The reign of Charles I is perhaps better known for its political – and therefore cultural – implosion in the 1640s than it is for its sophisticated and progressive attitude to the arts. However, in the glory years of the 1620s and 1630s, certainly in musical terms, Charles I's court can be characterised as adventurous and innovative, and the king, surrounded by the best musicians of the age, created an active and progressive musical culture that, for a period, rivalled that of the best European courts. The characterisation of English court music as ‘progressive’ may, at first, seem odd given the general slow engagement of English musicians with the Italianate ‘Baroque’, but in terms of private instrumental music the achievement was significant. A central figure in all this was William Lawes (1602–45), the subject of John Cunningham's impressive new study.

Charles I's patronage of musicians began with a vengeance even before he became king, for whilst still Prince of Wales he appointed seventeen musicians to his household. These included six singer-lutenists he inherited from his late brother, Prince Henry, to which he added six more of his own. But it was in the field of string-consort music that Prince Charles's musicians really made their mark. The prince employed four of the country's most eminent composers of consort music, Alfonso Ferrabosco the younger (c. 1575–1628), John Coprario (c. 1570/80–1626), Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) and Thomas Lupo (1571–1627), and together they were responsible for extending the range of scorings employed in the English fantasia idiom and for the introduction of the violin into contrapuntal music. Prince Charles was himself a skilled performer on the bass viol (having been taught by Alfonso Ferrabosco) and, according to John Playford, ‘could play his part exactly well on the Bass-Viol, especially of those Incomparable Fancies of Mr. Coperario to the Organ’ (An Introduction to the Skill of Musick, 10th edn (London, 1683)). Although the violin had first appeared at the English court in 1540, it was used almost exclusively for dance music until about 1620 and Coprario was one of the first composers to use the violin in contrapuntal consort music. In 1622 Prince Charles formed a violin and viol ensemble – ‘Coperario's Musique’ – that consisted of Lupo, John Woodington and Adam Vallet (violins), Ferrabosco II and Coprario (viols) and Gibbons (keyboard). Once the violin had become established as an instrument for ‘serious’ contrapuntal chamber music, court composers began experimenting with new forms and scorings using mixed groups of violins and viols with keyboard (usually organ) and/or theorbo. Coprario, William White (1571–1634) and John Jenkins (1592–1678) composed works for two bass viols and organ; Lupo for two treble and two bass viols; and Lupo, White, Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656) and Jenkins for two treble and one bass viol; in all these scorings the treble viol could be replaced with the violin. From the point of view of later development, the combination of two trebles (or violins) and a bass is important, for we would appear to have the nascent trio sonata texture (although the organ part cannot yet be called a true basso continuo part). One of the new forms to emerge was the fantasia-suite, a modern term used to describe a fixed three-movement sequence of fantasia and two dances: an almain and a galliard that usually concluded with a short coda in duple time. This form appears to have been invented by Coprario, developed by William Lawes, and seems to have remained a court genre until the Civil War, after which it was more widely disseminated. The importance of these court consort pieces cannot be overestimated, for they stand at the head of a tradition that was to culminate in the trio sonatas of Henry Purcell and, as such, perhaps herald the beginnings of the English musical Baroque.

When Charles succeeded to the throne in March 1625 he was faced with a problem: he already had a sizeable household of his own which he needed to somehow amalgamate with the personnel that he inherited from his father. Charles's solution was to retain most of both households with their existing salaries; only seven of his musicians from his time as Prince of Wales were not reappointed. The extra numbers of musicians necessitated a reorganisation of the royal music and the various groups of musicians (such as the ‘Musicians for Lutes and Voices’ and the ‘Musicians for the Violins’) came under the overall control of the ‘Master of the Musicke’, Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666), whose duty it was to oversee both the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ secular music-making at court. The ‘King's Musicke’ provided musical entertainment for court dinners, for dancing, for masques, ‘play nights’, and intimate chamber music. However, it seems that the most progressive music was reserved for the more intimate surroundings of the Privy Chamber. The ‘Private Musick’ performed chamber music and vocal pieces for the king's private delectation and the musicians continued the innovative work pioneered when Charles was still Prince of Wales.

