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52 and 53. It is interesting to find another early source attributing Alte Parole to
Joseph rather than to Thomas Lupo. 39
Four of Dering’s five-part fantasias occur in the Blossom books, but are a
notable omission from Myriell’s extant collections. This renews questions
about the composer’s movements and associations between about 1610 and
1625. He supplicated for the BMus degree at Oxford in 1610. In 1612 a letter
from Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador in Venice, to Sir John Harrington,
indicates that a ‘Mr Dearing’, servant to Harrington, had been in Venice and
was now in Rome and seemed likely to become a Catholic. 40 The likelihood
that this is the composer is strengthened by the appearance of Dering’s And the
King was moved in Myriell’s books, for surely this was another elegy on the death
of Henry, Prince of Wales, one of many which Myriell had collected. Maybe it
was written at Harrington’s behest, since he had been the prince’s tutor. Myriell
had no less than three copies of it and the only other known is in US-Ws,
V.a.412, a manuscript owned by Benjamin Cosyn, associated with Myriell
through his acquisition of Och 44. Myriell also copied Dering’s Country Cries,
but not his City Cries where he preferred Gibbons’s version. Maybe these
pieces (and those by Weelkes) were all written in friendly emulation in the early
part of James I’s reign. The pseudo-Welsh opening of Country Cries is odd and
Peter Platt has remarked that reference to ‘Master Courtnall, the King’s carttaker’
assigns the piece to James I’s reign. 41 The Harrington connection
suggests that Dering probably had some opportunity for mixing with court
musicians and the consorts too seem likely to have been written before he left
for the continent. Most of the five-part fantasias appear in Tregian’s GB-Lbl,
Egerton 3665, including the four found in the Blossom books. Whether
Dering’s conversion to Catholicism opened pathways to Tregian rather than
Myriell we shall never know, but the omission seems more likely to be due to
circumstance rather than taste.
In turning now to GB-Och, Mus. 423-8 we arrive at a manuscript which
came into the hands of John Browne (1608-1691), Clerk of the Parliaments. 42
Browne’s part in copying his manuscripts, assisted by at least five scribes, has
been well-documented, but that work appears to have taken place no earlier
than from about 1630, by which time he had come of age. Mus. 423-8 is
unique in the collection because it was begun by an unknown hand before the
other copyists had input and shows possible links with London manuscripts
extant some ten or fifteen years earlier. In a forthcoming article David Pinto
explores Browne’s contribution to some collections of vocal music and draws
renewed attention to the milieu of his father, uncle and associates in the
39 As GB-Och, Mus. 67 and presumably the associated ‘leather books’.
40 GB-Lpro, SP 99, x, 62.
41 New Grove: Dering.
42 Andrew Ashbee: ‘Instrumental music from the library of John Browne (1608-91), Clerk
of the Parliaments’, ML 58 (1977), 43-59; Nigel Fortune and Iain Fenlon: ‘Music manuscripts
of John Browne (1608-91) and from Stanford Hall, Leicestershire’, in Source materials and the
interpretation of music: a memorial volume to Thurston Dart, ed. Ian Bent (London, 1981), 155-168;
‘Alfonso Ferrabosco the Younger: Consort Music in Five and Six Parts’, Musica Britannica 81,
ed. Christopher D. S. Field and David Pinto, (London, 2003).
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