Robert Testwood, professional singer and evangelical mischief-maker, is one of the memorable characters in John Foxe’s Acts and monuments. Footnote ¹ The three revised editions of Foxe (1570, 1576 and 1583) follow the saga of Testwood from his successful choral audition at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in 1534 to his execution for heresy nine years later.Footnote ² The story consists largely of a series of colourful anecdotes told by Testwood’s fellow-musician John Merbecke, who was a member of the same choir and an eyewitness to the events in Windsor, and whom the original edition of the Acts and monuments in 1563 had wrongly reported as having been burned at the stake for his own evangelical activities.Footnote ³ Foxe made amends for this gaffe by obtaining correct information from Merbecke – who was still very much alive – and adding it when he revised the book.Footnote ⁴ (In this article, quotations from the narrative are from a manuscript fair copy of Merbecke’s written testimony used and annotated by Foxe during his preparation of the 1570 edition.Footnote ⁵)

One of the anecdotes is particularly striking because it takes place in the very act of music-making.Footnote ⁶ Testwood was singing in a duet that invoked the Virgin Mary in extravagant terms as ‘redeemer and saviour’, ‘O redemptrix et saluatrix’. He sabotaged the performance by changing the words in his own part to ‘Non redemptrix / nec saluatrix’, ‘neither redeemer nor saviour’. There was ‘good laugheng in sleues’ at Testwood’s antics, but the incident also ‘greued his aduersaries wonderfully’ and left them ‘sore offended’. This ‘pretye story’ can in fact be given a quite precise date. As we shall see, it took place in mid-May 1538, at a particularly volatile moment of religious unrest in and around Windsor. This article traces the last decade of Testwood’s career in light of his act of sonic iconoclasm and the events preceding and surrounding it – events that also reveal a number of things about the experiences of singers during the early years of the English Reformation.

We first hear directly from Testwood in an undated letter from the early 1530s, one of only three surviving documents in his own hand.Footnote ⁷ This is a request for help addressed to Thomas Cromwell. After the fall of Wolsey and the dispersal of the cardinal’s musicians, Testwood has found himself in precarious employment: ‘as your Mastershypp dothe well knowe / I was in my lorde cardinalles college in Gypswiche / and now I am in a servyce that stondythe myche by caswalteis and more lykele to decaye then to encreace’.Footnote ⁸ He asks Cromwell ‘to do for me’ what is necessary to find a new post. At this point the two men already had a well-established connection via the ambitious though short-lived Cardinal College, Ipswich, where Cromwell had helped set up a choral foundation with Testwood as master of the choristers. In fact the story of Testwood’s life told in the Acts and monuments refers to ‘Mr Cromwell the kynges Secretory / who was his greate frende’:Footnote ⁹ this is in the manuscript copy of Merbecke’s reminiscences; by the time the phrase ‘his greate frende’ reached the printing press in 1570, Foxe, always attentive to fine shades of meaning, had modified it to ‘hys speciall frend’.Footnote ¹⁰

Testwood’s second extant letter was written on 30 May 1534, shortly after he had joined the choir of St George’s, Windsor.Footnote ¹¹ It is addressed to John Whalley, a senior servant of Testwood’s ‘greate frende’ Cromwell. This letter shows the singer directly involved in the Henrician project of monitoring and denouncing dissent; it also contains some slightly undignified begging to become even more involved. It is a cover letter accompanying ‘sertayne Articles’, now unfortunately lost, of which Testwood wishes ‘to make relacyon with all spede unto my right worshypfull master cromwell … for it wyll aduawntage the kynges grace ij or iij M. li’ – £2,000 or £3,000. Testwood tells Whalley that some members of the extended household of St George’s, servants of the canon Christopher Plummer, should have their property seized on the basis of ‘dyuers cawsys the which I doo knowe by the rehersall of other’. Just two days earlier, on 28 May 1534, Plummer had been reported directly to the king for ‘certen wordes spokyn agenst your graces person’.Footnote ¹² Testwood makes a further request to ‘shew this my symple letter unto master Cromwell’ and a general offer to keep an eye on the situation in Windsor: ‘and also if it shall please mr Cromwell that when eny shall come in this besynes that I shall have any knowlege I shall with all dilygence helpp and to [sic] gyue suche cowncell as shalbe moste convenyent as well for letters as other thynges for the kynges advawntage’.Footnote ¹³

