an expert collaborator in the shape of Giacomo (or ‘John Baptiste’) da Costa, a glassmaker from the celebrated Jewish glass-making community (università) of Altare in Liguria, whom he had probably recruited in Amsterdam.Footnote ³⁷ Throughout his life, George was particularly close to his father, whose charitable trusts he helped to administer.

Mary (1634–83) married the baronet Sir Charles Golding in 1656. James (1635–1703/4) arrived in Douay with his younger brother John in 1649. Ordained and later active as a priest,Footnote ³⁸ he was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1653 (though never called to the bar). John (1637–1716), as we have seen, spent time in Venice as a merchant. Robert, born in 1639, died only a few months old. On Katherine (born 1640) there is no further information. Francis (1641–92) studied at Douay (he is probably identical with a ‘Franciscus Rider’ admitted on 2 February 1648),Footnote ³⁹ but left on 1 April 1660, because he was considered little suited to literary studies (‘minus ad litterarum studia idoneus’),Footnote ⁴⁰ to join George as a merchant, first in Venice and later in London.

The last child, Edward (1644–1704), took his talents in a different direction. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1659 and to the Middle Temple in 1667 but was never called to the bar. Instead, he became a popular London playwright, specialising in farces.Footnote ⁴¹

After leaving Douay on 27 January 1648 to rejoin his uncle John in Brussels, Thomas worked as a merchant in London. He married (the date and place are unknown) Magdalen Paris, born to a tenaciously Catholic family resident at Pudding Norton Hall in Norfolk, who became the mother of a single child, John.Footnote ⁴² At some point after her death Thomas took a second wife, Frances, whose identity remains obscure. It appears from Thomas's will, dated 23 September 1707, that in later life the couple lived apart, Thomas paying Frances an annual allowance of £60. This will, which was proved on 10 June 1708 following Thomas's death on 20 April that year, provides interesting information of many kinds.Footnote ⁴³ We learn that Thomas was residing at the time in Orange Street in the parish of St Giles in the Fields, Middlesex, and that he owned lands and houses in the parishes of Fenton and Pidley, Huntingdonshire, and at Colston Basset, Nottinghamshire, which he left to James, a son of his late brother Edward.Footnote ⁴⁴ Fold Farm and the surrounding estate were left to James Ravenscroft Stroud, a son of his still-living brother John. Thomasine and Mary, two nieces, were to receive substantial monetary bequests on attaining their majority. But the will holds a surprise: Thomas's servant Martha Richardson (wife of Jeremy Richardson, a journeyman tailor) is made his executrix, is left an annuity of £10 payable from the rent and profits of the Colston Basset estate and is granted the lifetime occupancy of Thomas's house, which after her death is to pass to James Ravenscroft Stroud. Thomas adds:

Predictably, in view of the unusual favour shown towards a mere servant, the two male beneficiaries challenged the genuineness of the will, but the probate court upheld its validity.Footnote ⁴⁵

After his death Thomas was buried in the North Cloister of Westminster Abbey. His pensive epitaph, echoing the moral seriousness of his father James, was thought striking enough to be included in the second volume (containing humorous, whimsical and satirical specimens) of T. Webb's collection of epitaphs.Footnote ⁴⁶ Its three lines read:

Unhappily, Thomas's wish that his library be preserved intact and within the family fulfilled the melancholy prediction of the last line of the epitaph only too exactly. On 24 October 1709 the Daily Courant advertised the printer Thomas Ballard's catalogue of the forthcoming auction, beginning on 7 November, of the Bibliotheca Ravenscroftiana. This catalogue is very rare, but an example survives in the library of Worcester College, Oxford.Footnote ⁴⁷ The over 2,000 volumes it contains are dominated by books in Latin, but there is also a fair quantity of books in French, Italian and Spanish, besides ones in English.Footnote ⁴⁸ No manuscripts are listed, and there are not many books with printed music, but there is a handful of musical collections and primers. The library contains an example of a 1614 edition of The Whole Book of Psalms with Tunes, as well as of Thomas Ravenscroft's The Booke of Psalms of 1633 and John Playford's The Whole Book of Psalms of 1677. There are two examples of John Playford's Introduction to the Skill of Musick (7th edition, 1674; 14th edition, 1700), and two of Christopher Simpson's A Compendium of Practical Musick in Five Parts (1677). This duplication suggests that at least one volume was originally intended for practical use by someone other than the collector himself – perhaps the composer John, to whom we now pass.

