The Peace of Ryswick was one of the most significant political achievements of the reign of William III. From the point at which he was crowned joint monarch with his wife Mary early in 1689, he directed English foreign policy and military power toward constraining the dominance in Europe of Louis XIV's France. William played a central role in constructing the Grand Alliance, in which Emperor Leopold I, Spain and the Dutch Republic joined with England against the French in the Nine Years War. The war was ended by a series of treaties signed in the Dutch city of Rijswijk in September and October 1697, which among other stipulations and exchanges of territory forced Louis XIV to recognize William III as the rightful English monarch rather than the exiled James II. In England the Peace was marked by a great outpouring of musical works of various sorts, including anthems by John Blow and William Davis, odes by Jeremiah Clarke and John Weldon, and a variety of songs and entertainments by Vaughan Richardson, Philip Hart, William Williams and Thomas Morgan. Perhaps the most notable and unusual of all of these works was Europe's Revels for the Peace, a collaboration between the émigré Huguenot writer Peter Motteux and the composer John Eccles.

No source records the date of the first performance of Europe's Revels, though the title-page of the printed libretto indicates that it was given at Little Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, where it must have been staged. The work is a generic oddity involving elements of court ode, dramatic opera, masque and street entertainment in praise of William's martial exploits and their dividend of peace. As Motteux's description of the work as a ‘musical interlude’ suggests, Europe's Revels is not a full evening's entertainment. In its earliest performances it was almost certainly performed with another work; when despite its occasional subject it was revived in 1706, it received seven performances with three different plays.

The work opens with a single-movement symphony in D major for two trumpets, kettledrums and four-part strings with continuo, full of martial bombast, but with two attractive string passages that rescue it from banality. An English officer steps forward to call the Britons to arms in an extended bass solo accompanied by the same forces as the opening symphony. Motteux's text draws heavily on the example of the second scene of Dryden's King Arthur: the dramatic action of William crushing his foes is described by the officer, and then repeated to new music by the chorus of Britons. Eccles captures the excitement of battle – ‘Squadrons pouring; / Shouting, / Routing’ – but does not take the opportunity for colourful harmonic contrast offered by ‘Rage and horror, groans and fear, / Blood and slaughter ev'rywhere’. As the chorus ends ‘A Lady, Messenger of Peace’ steps forward to sing a fine song in D minor accompanied by a pair of recorders and continuo in praise of the now pacific William. She then breaks into a bright D major to call representatives of several nations to revel and dance.

Here the interlude shifts to a broad comic masque in which Spanish, Dutch, French and English couples dance consecutively in their characteristic styles. The English Clown (a rustic peasant rather than a modern circus clown, as the editor helpfully explains) offers a coarse evaluation of the relative merits of each nationality's terpsichorean habits, and then suggests a partner-swapping English hornpipe. A series of vocal movements follows in which Eccles matches his musical setting to the stereotyped treatment of a number of non-English characters. In a dialogue a French officer woos an English lady in Franglais, which Eccles sets to cod Lullian recitative. Next an Irish Rapparee (an irregular soldier who fought on the Jacobite side against William in his Irish campaigns) sings in Motteux's approximation of a brogue to an E minor melody with modal inflections and Lombardic rhythms. Jig-like rhythms characterize an extended duet between an English country lass and a soldier returning from war, which partakes of the manner of Purcell's duet for Coridon and Mopsa from The Fairy Queen. The songs conclude with a ballad for a Savoyard itinerant musician, once again with an accent indicated in Motteux's text. The Savoyard presents his ‘raree show’, probably a portable case opened to display a series of miniature scenes with figures that move when a handle is turned. Eccles provides the simplest of melodies for his strophic song, with a refrain in dialect based on a Provençal proverb. This was apparently the most popular piece from Europe's Revels. The editor lists three printings: in a set of three songs from the interlude published by Henry Playford, in Pills to Purge Melancholy (London, 1699) and as late as the 1740s in a single sheet with an engraved illustration. To these can be added a song sheet engraved for voice and continuo by Thomas Cross, a copy of which is preserved at Chetham's Library in Manchester (a digitized image is available through the Library's website at https://chethams.inforlib.uk/iguana01/www.main.cls?surl=search&p=*#recordId=1.29352&srchDb=1). Cross seems usually to have produced such engravings as quickly as possible after the first performance, and he presumably identified the Savoyard's song as that with the most commercial potential.