The next step came swiftly and decisively. On 4 November 1534, Testwood, Merbecke and all the other ‘ministers of the college … from the hiest to the lowest’ were summoned to an emergency meeting at ‘eyght of clock in the mornyng’, were told ‘that the Acte of the Kynges Suprymacy passed in the parliament house’ the previous day and were ordered to collect ‘all the popes pardons that hange aboute the churche / to be brought in to the chapter house / and cast in to the chymney & brent’.Footnote ¹⁴ That was how the Reformation officially arrived at St George’s: with torn-down parchment and open flame, not with refined academic debate. Great learning was certainly no deterrent to vandalism at this moment in English history: Sir George Lawson was walking with John Leland in York Minster in June 1534 when Leland spotted a reference to papal authority on a detailed historical tabula ‘hangyng upon the walle’.Footnote ¹⁵ Lawson promptly ‘cutt oute… and raysed’ the offending passage.Footnote ¹⁶ Leland, an exceptionally gifted and conscientious historian who was passing through York on the first of his antiquarian journeys, did not object to this act or try to stop it. Roger Bowers is quite correct when he describes St George’s as ‘a factory of prayer and music, and no forum of sophisticated learning’.Footnote ¹⁷ There was, however, some sensitivity to what was being prayed and sung, and that sensitivity grew more acute in the early Reformation as the political situation became more tense.

Some of the tension was already built into the complex hierarchy of the ‘ministers of the college’. At the top, ‘the hiest’, were the dean and twelve canons. A number of them were grand pluralists and habitual absentees; in fact the sustained periods when canons were in residence were seen as notable enough to be marked by special ‘residence dinners’, one of which, hosted by the vehemently traditionalist John London, was the occasion for another public protest by Testwood against the invocation of saints.Footnote ¹⁸ On the next level down from the canons were the resident clergy who were appointed to be physically present in choir and to carry out the regular round of worship: sixteen of them as specified by the revised statutes in 1522, eight senior (the so-called minor canons or ‘peticanons’) and eight junior (the vicars choral).Footnote ¹⁹ The bedrock of the system at St George’s was formed by the thirteen clerks, ‘the lowest’, the lay professional musicians. They sang plainsong at every canonical hour, and enriched many of the services with elaborate polyphony, improvised harmony and organ music. Their duties were unrelenting and required long hours daily in the chapel.Footnote ²⁰ Testwood grumbled in his letter to Whalley in May 1534 that he had wanted to hand deliver some documents to London, but it ‘wolde haue ben thoughte off all owre masters the chanons where abowte I had gone’.Footnote ²¹

‘Owre masters the chanons’ – the sneer is audible, and there is more at play here than simple class resentment. Much of the reforming impulse at Windsor seems to have come from the lower-ranking members of the establishment. The higher clergy of St George’s, on the other hand, remained a generally traditionally-minded group during these early years. We can see this divide in a letter sent from Windsor by Whalley himself on 27 April 1534, reporting that several of the lay professional singers there, including John Wilson and Robert Guy, had denounced their dean, Richard Sampson, for having expressed dismay about recent religious developments and for having ‘prayed unto god / that we were not skurged as they were in Almayn which he ffeyred shortely shuld com to passe’.Footnote ²²

When the break with Rome was first announced in the chapter house in November 1534, Merbecke observed that ‘when the Canons herd this / they were all strycken in a dompe’, stunned and depressed.Footnote ²³ They could see the first cracks appearing in the foundations of their community. The establishment of St George’s had to a large extent been built up as a splendid edifice of intercessory prayer for the souls of the founder Edward iii, his family, his successors and the many benefactors of the college and chapel. The ‘popes pardons … cast in to the chymney & brent’ that morning were papal indulgences available for the spiritual benefit of chapel staff and visiting pilgrims. The staff were ‘commanded’ at that meeting to destroy those documents and ‘to call hym pope no more’; anyone who did not comply would lose ‘the benefite of that house’ – would be ejected from the community – and would be ‘taken / for an utter enemy to God and to the kynge’.Footnote ²⁴ For the priests of St George’s, the first decision would have to be made on a quite intimate level within the next twenty-four hours, as each one of them celebrated his own daily private mass as required by the statutes of the college.Footnote ²⁵ Would he omit the reference to ‘papa nostro’ shortly before the consecration, at a point where he was already speaking so softly as to be practically inaudible to his colleagues? There would certainly be nowhere to hide a few months later, with the greater litany sung constantly during Lent, the solemn prayers chanted on Good Friday and the Exultet proclaimed on the vigil of Easter, all of which featured prominent mention (or not) of the pope.Footnote ²⁶ At that point the sound-world of the chapel, and of Testwood’s choir, had begun its slow transformation.