There is unfortunately no known information from parish records on the exact date and place of John's birth; he may even have been secretly baptised as a Catholic. It is only from Roman sources that we learn that he was born in London in 1664/5. Since he used the alias Rider in Op. 1, and this surname recurs in Roman documents, it is a fair assumption that he attended Douay College, where until 1688 music formed part of the curriculum.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the Sixth Douay Diary, covering the years 1676–92, has not survived, so confirmation of this hypothesis is not at present possible. He is probably identical with the John Ravenscroft of St Giles in the Fields, gentleman, who on 30 July 1685, in partnership with one Edward Burdet of Gray's Inn, Middlesex, leased buildings and lands in a number of locations in Wiltshire.Footnote ⁵⁰ Since his father Thomas was residing in the same parish in 1708, the information in the deed recording this lease suggests that John was still living with him in London three years before we first catch sight of him in Rome. Seeing that his arrival in that city pre-dated the final crises of James II's reign, he may well have gone there originally just as a visitor, deciding to remain only as a result of the Glorious Revolution.

John Ravenscroft alias giovanni battista rederi in rome

Information gleaned from Roman archives does much to fill in the gaps in the composer Ravenscroft's biography, at least during the last ten years of his life. It tells us that he was born in London around 1664/5 as the son of Thomas. From 1688 to 1697 he lived in Rome in a boarding house in Via del Corso, a short distance past the church of S. Giacomo degli Incurabili (today S. Giacomo in Augusta) on the same side of the street, as one goes towards the Piazza del Popolo. In parish censuses he appears as ‘Giovanni Battista Rederi’, and always in association with the same landlady, who was at least twenty years his senior.Footnote ⁵¹ Earlier, from 1683 to 1687, this landlady was living in the same house together with her husband Giuseppe Cascapera (born around 1623 in Velletri); Ravenscroft, aged twenty-three, arrived in 1688, at which point Giuseppe Cascapera – obviously in order to make room for him – moved elsewhere. In view of the sparseness of biographical information concerning our composer, it will be useful to show, as Table 1, the complete set of entries for this house from 1688 to 1697.

Table 1

Notices of Ravenscroft's residence in furnished lodgings in Via del Corso, Rome

Source: Transcribed from I-Rvic, Parrocchia di S. Maria del Popolo, Status animarum, 1688–97, section ‘Corso verso Ripetta’.

Ravenscroft lived, then, a few minutes’ walking distance from the Piazza di Spagna, which at this time was the heart of the artistic life of the city and the fulcrum of the quarter familiarly called ‘Ghetto of the English’ (Ghetto degli Inglesi). Indeed, most of the tourists from that nation, having entered Rome by the Porta del Popolo (adjoining the square of that name), took up residence in this area, as, incidentally, John Evelyn had earlier done, in 1644–5. Especially during the eighteenth century there sprang up in the neighbourhood of the Piazza di Spagna numerous inns expressly named after England or London, in addition to several watering holes, such as the Caffè Greco (still in existence), that the English frequented (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁵² Already in those days, and until late in the twentieth century, the palazzo of the British ambassadors was located in the Piazza di Spagna.Footnote ⁵³

Figure 1

David Allan, The arrival of a young English traveller and his suite during carnival in Piazza di Spagna, Rome, c. 1775. The Royal Collection © 2012 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

On 9 October 1697, from his sickbed, Ravenscroft dictated his will, in which, finally, his true surname is given. From this will (see the transcription in the Appendix) we learn that his place of birth was London. Attached to it is an inventory of his property, which was drawn up in his presence on the same day. On 12 October he passed away. The same document tells us that his death occurred in his home in Via del Corso, where he received the last rites. He was buried in his parish church of S. Maria del Popolo:Footnote ⁵⁴

The personal details given in this document contain the same error (‘fil[ius] Ioannis’) and the same vagueness over age (‘annorum 35 circiter’) that we noted in the Status animarum (an annual parish census usually prepared during Lent) for 1697. Evidently, the parish priest drew on that document for the death notice. These two entries are at variance with the complete consistency of the same details (like those referring to John's landlady) in the Status animarum entries for earlier years (see Table 1). From the latter, one may safely conclude that John was the son of Thomas and born in 1664 or 1665.

