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(b. 1705), the son of Basil. 70 There is no sign that Nicholas junior was musical, so
it may be that some or all of the music came directly to Edward junior from his
father. Edward junior appears to be the person who added the later printed vocal
music now in the Ferrar Box of Music to the collection, including two songs from
Boyce’s Solomon (1742) (nos. 19 and 21), a song adapted from a movement in the
overture to Samuel Howard’s The Amorous Goddess (1744) (no. 23), two songs by
Thomas Arne (nos. 6 and 22), and the copy of The Ladies Pocket Guide (c.1750) (no.
25). The proof that he was interested in contemporary vocal music is provided by
the Ferrar copy of the two volumes of Bickham’s Musical Entertainer, to which he
supplied a meticulous manuscript index. 71
However, there is no sign that Edward junior was a bass viol player or was
much interested in instrumental music. In any case, the Fitzwilliam collection
seems to have been mostly assembled in the first years of the eighteenth century,
the period when Thomas, Basil and Edward senior were active; Edward junior was
only born in 1696. Edward senior is the most likely candidate for the main copyist,
Hand B, of MU. MS 647. Although it is difficult to make meaningful comparisons
between music hands (or for that matter the formal literary hands used for the
titles of pieces) and the informal literary hands used in correspondence, the forms
Edward senior used in his letters are certainly similar to that used by Hand B for
song texts: note, for instance, the rather crabbed lower case letters, mostly sloping
sharply to the right, though with the ‘d’ looping to the left, and the mixture of
secretary and italic forms used for the ‘e’ [Illus. 3, 4]. There are not many examples
in Edward’s letters of the formal style used by Hand B for titles and headings,
though he uses similar forms in his signature; compare, for instance, the detached
cross-stroke of the ‘F’ in Ferrar with the similar form of the ‘T’ in ‘Tune’.
Although we should regard the identification of Hand B with Edward senior as
likely rather than proven at present, it is significant that his adult life coincides with
the period covered by MU. MS 647: he died in 1730 while the latest pieces in the
collection, the Handel minuets in Item XIII, were probably taken from printed
anthologies of 1728 and 1729.
No evidence has yet been found in the main Ferrar papers that Edward senior
was a bass viol player, though he only figures in the first two letters transcribed by
Bryan White (Ferrar Papers, nos. 1542, 1544), written at a time (24 April 1693 and
13 January 1693/4) when he was still at Little Gidding. 72 He does not seem to have
been party to the later activities of the music club, probably as White suggests
because he was by then living in Huntingdon and was therefore too far from
Stamford to attend meetings regularly. In an undated letter probably from
February 1694 (Ferrar Papers, no. 1558) Thomas complains that ‘We are in
extreme want of a Bass Viol’ and informs his correspondent, the Revd Henry
Bedell of Southwick in Northamptonshire, that ‘if you can procure one for us you
70 ‘Introduction/Finding List’, The Ferrar Papers 1590-1790, ed. Ransome, iii.
71 Library of Magdalene College, Cambridge, H1022.
72 White, ‘“A Pretty Knot of Musical Friends”’, 31-32.
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