The third and last surviving document from Testwood’s own hand was written in December 1536. It is a letter to Cromwell’s prize propagandist Richard Morison.Footnote ²⁷ Here Testwood offers some more information about the ‘dyuers cawsys’ of evangelical discontent in Windsor, including ‘lewde’ behaviour by a priest and ‘abhomynable and blasphemous’ preaching. He asks Morison to let Cromwell ‘haue knowlede [sic] off these thynges’, and he notes that ‘Mr Doctor Haynes and I dyd wryte owte sertayne artycles’ of the offending sermon. Simon Haynes, appointed a canon of St George’s on 21 December 1535, was one of the few members of the higher clergy there who strongly favoured the Reformation from its early years.Footnote ²⁸ Haynes served a term as dean of Exeter Cathedral in the later 1530s, where he suppressed pilgrimages, censored choirbooks and reappropriated liturgical funds for the godly education of children.Footnote ²⁹ He was not in a position to make such changes at Windsor, but he clearly wished to see them implemented. For the evangelical choirmen of St George’s, he was a friend in high places. This friendship would play a crucial role during the investigation of Merbecke and Testwood for heresy.

The most telling detail in Testwood’s third letter, however, is in the salutation at the beginning: ‘Good master Moreson … I commend me unto yow with manyfolde thankes for your grete kyndenes and love showde unto me and now yn especyally off late unto my brother and frende William Graye the brynger off this my symple scryblyng.’

William Gray was a distinguished ballad-writer who rose to prominence in the later 1530s when Cromwell employed him to create Reformation propaganda in song. The name and surname are not at all uncommon in Tudor England, but it is clear that we are dealing here with the balladeer William Gray of Reading because Morison indeed helped him – or at least tried to help him – in the last months of 1536, interceding with the abbot of Reading to attempt to bring Gray back into his favour despite some unspecified conflict in the recent past.Footnote ³⁰

Gray’s most substantial and widely circulated work was his polemical ballad The fantasie of idolatrie, composed at Cromwell’s request in 1538.Footnote ³¹ We know that the ballad was commissioned by Cromwell because Foxe tells us so when he reprints all fifty verses of it in the first edition of the Acts and monuments. Footnote ³² It occurs immediately after the account of Cromwell’s death, where it is presented as an epitaph or encomium on what Foxe considered to be his life’s work. Foxe’s introduction to the ballad praises Gray as one of the ‘freshe and quicke wyttes … by whose industrie and ingenious labours, diuerse excellent both ballades and bookes were contriued and set abroade, concernyng the suppression of the Pope and … the great multitude of idolatrus pylgrimages’.Footnote ³³

The fantasie of idolatrie is a revolutionary text. It has been aptly described as ‘both a progress report from Cromwell’s household on the attack on the cult of the saints and a manifesto revealing its real objectives’.Footnote ³⁴ The targets of Gray’s satire include shrines (the shrine of John Schorne at Windsor is singled out for special mockery), pilgrimages, relics, the veneration of saints both great and small and the whole panoply of ‘fayned miracles’. Some of the material ‘in this same lytle song’ (as Gray calls his own ballad) makes Testwood’s blasphemies seem mild by comparison, as when Gray imagines the crucified Christ of the Boxley Rood, that medieval tour de force of lifelike wooden stage puppetry, sneaking away from his shrine at night for priapic adventures.Footnote ³⁵ Gray’s own travels between Reading and London would have taken him regularly through nearby Windsor, where he seems to have found an eager audience for this sort of extreme iconoclastic balladry, as well as an opportunity to convey local information directly from Testwood to the royal court.

Two verses of The fantasie of idolatrie contain a spirited attack on ‘Forest the Frier / That obstinate lier’. Foxe tells us that ‘Upon the galowes was set in greate letters these verses’ at the exceptionally slow and gruesome burning alive of the Franciscan friar John Forest on 22 May 1538, as a new phase of religious controversy reached its peak.Footnote ³⁶ There could hardly have been a more graphic context in which to encounter a new song. The author of that song was the ballad-writer whom his fellow evangelical Testwood called ‘brother and frende’, and whom Testwood entrusted with carrying documents to Richard Morison, another master of Cromwellian propaganda.Footnote ³⁷