As his executor John named ‘Monsignor Illustrissimo e Reverendissimo Odoardo Vualdegrave [Waldegrave]’, a ‘Clericus Londinensis’ of whom it is known that in 1699 he was appointed by the Pope as prior of the prestigious church of S. Maria in Via Lata, lying in the stretch of Via del Corso close to the present-day Piazza Venezia. Waldegrave was certainly a person of some distinction, seeing that in the document nominating him Innocent XII describes him as a regular table companion (continuus commensalis).Footnote ⁵⁵ This prelate was, however, no luckier than Ravenscroft, since he died, aged only thirty-one, on 20 April 1702. From the death notice we learn that Edward was the son of the late baronet Charles Waldegrave and that he became, after the death of Innocent XII, a cameriere d'onore of Clement XI. He lived in the papal palace on the Quirinale and was buried in S. Maria in Via Lata to the accompaniment of a solemn Mass, in which the choir of the Sistine Chapel participated:Footnote ⁵⁶

Ravenscroft arrived in Rome precisely at a time when, in musical matters, it enjoyed Europe-wide supremacy. In 1686 Richard Lassels, an English tourist who paid several visits to the Eternal City, voiced his admiration for the music he heard there:Footnote ⁵⁸

According to Hans Joachim Marx, as late as 1707 Handel, on his arrival in Rome, ‘found a musical culture whose artistic level surpassed that of all other European capitals’.Footnote ⁵⁹

In his Memoirs of Music (written c. 1726–8) Roger North observes: ‘most of the yong nobillity and gentry that have travelled into Itally affected to learne of Corelli, and brought home with them such favour for the Itallian musick, as hath given it possession of our pernassus [sic]’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The ‘molt'illustre Signor Giovanni Ravenscroft figlio del Signor Tomasso da Londra’, as his will styles him (see Appendix 1), certainly belonged socially to this group: indeed, his Op. 1, published by Mascardi in Rome in 1695Footnote ⁶¹ and dedicated to Ferdinando III de’ Medici (with whom, however, he seems not to have had any direct relationship), constitutes, as we noted earlier, a perfect paradigm of Corellian style. In his preface to this collection of Sonate a tre Ravenscroft pointedly styles himself an amateur rather than a professional, a description supported by the total lack of known documentary evidence for any professional activity – an involvement for which he would have needed, at least in the case of performance in churches, to be a member of the Roman guild of professional musicians, the Congregazione di S. Cecilia.Footnote ⁶² If we then consider that despite his lively activity as an amateur musician and (as we shall see shortly) as an art collector, he owed at the time of his death only the last instalment of the rent for his lodgings, we may reasonably conclude that the source of his income was his family, a supposition only reinforced by the fact that he named ‘Signor Tomasso Ravenscroft suo amatissimo padre’ as his universal heir (see Appendix 1).

The only references to music in the inventory of Ravenscroft's possessions concern unspecified musical works and ‘cinque violini fatti di mano di Mattheo Albon, con due archi per sonare’ (‘five violins made by Mattheo Albon, with two bows’).Footnote ⁶³ Two violins by the Tyrolese maker Mathias Alban (also Albani, Albano, born Caldaro/Katern 1621, died Bolzano/Bozen 1712) are listed in the same year, 1697, among the four left by the Roman musician Carlo Mannelli, also known as ‘Carlo del violino’, a fact confirming the esteem in which this maker was held.Footnote ⁶⁴ Further, at least one violin by him was owned by a pupil of Mannelli, Nicola Cosimi. The autograph accounts of the second violinist – dated 12 January 1702, when he was already working in London – record payment to him from an English pupil ‘per il violino di Mattia Albò che gl'ò portato da Roma’ (‘for the violin by Mattia Albò that I brought him from Rome’). Amnden, this pupil, returned it on 20 April 1704 as part-payment for his violin lessons, on which occasion Cosimi called it ‘un violino di Mattia Albò mediochre’ (‘an indifferent violin by Mattia Albò’) and noted that it was ‘per vendere’ (‘to be sold’).Footnote ⁶⁵ The references just mentioned are therefore further pieces of evidence supporting the supposed presence of Albano in Rome to add to that supplied by the label found in one of his violins: ‘Matthias Albano fece in Roma 1668’.Footnote ⁶⁶ From recent archival discoveries we also learn that this maker worked in the shop of two noted makers active in Rome: Martin Artz (1665) and Andrea Portoghese (1666).Footnote ⁶⁷