The confidence of the Caroline court's musical establishment must have taken a knock in the late 1620s with the deaths of a number of its foremost musicians: Orlando Gibbons died suddenly at Canterbury on 5 June 1625 while the court was awaiting the arrival of Queen Henrietta Maria from France, Coprario died in the summer of 1626, Lupo in the winter of 1627–8, and Ferrabosco in March 1628. But the court's musical identity was reaffirmed in 1635 with the appointment of William Lawes as a ‘musician in ordinary for the lutes and voices’ and the image of a progressive musical culture was secured. William Lawes's links with the court must pre-date his appointment in 1635. The earliest version of his Royal Consort (suites of dances) appears to date back to the late 1620s and thus it is possible that he was composing for the ‘Lutes and Voices’ several years before his official court appointment. His elder brother, Henry (1596–1662), was appointed as ‘a musician for the voices’ in 1631; this would presumably have given William access to court musicians, if not to the court itself. William Lawes's consort music represents some of the most adventurous instrumental music of the time and his fantasia-suites and his harp consorts, in particular, single him out as the heir to Coprario. Towards the end of the 1630s Lawes returned to the composition of fantasias in more traditional scorings with his Consort Setts for five and six viols and organ. This may at first seem surprising, but it appears that the more old-fashioned viol fantasias remained in the court repertory and were performed alongside the more progressive pieces until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642.

John Cunningham's handsomely produced book is the third to be devoted entirely to the music of William Lawes (following Murray Lefkowitz's pioneering study William Lawes (London, 1960) and David Pinto's difficult but rewarding ‘For ye Violls’: The Consort and Dance Music of William Lawes (Richmond, 1995)). It is divided into three sections. The first sets the scene with an examination of music at the court of Charles I and provides a context for the study of the instrumental music. It offers a very thorough summary of the existing scholarship concerning the Caroline court and its musical structures and concentrates, in particular, on the King's ‘Private Music’, for much of Lawes's surviving consort music was written for this context. Cunningham is surely correct to assert, as Lefkowitz and Pinto had before, that William Lawes must have had strong unofficial connections with the Royal Music for a number of years before his formal appointment on 30 April 1635, and that the obvious link was through his teacher John Coprario, to whom he was apprenticed in the household of Edward Seymour, Earl of Herford c. 1619–26.

The second section of the book, in the form of the extended second chapter, deals with William Lawes's autograph manuscripts. This chapter is supported by Appendices giving full bibliographic descriptions and inventories of the manuscripts and an index of watermarks and rastrum rulings. The system used by Cunningham for his manuscript descriptions is based on that of The Viola da Gamba Society Index of Manuscripts Containing Consort Music compiled by Andrew Ashbee, Robert Thompson and Jonathan Wainwright (Ashgate: vol. 1: 2001; vol. 2: 2008), and provides the supporting documentation for many of the comments and arguments promoted in the subsequent chapters of the book. The Appendices also provide researchers working on seventeenth-century music manuscripts with a wealth of information for comparative purposes. This is one of the key uses of such apparently dense and impenetrable data and the publisher, the Boydell Press, is to be congratulated for allowing the author to present such material (many publishers would have asked for it to be cut). Cunningham's examination of the manuscripts is impressive and it leads to a substantial revision of the chronology suggested by Lefkowitz and to some different conclusions from Pinto. The valuable and perceptive comments on William Lawes's signatures and handwriting prove useful for postulating datings for the specific manuscripts and for some proposals regarding their chronology. Important here is Cunningham's suggestion that the bulk of Lawes's surviving output was composed before c. 1640 – perhaps not surprising given that Lawes's consort music was composed for the court which was in disarray after the outbreak of civil war (even if there was a pretence of normalization after the court's removal to Oxford in 1642). The arguments are supported throughout by black-and-white facsimile images of manuscripts (over sixty in all), which reveal the variety in Lawes's handwriting. Cunningham explains this variety cogently through examining the differing functions of the manuscripts. Thus, in the important early source British Library Add. MSS 40657–61 (‘The Shirley Partbooks’, copied before c. 1633), Cunningham demonstrates that the two versions of Lawes's hand previously thought of as an ‘early’ and ‘late’ hands are better characterized as the ‘formal’ and ‘rushed’ hands and do not necessarily carry chronological implications (although it is a shame that the description of the partbooks, p. 279, still uses the term ‘later hand’). Thus manuscripts copied in Lawes's ‘formal’ hand – British Library Add. MSS 40657–61 (hand ‘A1’), Add. MS 17798, and the original sections of Bodleian Library Mus. Sch. MSS D.229 and D.238–40 – are characterized as ‘presentational style’ in terms of function and contrast to ‘informal’ manuscripts for Lawes's own personal use (such as Bodleian Mus. Sch. B.2–3, British Library Add. 31432, and Harvard, Houghton Library MS Mus. 70). The Harvard manuscript, a sole surviving partbook of an original set of three containing lyra-viol trios in tablature, was discovered by Murray Lefkowitz too late to be included in his 1960 monograph, so it is particularly useful to have a detailed and thorough assessment of this important source from Cunningham.

