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416 CAVALIERS AND ROUNDIIEADS. |
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Protector, who loved a good voice and instrumental music well. He heard him sing with great delight, liquored him with sack, and in conclusion, said, ' Mr.. Quin, you have done well, what shall I do for you ?' To which Quin made answer, ' That your Highness would be pleased to restore me to my student's place;' which he did accordingly." {Life of Anthony a Wood. Oxford, 1772, p. 139.)
Cromwell treated Oxford much better than Cambridge, and it seems to have been a place of almost peaceable retirement for musicians, during the Protectorate. Anthony a Wood gives a glowing account of the delight he experienced in the weekly music parties there, and relates some other freaks, such as joining in a disguise of country fiddlers and going to Farringdon Fair. His companions in this were W. Bull, who like himself played on the violin; E. Gregory, B.A. and Gentleman Commoner of Merton College, who played on the base-viol; J. Nap, of Trinity, on the citerne; and G. Mason, of the same College, on another wire instrument. They got on very well, played to the dancing on the green, and received a sufficiency of money and drink; but, in returning home, they were overtaken by some soldiers, who made them play in the open field, and left them without giving them a penny. He says, " Most of my companions would afterwards glory in this, but I was ashamed, and never could endure to hear of it." (p. 81.) Wood's accounts of the music parties, and of the musicians who were then in Oxford, have been copied into Hawkins' History of Music; I will, therefore, only add what he says of the instruments :—" The gentlemen in these private meetings played three, four, and five parts, with viols, (as treble-viol, tenor, counter-tenor ^ and base,) with an organ, virginal, or harpsicon, joyn'd with them: they esteemed a violin to be an instrument only belonging to a common fidler, and could not endure that it should come among them, for fear of making their meetings to be vain and fidling. But before the restoration of King Charles II. (and especially after), viols began to be out of fashion, and only violins were used, as treble-violin, tenor, and base-violin; and the King, according to the French mode, would have twenty-four violins playing before him, while he was at meals, as being more airy and brisk than viols." (p. 97, 8vo., Oxford Edit., 1772.) Hence the song of Four-and-tioenty Fiddlers all of a row.
As to ballads, it was said, in 1641, that " there hath been such a number of ballad-makers and pamphlet-writers employed this yeare, that it is a wonder that there was any room for that which was made in Queen Elizabeth's time, upon the Northerne Rebellion, now reprinted." (Vox Borealis.) In 1642, ballads respecting " the great deeds of Oliver Cromwell at Worcester and Edgehill," were gravely proposed to Parliament to be sung at Christmas in place of Christmas-carols. (See No. 6, of " Certaine Propositions oifered to the consideration of the Honourable houses of Parliament," reprinted in Antiquarian Repertory, iii. 34, 4to., 1808.)
The ballads written against Cromwell personally were principally aimed at his fanaticism, at his red nose, at his having been a brewer (which is not the fact), and at his having been run away with by some German horses, which they do not fail to wish had broken his neck. The accident is thus related by Heath, |
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