In all probability, Ravenscroft knew two makers whose shops were close to his house: Giacomo Ertlè (in Via del Corso, in the stretch lying between the churches of S. Carlo and S. Giacomo) and Leone Ceroni (in the neighbouring Via di Ripetta).Footnote ⁶⁸

There is no further biographical information of musical relevance concerning Ravenscroft in Rome. In his will and inventory the only references to persons of his acquaintance, apart from his executor, are to two painters with whom he had business dealings, as we shall shortly learn. In contrast to many Roman wills of the period, there are no mentions of friends, servants, colleagues or teachers – not even a little present or souvenir for the landlady who lived with him and had looked after him for almost ten years. There is nothing to connect him with the musical life of the city, not even among the pictures in his collection, which are totally devoid of portraits (in contrast to the collections of Pasquini, Mannelli and Cosimi).Footnote ⁶⁹ The impression is of a strongly introverted personality. The fact that, like Mannelli and Cosimi, he owned a number of violins by a maker who had not been active in Rome for some time makes one wonder whether he did not have some kind of personal link to these two. Although no contemporary source bears witness to a personal relationship with Corelli (leaving aside the claim, perhaps merely speculative, in the Vienna manuscript of Op. 1 that Ravenscroft was his pupil),Footnote ⁷⁰ it is clear that Corelli was at least close to Cosimi, seeing that the latter's property list records as its sole portrait (apart from the two of Cosimi himself) one of the master of Fusignano.

Ravenscroft lived during a period when some of the leading professional violinists were on the verge of leaving Rome for London. Indeed, Nicola Cosimi, teaming up with the young cellist Nicola Francesco Haim, departed in 1701 for that city.Footnote ⁷¹ Gasparo Visconti (known in England as ‘Gasparini’ or ‘Gasperini’), another associate of Cosimi, made the move the following year.Footnote ⁷² In view of his apparent detachment from the social life of Rome and the fact that he remained throughout his ten-year sojourn in lodgings, one wonders whether Ravenscroft harboured thoughts of eventually returning to England. Of course, unlike the Italian professional violinists, he had no financial incentive to live in England rather than Italy, but his main reason for staying away is likely to have been, on the positive side, the uniquely inspiring (for Catholics) religious climate of Rome and its thriving musical life, and, on the negative side, the real disadvantages and even dangers he faced in his native country if he practised his religion openly there.

We must finally consider Ravenscroft's activity as an art collector. The collecting of pictures was a highly fashionable activity among the leading Roman families of that time. This is shown by the annual exhibitions, which, at least between 1680 and 1725, the academician Giuseppe Ghezzi organised in the church of S. Salvatore in Lauro, where even Arcangelo Corelli took part. Other musicians, too, were caught up in the universal mania for collecting pictures: among them, Bernardo Pasquini, our Ravenscroft, Nicola Cosimi, Angelo Olivieri and Bonaventura Argenti. Ravenscroft's collection comprised forty-four works by contemporary artists active in Rome, who include Jan Frans van Bloemen, Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, Giuseppe Consiglieri, Michelangelo Corbi, Gaspard Dughet, Dirk Theodor Helmbreker, Filippo Lauri, Jan Remigius Leemput (known in Rome as Giovanni Remigi), Jan Momper and Salvator Rosa. This is a notable collection, when one considers that it was probably put together in a mere ten years and must have entailed a considerable financial outlay.Footnote ⁷³