As the Savoyard exits, twelve grenadiers enter, ‘who rejoice for the king's return, and exercise at the sound of the hautbois and other instruments’. With their exercises complete they leave the stage and the Britons return, restoring the mood and musical expression of the beginning of the interlude in two rather perfunctory choruses – very much in the style of a court ode – between which the ‘Lady, Messenger of Peace’ sings another short song to the accompaniment of a pair of recorders and continuo. As can be deduced from this description, Europe's Revels is not a sophisticated entertainment, indulging in broad national stereotypes, crude humour and hyperbolic praise of William. Similarly, it is not a panacea of European partner-swapping for everyone; the duet between the English country lass and soldier alludes to the difficulties of the latter following demobilization, the Savoyard comments wryly on a captain who curses the Peace and the Irish Raparee drowns his sorrows in usquebaugh.

Europe's Revels is the fifth A-R Editions volume of Eccles's music, and indeed, were it not part of a project to edit the composer's complete oeuvre, the work would not be an obvious candidate for a modern edition. It is fortunate, then, that Michael Burden's edition is so well conceived and executed. Although the work is presented complete, no single source provides all of the music. It must be assembled from three disparate sources: a non-autograph manuscript containing all of the vocal music (British Library, Add. MS 29378), Thomas Bray's Country Dances (1699), containing six or possibly seven of the dances in two parts, and the printed libretto. The order of the numbers as found in the manuscript and libretto does not agree entirely, and some speculation is needed to match titles in Country Dances to the descriptions in Motteux's text. Burden handles these problems convincingly, and clear editorial comments and a useful table offer a transparent account of his method. Only in relation to the ‘March’ for the twelve grenadiers was I left uncertain about Burden's choice. This is the dance in Bray's collection least clearly identifiable as belonging to Europe's Revels. Presented in B flat major in Country Dances, Burden transposes it up a major third so as better to fit the tonal scheme of the work, but this results in an uncharacteristically high-lying melody line. As he does for all of the two-part dances, Burden supplies two inner parts, but here also suggests, following the cue for ‘hautbois’ in the libretto, that an oboe doubles the melody line, and he adds an editorial kettledrum part. It seems possible to me that the grenadiers may in fact have performed their exercises to the accompaniment of a military oboe band, a number of which were attached to English regiments at this time.

As a preface to the musical text, Burden provides an edition of the lyrics and spoken texts, thoroughly and helpfully glossed. In this section, as in the excellent Introduction, those elements of the work that may be obscure to modern users are explained clearly. The edition also includes six well-produced plates. That of the song sheet featuring an engraving of a performer presenting his ‘raree show’ – it may, in fact, represent that of the original production – is especially welcome in terms of understanding the context and performance of the Savoyard's song.

In musical terms Europe's Revels is an uneven work. It is easy to imagine that in its original performances any limitations in the music were more than compensated for by the dancing and the colourful interpretations of the songs, but a full performance of the work today would be problematic for modern sensibilities. Nevertheless, the first song for the ‘Lady, Messenger of Peace’, ‘Peace tunes the world’, shows what Eccles could do at his best, and would be a valuable addition to the concert repertory from the period. Just as significant is the contribution the edition makes to our understanding of a noteworthy cultural response to the Peace of Ryswick. In this regard it is especially timely as an example of an attempt to represent England's ever-changing relationship to Europe, a project that remains as contentious now as it was in 1697.