The prevailing mood in Windsor by that point is captured in detail in a set of depositions taken there during a heresy investigation on 5 and 6 April 1538.Footnote ³⁸ The catalyst for the investigation was a casual remark made on 3 April ‘aboute the houre of v at after none’ by Robert Guy, ‘on of the syngyng men within the kynges College of Wyndesore of the age of xxxvj yeres’.Footnote ³⁹ He was standing outside a local fuller’s shop, ‘kervyng with a knyffe in a pece of box’: this was boxwood, a popular material at the time for fine carving, including the preparation of woodblock initials and musical instruments.Footnote ⁴⁰ Two bakers, Richard Orchard and John Tyle, passing by in the street, ‘stayd at the sayd shop in beholdyng the keruyng’. Guy tried some banter with them: ‘ye maisters how say ye to a dyshe of butterd Egges’. Easter was late that year, 21 April, and Windsor was still very much in the midst of Lent, a delicate matter in 1538 because the king had just issued a new dispensation on 11 March allowing his subjects to eat ‘whyte meates’ – dairy products and eggs – during that season.Footnote ⁴¹ Tyle, the baker, took the bait and said that he would not touch any eggs until Easter. Guy, the singing-man, who obviously shared the reformist views of his colleagues Merbecke and Testwood, responded that this was all a ‘tradicion of the bisshop of Rome’ in any case. A servant chimed in from inside the shop and was angrily told: ‘pece / apply thy work’. Guy went on into an anticlerical diatribe, telling stories of priests in town who had said indiscreet things to two different married women in confession and had told one of the women to make an offering at the shrine of the saintly Henry vi in Windsor Castle. He had also noticed that one of the priests had been suspiciously quiet in the pulpit, neglecting to mention any of the king’s recent injunctions. All of this Guy considered ‘lyke to preuy tratory’.

The two women were summoned and interrogated. The first was Alyce Merbek – the unusual surname is also spelled ‘Merberke’ and ‘Merbeke’ by the scribe – ‘of the age of xxx yeres’.Footnote ⁴² This was clearly John Merbecke’s wife, who would go on to play a significant role in the narrative of the Acts and monuments when her husband was imprisoned for heresy.Footnote ⁴³ On this occasion she simply attested to the truth of what had been said in the street a couple of days earlier: ‘the sayng of Robert Guy tochyng the wordes of the Curate who demanded a certayne woman maryd whether she had at any tyme carnally commyttyd wt any besyde hyr husbande she sayng nay / he sayd ye may thanke god / but many in this toune haue done’. Revealing the contents of other people’s confessions to a third party, even in a clumsy attempt at moral edification, was (and had been for hundreds of years) a serious breach of church law and a textbook illustration of what the document called ‘an undyscrete gostly father’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Guy could only have found out about this remark via his colleague John Merbecke or possibly even from Alyce herself, who had clearly found it offensive enough to complain to her husband, if not to her wider social circle.

The second woman questioned was Agnes Wilson, also spelled ‘Wylson’ and ‘Willson’ at various points in the document. This deponent was almost certainly the wife of the singer John Wilson, given Guy’s immediate familiarity with her story as well as Alyce Merbecke’s story. (‘Wylson’ – surname only – was also recorded as a member of the choir in 1541–2, the year closest to 1538 for which we have a full roster, a list that also includes Testwood, Merbecke and Guy.Footnote ⁴⁵) Agnes Wilson’s case was much less crass and more nuanced. As she tells it:

It is heavily implied here that Agnes Wilson’s husband already had a reputation for being on the leading edge of religious change, and that ‘syr peter the morow masse prest’, who, in his own deposition, affirmed her report ‘to be playne and trew in all poyntes’, wanted to warn her away from merely following him without reflection. By the time the story was retold second-hand or third-hand by Robert Guy, this warning had become a blunt instruction to ‘be not ruled by the husband for he is nought / and if thu be / he wyll make the nowght also’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Sending her to the shrine of Henry vi for her penance was certainly a sharp traditionalist nudge. It was also a practice that was being publicly mocked in William Gray’s satirical verses at this exact moment in 1538, and the priest must have known that the shrine had recently been attracting criticism – some of it involving Testwood, who had confronted a group of pilgrims for ‘running a whoring’ to Henry’s relics, and who had openly mocked ‘kynge harries spurres and his hatt’ as the choir lined up for a procession on ‘relique Sonday’.Footnote ⁴⁸

All these events were taking place in a paranoid atmosphere, where the slightest suspicion of heresy or treason – which often amounted to much the same thing in late-Henrician eyes – was investigated with the utmost thoroughness and seriousness. Buttered eggs were no joking matter, and it took barely forty-eight hours for things to escalate from a casual argument outside a shop to the full machinery of a state inquiry ‘commyttyd by the kynges highnes’ to the dean of St George’s and the mayor of Windsor. In some ways the case was a storm in a teacup, an absurd waste of resources. In other ways it was a set of controversies that went straight to the heart of everyday life in this community: food, sex, gossip, spiritual practice, household authority, the flash of an exposed knife in the street, tempers fraying ‘aboute the houre of v at after none’ as Lent dragged on for another day.