Ravenscroft lived only a short distance from the painters’ quarter, which, just as today, was centred on Via del Babuino and Via Margutta, both of which lie between the Piazza di Spagna and the Piazza del Popolo. He was therefore in a good position to establish personal relations with many of the artists represented in his collection, some of whom predeceased him by a few years. A special word is needed on Giovanni Bartolomeo Chiari (born Rome, 1654; died Rome, 1727), since it was he who executed the actual picture used for the engraved vignette showing a lyre-playing Orpheus surrounded by stringed instruments and the Medici arms that appeared in 1695 on the title page of Op. 1. Not previously identified, this picture (see Figure 2) needs to be added to Chiari's oeuvre. In fact, given that in his property list Ravenscroft claims to have paid Chiari 20 scudi in advance for ‘un quadro che gli deve fare’ (‘a painting that he is to do’), one wonders whether this is not a version in oils of the engraving (presumably copied from a preliminary drawing), which is shown, perhaps significantly, with a full frame surround.Footnote ⁷⁴

Figure 2

Title page of Ravenscroft's Op. 1, engraved after a picture by Giuseppe Chiari. Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Bologna

Ravenscroft had a special liking for Filippo Lauri (born Rome, 1623; died Rome, 1694), an internationally known artist of Flemish parentage (his father, also a painter, was Balthasar Lawers). Until his death, Lauri lived in Via dei Greci, also only a few minutes away from Ravenscroft's lodgings. This painter, incidentally, had musical interests: in his studio he kept a two-register harpsichord.Footnote ⁷⁵ Ravenscroft owned as many as seventeen works by him – unsurprisingly, since the two men shared a predilection for Arcadian and mythological subjects.Footnote ⁷⁶ Among the paintings by Lauri in the collection is an Ecstasy of St Francis also featuring a violin-playing angel, a work that the composer bequeathed to his executor Waldegrave (the rest of the collection, as we saw, passed to his father). Strangely, Waldegrave's own similar property list (1702) has no trace of the Ecstasy.Footnote ⁷⁷

Ravenscroft had personal knowledge also of Jan Remigius Leemput (rendered in Italian as Giovanni Remigi by turning the second forename into a surname), who lived in Via del Babuino and died there in 1695. In addition to listing one painting by Remigi, Ravenscroft mentions the artist's Roman wife, Claudia Simonetti, on fol. 725^v of the inventory:Footnote ⁷⁸

A son of the same painter, Ferdinando Remigi,Footnote ⁷⁹ was among the witnesses to Ravenscroft's inventory and will.

Ravenscroft's legacy

News of John's death reached England quickly, perhaps as a consequence of the shipment home of his effects. The official manuscript report of the heraldic visitation of Norfolk in 1664, which contains many later additions, inserts into the genealogy of the Paris family ‘John Ravenscroft dyed at Rome 9 Oct. 1697 unmar[ried]’ and into that of the Ravenscroft family ‘John only child died at Rome 9 Oct. 1697, s[ine] p[role]’.Footnote ⁸⁰ The quoted date is actually that of John's will, not his death, from which one may conclude that this document was the source of the information. The same information was repeated without alteration in the third volume (1769) of Francis Blomefield's historical survey of Norfolk.Footnote ⁸¹

John was remembered by his family in a particularly fitting way. Among the musical manuscripts acquired after his death by his father must have been a set, ready for publication, of six chamber sonatas in three parts following on, alla Corelli, from the church sonatas of Op. 1. These were published on 10 January 1708 by the London bookseller Isaac Vaillant, brother of the François Vaillant who was Estienne Roger's appointed agent. The sonatas were advertised the same day in the Post Boy. Their title page, featuring a Latin motto commemorating the composer (which can be rendered in English as ‘Virtue [with the added meaning of virtuosity] lives on after death’), is worded in the advertisement: ‘Sonata [sic] di Camera, a doi Violini, col Basso Continuo. Del Sig. Giovanni Ravenscroft, Englese [sic]. Opera Secunda. Vivit post Funera Virtus. Fairly Engrav'd, Price 4s’.Footnote ⁸² There is no small irony in the fact that Thomas, or whichever other family member financed the publication, enlisted the help of a French Huguenot refugee to publish the music of an English Catholic exile. A new edition, ‘engraven in a better caracter and more correct than the former edition’, was produced very quickly – perhaps later the same year – by John Walsh and his associates John Hare and Peter Randall, under the description of ‘Sonatas or Chamber Aires’.Footnote ⁸³ Later still, but not after 1712, Estienne Roger brought out his own edition, a ‘seconde edition corrigée trez exactement sur la partition’, which was augmented by four sonatas by Neapolitan composers: two by Giovanni Antonio Guido and two by Pietro Marchitelli.Footnote ⁸⁴