The third section of the book comprises six chapters on Lawes's consort music in which various topics are examined, including chronology and Lawes's compositional process. Chapter 3, ‘The Music for Lyra-Viol’, is particularly important because it concerns an understudied repertory. Again the context, particularly of the lyra-viol trios, is that of the court with Lawes demonstrating a complete mastery of the idiomatic possibilities of the instrument and following the stylistic exemplars of Ferrabosco II and Coprario. Chapter 4 is a thorough summary of the issues relating to Lawes's ‘Royall Consort’ which, in stressing the progressive nature of court consort music, in turn provides a through context for the examination of Lawes's Viol Consorts (chapter 5), the Fantasia-Suites (chapter 6) and Harp Consorts (chapter 7). Lawes's thirty pieces that make up the harp consorts are unique in the English consort repertory and are amongst his most accomplished court compositions. They are scored for violin, bass viol, theorbo and harp and may therefore represent a late incarnation of the English tradition of the ‘broken consort’ (a combination of ‘unlike’ instruments). The issue of the type of harp that Lawes intended for his consorts has proved contentious. Today most scholars follow Peter Holman's line – as does Cunningham – that Lawes was writing for the wire-strung chromatic Irish harp. The arguments are well rehearsed by Cunningham but it might be added that, if the heritage of the harp consorts is the Elizabethan ‘broken consort’, then we should remember that the bandora and cittern are, like the Irish harp, wire-strung instruments. It is interesting, however, that most recordings of the harp consorts choose to use – presumably for practical reasons – the gut-strung Continental double or triple harp.

Chapters 5–7 include important new information and a fresh outlook on a number of issues. The suggestion that the harp consort pieces originally derived from two-part pieces is particularly important and another significant aspect of these chapters is the study of William Lawes's ‘division’ style of writing. This issue is important, too, in the penultimate chapter ‘The Suites for Two Bass Viols and Organ’ (chapter 8); this chapter draws together a number of threads concerning Lawes's compositional process. The book ends with a succinct conclusion about William Lawes's consort music that offers summaries of the composer's stylistic development and the proposed chronology of his output together with some thoughts on Lawes's compositional process. Lawes's earlier music was heavily influenced by that of Coprario but in the mid-1630s he began to incorporate elaborate divisions as part of his compositional process and, although the bass viol perhaps remained the main vehicle for division, we increasingly find them in Lawes's violin writing. The Caroline court of the later 1630s was enamoured, it seems, by virtuoso consort music containing elaborate divisions, and it was William Lawes who created some of the finest instrumental music of the age.

Cunningham's arguments are cogently expressed throughout the book and his encyclopaedic knowledge of the manuscript sources of English consort music give his arguments an authority. That is not to say, however, that this will be the last word on a number of the issues. Complex arguments relying on evidence gleaned from source studies can be easily questioned and, in time, I have no doubt that some of his conclusions will be re-examined and perhaps overturned. However, this is a major contribution to the study of early seventeenth-century English music and Cunningham's book will become the standard reference work for students of English court music and, in particular, of William Lawes's consort music.