By this point, at least four of the thirteen singing-men of St George’s – Testwood, Merbecke, Guy and Wilson – were known for their evangelical leanings. In fact Merbecke was able to report to Foxe, recalling the state of things at the end of the 1530s, that the clerks’ ‘company for the most parte at that tyme favored the gospell’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Merbecke shows no signs elsewhere of exaggerating the evangelical influence in Windsor – for him, it was always something precarious, in danger of collapse and extermination – so it seems safe to take him at his word that the balance among the thirteen singing-men had ‘at that tyme’ shifted toward reform. We already know of four who were flushed out by official enquiries. It is easy to imagine that there were a few more who ‘favored the gospell’ but may have been on the quieter side.

A related conflict in Windsor in spring 1538 involved Testwood meddling with a theologically problematic text ‘sett up’ in the chapel. According to the Acts and monuments, this took place immediately before the musical duel between ‘O redemptrix’ and ‘Non redemptrix’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this case, the offending text seems to have been seen rather than heard:

Testwood ‘pluckt it downe secretely’, and ‘the next day after was a nother sett up in the same place’ . He then ‘plucte away’ this replacement openly in full view of the dean of the chapel, William Franklin, who had very recently been ordered to preside over some uncomfortable heresy investigations involving his choirmen and their wives, and ‘mr deane (beyng a tymerous man) made no more ado with him at that tyme’.Footnote ⁵²

What were the contents of this ‘foolyshe pryntid paper in meter’?Footnote ⁵³ What we read in the Acts sounds very much like an approximate recollection of one text in particular: the metrical prayer Ave cuius conceptio, whose rhyming stanzas praise the Virgin Mary and recount the great events in her life, calling them in turn ‘our redemption … our purgation … our glorification’ (‘nostra fuit redemptio … nostra fuit purgatio … nostra glorificatio’).Footnote ⁵⁴

This fifteenth-century Northern European text crossed the English Channel in the early Tudor era. It circulated among élite English readers at first, most notably in the devout circles associated with Syon Abbey and in a miniature illuminated manuscript made for the private use of John Islip, abbot of Westminster.Footnote ⁵⁵ It became more broadly popular in the 1530s, when it made its way into a number of the Regnault primers that were printed in large quantities for the English market in the final years before the Reformation took hold.Footnote ⁵⁶ ‘A certayne foolyshe pryntid paper’ strongly implies a free-standing leaf rather than anything contained in a book, although no single-page printed broadside of any version of Ave cuius conceptio has survived in England, not surprising given the fragility of single leaves and the suppression of all such prayers not long after 1538. This may well have been a ‘paper’ that was ‘pryntid’ in some quantity, since a second copy could be found within a day after the first copy was removed. It appears to have been posted in the chapel for silent reading or for individual spoken recitation, not for any kind of singing; it was ‘sett up att the Quere dore’, at the literal threshold between quiet and loud devotion.

Ave cuius conceptio was also cultivated as a sung prayer in England. There are several polyphonic settings of the poem, including one by Nicholas Ludford in the Peterhouse partbooks (c. 1540), one indexed in the Eton Choirbook (c. 1502–4) but now missing because of the loss of some pages from the manuscript, and another preserved anonymously in British Library, ms Harleian 1709 (c. 1530) in the extremely unusual enhanced format of a self-contained miniature polyphonic liturgy (a full ‘suffrage’ or ‘memoria’), even including a notated pause for the choir while the priest intones his own prayer.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ludford’s setting of Ave cuius conceptio in Peterhouse happens to be copied side by side with what was almost certainly the motet whose words Testwood mocked in public, the five-voice Lauda vivi Alpha et O by the prominent Chapel Royal composer Robert Fayrfax. In fact the Peterhouse scribe seems to have caught the scent of controversy in Lauda vivi, because he toned down the offending phrase from ‘O redemptrix et salvatrix’ to ‘O precatrix et adiutrix’ (‘O intercessor and helper’), a reading unique to his copy.Footnote ⁵⁸ The crucial Reformation issue shared among all these texts is the question of redemption mediated through Mary: ‘O redemptrix’, ‘ascribyng unto her … oure redemption’, ‘nostra fuit redemptio’. That was one thing that ‘Testwodd could not abyde’.