In England, Ravenscroft's Op. 2 seems to have been more popular than Op. 1; the fact that it existed in locally produced editions doubtless played its part. An example of the Vaillant edition today held by Magdalene College Old Library, Cambridge, originated in the collection of the Ferrar family, which between c. 1690 and 1710 was prominent in a Cecilian Music Society in the coaching town of Stamford in Lincolnshire.Footnote ⁸⁵ Hawkins tells us that Thomas Britton, the ‘small coal man’ who held concerts at his own house, owned an example of ‘Ravenscroft's Ayres’, which must refer to the Walsh edition.Footnote ⁸⁶

Very soon, this brief revival of interest in Ravenscroft's music was over, and the only musician named ‘John Ravenscroft’ in public view was a humbler, probably only distantly related, namesake: a wait (civic musician) of Tower Hamlets who played in the band at Goodman's Fields Theatre in Stepney, composed a few songs and a great many hornpipes, and in later life (as he stated when acting as a character witness in a trial at the Old Bailey in 1745) may have kept a coffee-house in Smithfield.Footnote ⁸⁷

But there is an unexpected postscript. Near the end of the eighteenth century, when interest in older music, which constituted a kind of counter-canon alongside the dominant canon exemplified by Haydn and Mozart, was enjoying relatively wide currency in England (for example, at the Concerts of Ancient Music), some unknown person took the trouble to write out calligraphically a group of thirteen four-part fugues in open score attributed to a ‘Sig[no]r Giov[ann]i Ravenscroft’, which would appear to have used as its copy-texts material sent or brought back to England either before or after the composer's death (for the combination of Italian given name and English surname places his identity and location beyond doubt).Footnote ⁸⁸ In an archaising spirit, the copyist deliberately retains many features of what one imagines to have been the original notation: sharps are used instead of natural signs before the note B (a practice particularly favoured in Britain but also current in Italy in the mid-seventeenth century), and breves retain the characteristic old-fashioned shape of a ‘double tilde’ framed by vertical strokes.

The fugues are all through-composed, mono-sectional movements in alla breve (4/2) metre. The first is in a kind of ‘deformed’ Phrygian mode with a void key signature, in which F♮ is frequently replaced by F♯, and other sharps (before C, D, G and even A) are liberally added even in the absence of explicit chromaticism. The remaining twelve form a cycle based on subjects in each of the twelve ecclesiastical modes as defined in the sixteenth century by Heinrich Glarean. Depending on the chosen tessitura, the notation employs either the ‘natural’ (F4, C4, C3, C1) or the ‘high’ (F3, C3, C2, G2) clef combination.

The style of these pieces is extraordinary. To summarise and simplify: they have a strong affinity of musical language with works of fantasia type composed in the early seventeenth century by composers such as Sweelinck, but their undeviating focus on a single subject (plus countersubjects), without any change of textural type, metre or tempo en route, brings them much closer to the Italian ricercar tradition, as represented by Frescobaldi and his followers.Footnote ⁸⁹ One is struck by the avoidance, in true stile antico spirit, of purely episodic writing – in complete contrast to Ravenscroft's Corelli-imitating trio sonatas. The long opening fugue, ninety-three bars long, even manages to avoid formal cadencing (after the fashion of Biagio Marini's Sonata senza cadenza) until the very end. Could Ravenscroft really have written in such an archaic and severe style, either because he had received a particularly conservative musical education in England or because, prior to his discovery of Corelli, he had been taught by a similarly backward-looking master in Rome?