At this point we can investigate Testwood’s act of musical iconoclasm in greater detail. A ‘longe songe … called Lauda viui’ had been ‘sett up’ – that term once again – as a showpiece for a prominent guest singer who was visiting from another royal establishment, ‘Robert Philips gentylman of the Kynges Chapple’.Footnote ⁵⁹ This piece of music included a verse for two solo singers, invoking the Virgin with the text ‘O redemptrix et saluatrix: which verse (of all other) Robert Philips wold synge / because he knew that Testwodd could not abyde that dittye. Now Testwodd knowyng his mynde well enough: / joynid with hym at the other parte.’ The result was a sung confrontation between the two men. ‘Testwodd was as quycke on the other syde to aunswere hym agayne with Non redemptrix / nec saluatrix.’ We are told that ‘Robert Philips / with other of Testwodds enemyes / were sore offended’ at this turn of events, and Testwood was now a marked man among the more traditionally-minded Windsor clergy, who were already saying that he ‘wold roste a faggott for this gere one day’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Merbecke immediately follows the ‘Non redemptrix’ anecdote with some valuable context: ‘It was not .14. dayes after this / or that the lordes of the Garter (as their custome is yerely to do) came to Wyndesore to kepe S. Georges feaste. At which feaste / The Duke of Norfolke was president.’Footnote ⁶¹ The annual feast of the Order of the Garter was officially appointed for St George’s Day, 23 April, but in the first half of the sixteenth century it was almost always deferred until a few weeks later.Footnote ⁶² The festivities were generally presided over by a knight of the Garter who took the ceremonial place of the monarch; Henry viii presided in person just once during his whole reign.Footnote ⁶³ The only year in which the duke of Norfolk served as the king’s deputy during the relevant decades was 1538. Two separate lists in the register of Garter observances in Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Ashmolean 1116, identify Thomas Howard, third duke of Norfolk, as having presided in 1538 (the Black Book of the Order is unhelpfully missing its entry for that one year). The register also gives the exact date of the feast that year: 26 May.Footnote ⁶⁴ The description ‘not .14. dayes after this’ places our ‘pretye story’ squarely in mid-May 1538.

Testwood’s declaration that the Virgin Mary was ‘neither redeemer nor saviour’ would have gone by quickly enough in performance, but it had a strong effect on a number of the people who witnessed it. Within the next two weeks they ‘made a grevous Complaynt on Testwodd’ to Norfolk, who had just arrived in Windsor to preside at the Garter feast, and who ‘shoke him up and all to reuyled hym / as thoughe he wold haue sent hym to hangyng by and by’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Why such vehement reactions to a gesture that Merbecke himself tried to downplay in his narrative as merely a ‘mery pranke’ and a ‘pretye story’?Footnote ⁶⁶ Spring 1538 was already a time of great religious disruption and unrest in and around St George’s. An equally crucial factor here was the music that was being sung. The ‘longe songe … called Lauda viui’ is, for a number of reasons, very unlikely to have been anything other than the five-voice motet by Fayrfax. Lauda vivi is not one of the familiar votive prayers to the Virgin so often set to music in early Tudor England. In fact there is only one known text beginning with those words at all, a long and extravagantly aureate prayer (‘prefulgidissima … mellifluissima … incomparabilissima’) which features a petition for the good estate of ‘glorious Henry the Eighth’ (‘Henrico octavo inclito’). This was clearly a bespoke devotional text for use in royal circles. There is only a single known musical setting of the text, the one by Fayrfax. The ‘counterverse that began on this wyse: O redemptrix et saluatrix’ is set by Fayrfax as a duet, for bass and contratenor voices.Footnote ⁶⁷ The duet unfolds just as the story describes: the bass enters with ‘O’, and the contratenor is ‘quycke on the other syde to answere’ a single beat later, which Testwood took as an opportunity to interrupt his visiting colleague Robert Philips with a very audible ‘Non’, catching him by surprise. One of the many things we learn from this anecdote is that Philips sang bass. He was not just ‘a notable syngyng man (wherein he gloried)’; he was also a direct successor of the Chapel Royal ‘contrabassi’ who impressed the musically astute Venetian diplomatic secretary Nicolo Sagudino with their ‘jubilation’ in 1515.Footnote ⁶⁸

Testwood and Philips obviously brought some pre-existing rivalry to the music lectern at St George’s. They had both been boy choristers of the Chapel Royal, they had served together under Wolsey and the narrative of the Acts and monuments makes it clear (‘he [Philips] knew … Testwodd knowyng his mynde well enough’) that they were intimately familiar with each other’s weak spots: Philips as a vain and virtuosic soloist who expected to be offered ‘the best and longest songe’ wherever he went, Testwood as a brusque iconoclast who ‘could not abyde’ to hear elaborate invocations of the saints.Footnote ⁶⁹ Their rivalry was both musical and ideological. In fact the tale itself shows that those two threads had become inextricably entangled by May 1538.Footnote ⁷⁰ In some ways this ‘pretye story’ was a turning point in Testwood’s fate. He could hardly have chosen a more audacious moment to disrupt the music: in one of the most iconic architectural spaces of the regime, in a well-known piece of court repertory, just after invoking Henry viii by name, in the presence of a distinguished musician visiting from the Chapel Royal, during the immediate preparations for the Garter feast. The narrative of the Acts and monuments does its best to depict Testwood as a sort of holy fool, a ‘mery conceyted’ man innocently speaking truth to power, but this was more than a jest. He may have thought that ‘his greate frende’ Cromwell would protect him, but Cromwell did not survive for long.Footnote ⁷¹ Testwood’s own life ended in 1543 at the heresy tribunal and the stake.Footnote ⁷²

John Merbecke, who ensured Testwood’s place in sixteenth-century martyrology by telling his story to Foxe, very nearly suffered the same fate as his colleague. Unlike the local heresy proceedings involving Robert Guy and his fellow singers five years earlier, which are almost light reading by comparison, Merbecke’s interrogation and trial in 1543 was a long ordeal that included threats of torture (‘if thou wylt not tell by fayre meanes / those fyngers of thyne shalbe made to tell’), three weeks spent incommunicado in solitary confinement and various other attempts at coercion.Footnote ⁷³ The one time Merbecke began to weep openly was when his interrogator was trying to bully him into betraying Simon Haynes and another learned friend.Footnote ⁷⁴ Having failed at that, ‘the gentylman’ moved on to grilling him about his weak Latin.

The official cause of Merbecke’s arrest was his literary and textual work rather than anything having to do with music. Heresy and orthodoxy were dangerously moving targets during the last decade of Henry’s reign, and old-fashioned religious practices were briefly back in vogue by 1543, which put some of Merbecke’s recent activities beyond the pale. He had been compiling an alphabetical concordance of the Bible in English; he had got up to the letter ‘L’ when his manuscript was seized by the authorities.Footnote ⁷⁵ He had copied a substantial text by John Calvin, De fugiendis impiorum illicitis sacris. He tried to defend himself by recalling that he had ‘wrytten out’ the ‘Epistle of Mr John Caluyne’ in 1537 or 1538, ‘.v. or .vj. yeres ago’ at the time of the interrogation, before the new conservative strictures of the Six Articles had come into force.Footnote ⁷⁶ He also insisted that it had been a purely professional job done in haste for a colleague at St George’s, with no time for ‘delyberacion’ and no personal investment of his own in the contents of the text.Footnote ⁷⁷ That certainly appears to have been true for some other documents Merbecke wrote out, including the canon William Tate’s will in 1540 (which included a quite unreformed instruction for mass to be sung ‘for my soule’ by a designated priest for a full year), and, later on, a Sarum rite Collectarium for the canon John Somer in 1557–8.Footnote ⁷⁸ The interrogator was not convinced in this case. He asserted that various marginal notes in Merbecke’s copy of Calvin were in the handwriting of none other than Simon Haynes. This was clearly not the disinterested work of a professional scribe; it was evidence of a dangerous network of radical reformers at St George’s that spanned the ranks from lay singing-men to senior clergy.

Merbecke was also found to have ‘three bookes of Notes’ in his own handwriting – some of them not at all compatible with current orthodoxy – ‘which he had gathered out of other mens workes / vj. yeres ago’, in 1537.Footnote ⁷⁹ A committee of distinguished clergy was convened in Fulham Palace, and Merbecke was brought there under guard from the Marshalsea prison and questioned about his manuscripts:

Merbecke was quite open about his own lively interest in ‘all sortes of bookes’ and his desire to ‘come by knowlege’. It was already clear from his earlier interrogations that he had been taught basic Latin grammar as a chorister but had no higher education in theology, literature or rhetoric; he himself would declare in 1550 that he had ‘neuer tasted the swetnes of learned Letters’.Footnote ⁸¹ What he did have was insatiable curiosity about a wide range of texts.Footnote ⁸² His ‘three bookes of Notes’ have not survived, but there is one learned text from the 1530s that we can be absolutely sure he encountered and read with some ‘delyberacion’. We know that because he set it to music.