Until a point shortly after the submission of this article, the authors believed so, offering the hypothesis (which in retrospect looks rather far-fetched) of a ‘first’ and ‘second’ compositional style in Ravenscroft's music, and even discerning traces of English influence in the works of the first group. We were disabused of this idea through a strange happenstance. Michael Talbot had just produced a published edition of the thirteen fugues, of which John Collins, a specialist in organ music, had early sight. Collins recognised from memory one fugue from the ‘modal’ set of twelve and through it discovered that the complete cycle of twelve fugues was contained in the collection Partitura seu tablatura italica written and published by Johann Klemm in Dresden in 1631.Footnote ⁹⁰

The chromatic fugue preceding the set in the London manuscript is not included in the Klemm print or known from Continental sources. However, although it is slightly longer than any of the fugues in the ‘modal’ cycle and tonally a little more modern, it is so similar in overall conception that Klemm must now be considered the prime candidate for its authorship. There is no absolute proof that Ravenscroft is not its composer, but in the changed situation following Collins's discovery his claim is seriously weakened. Naturally, the possibilities are not limited to Klemm and Ravenscroft.

It remains, however, to explain the explicit attribution to Ravenscroft of the chromatic fugue and of the first fugue in the cycle of twelve. Were these acts of deliberate plagiarism or some arbitrary addition or substitution by a copyist or collector? We believe that there is another possible explanation. In the keyboard score of the chromatic fugue held by the Fitzwilliam Reference Library, Cambridge,Footnote ⁹¹ the piece is headed ‘Pr Mr. John Ravenscroft’. Could the enigmatic and unconventional ‘Pr’ be a contraction of Latin ‘Per’ in the sense of ‘via’? This would suggest an identification of Ravenscroft as the intermediary through whom this music reached England rather than necessarily its author. Such a hypothesis accords well with the fact that the Fitzwilliam volume includes other items with Continental and, significantly, Roman connections, and was in part copied (the copies include that of the chromatic fugue under discussion) by the organist John Harris (1677–1743), who, as a Catholic (his father was the prominent organ-builder Renatus Harris), will most probably have belonged to the same social and musical network as Ravenscroft. The latter could certainly have sent music requested by his circle to England during his residence in Italy, and other musical items will presumably have travelled back among his effects after his death. This possibility is certainly one to explore in the future.

Returning to biographical matters, our final task is to assess Ravenscroft's profile as a musician. Clearly, his position is a distinctive one that does not fit neatly into any familiar category. We might be tempted to view him as the ‘last recusant composer’, which would place him at the end of a long line initiated by Tallis and Byrd and continuing with Bull, Philips and Dering, but unlike all those men he was not a professional musician and held no salaried musical posts. On the other hand, he was unlike other prominent English amateur musicians in choosing to settle permanently in Rome and ‘go native’. He must have supported the Jacobite cause, but he did not, to our knowledge, frequent the Stuart court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye or engage in exile politics. The details of how he managed to support himself in Rome, acquiring not a few luxuries, for at least ten years are elusive, but he clearly enjoyed the support of his family, based partly on the Continent and partly in England, where it shielded itself from legal penalties most of the time by outward religious conformity.

Ravenscroft's surviving music would be interesting and revealing even if we did not know the biographical background. With this knowledge, however, we can view him in a new light: as an English gentleman-composer of a very recognisable kind – but, more important, also as one drawn physically and emotionally to Italy for special religious and political reasons in addition to the more ordinary musical and cultural ones. At the time of his arrival in Italy Ravenscroft probably had a modicum of training in the English musical tradition, even if none of his surviving compositions can be connected directly to his homeland; but he was sufficiently young and enterprising to forge an identity as an adept disciple of Corelli. Alfred Einstein's famous quip, reported by Newman, that Ravenscroft's sonatas were ‘more like Corelli's than Corelli's own sonatas’Footnote ⁹² falls into the exaggeration characteristic of most bons mots but expresses very felicitously the composer's eagerness to identify fully with his new surroundings and perhaps, also, an exile's awareness that his future, in the event cut tragically short, lay in Italy rather than England.