Domine Jesu Christe fons bonorum omnium is a text by the Dutch humanist scholar Cornelius Crocus (c. 1500–50). It concludes his long series of prayers on the Passion, the Precationes (also titled the Piae meditationes) in passionem Iesu Christi. The substantial text set to music by Merbecke, the sixtieth and last of the prayers, is the point at which the narrative finally turns to resurrection and new life. Crocus’ Precationes seem to have become something of a classic on all sides of the Reformation debate, and the final prayer Domine Jesu Christe fons bonorum omnium eventually gained some popularity as a free-standing item (sometimes under the title Corn. Croc. precatio) in devotional anthologies. The Precationes were first published in 1531 in Antwerp.Footnote ⁸³ They reappeared in no fewer than nine other editions during the 1530s, usually alongside various other humanist works – including the Precationes aliquot novae of Erasmus, from which Katherine Parr would select, adapt and translate two substantial prayers during her years as Henry’s last queen.Footnote ⁸⁴ Parr’s work came into more direct contact with the world of polyphonic singing when another of her humanist-inspired translations, Se lord and behold, adapted from a text by John Fisher, was set to the music of Tallis’s Gaude gloriosa, one of the few motets of that generation even longer and more ornate than Merbecke’s.Footnote ⁸⁵

Domine Jesu Christe is one of only three extant Latin-text works by Merbecke: one mass and two motets, all in ample, sonorous and well-crafted pre-Reformation style. Modern commentators have generally treated these items as mere juvenilia and passed over them in haste, eager to move on to his better-known English settings from the Book of Common Prayer.Footnote ⁸⁶ This particular piece may have escaped further notice simply because its first three words are the most basic and universal of Christian prayers. One also suspects that the composer himself, who by his mature years was excoriating the Church of Rome as ‘that purple Whore’, did not do much to help keep his own early works in circulation.Footnote ⁸⁷ Domine Jesu Christe survives in only one source. That source is a set of manuscript partbooks compiled for John Sadler, a prosperous Elizabethan merchant-grocer in Norwich who had wide-ranging musical tastes going back to the early sixteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁸ The piece is notably not found in the copious manuscript collections of Sadler’s contemporary John Baldwin, a singing-man of St George’s, Windsor, who seems to have had extensive access to musical sources there. It is no surprise that this music caught Sadler’s attention, especially the spectacular harmonic swerve that suddenly happens a few minutes into the piece.Footnote ⁸⁹ The new and unexpected chords occur on the phrase ‘regenerans nos’ – the topic of regeneration, like that of redemption, being another great flashpoint of Reformation fervour and controversy.

Merbecke’s music closely follows the printed text of Cornelius Crocus’ Precationes, with the exception of a few deliberate edits. Some of the edits transform the text from a personal prayer in the singular into a collective prayer in the plural, a shift that would soon be made wholesale in much of the new English liturgy and the music composed for it. There is also the deft excision of one clause in Crocus’ original, in which he uses the word tyrannide. The ‘tyranny’ defeated here is of course the power of death itself, but it may just have been too politically fraught a word to write, speak or sing in the wake of the Treason Act passed in 1534 – what Sir Thomas Wyatt memorably called ‘the lawe of wordes’ – which made it a capital offence in England to ‘publish’ or even to ‘pronounce’ that the king was a ‘tyrant’.Footnote ⁹⁰ These changes to the text were almost certainly made by someone whose skills in Latin composition and grammar were a few notches above Merbecke’s, perhaps by the person who gave him the words to set to music. The whole piece evokes an atmosphere of close contact and friendship between professional singers and learned men – exactly the sort of network that caused such panic among heresy investigators.

Musicians did not take part in élite theological debates or hold positions of power in the Henrician Church, but the doctrinal struggles of this generation were played out in public worship, physically enacted and experienced daily in choirs. This was especially true in prominent choral foundations such as St George’s, where the lives of singers were never entirely out of the public eye. The backlash against religious dissenters in Windsor in 1543 was doubtless part of a more general attempt at rooting out ‘evangelical contamination’ in royal circles after the fall of Cromwell and the passing of the Six Articles, but Testwood and Merbecke were not just pawns caught up in a much larger game.Footnote ⁹¹ The events in the years leading up to their trial suggest that the heresy commissioners had some very good reasons for investigating singing-men in particular.