Love in the music room: Thomas Whythorne and the private affairs of Tudor music tutors

Abstract

I have heard [that] diverse young women of quality have suffered in their reputation and had such or worse mischa[nce] by those who taught [them] to sing and dance. Sir Hugh Cholmley of Whitby (1600–57) The social world of Tudor England presented itself as ordered and hierarchical. The Great Chain of Being illustrated how God had ordered the universe: God resided at the top, above archangels and angels, followed by a hierarchical ladder of earth’s inhabitants. This was the way God wanted it. The state modelled itself on God’s order, and the household modelled itself on the state. There was a place for everyone and everyone had their place.1 In reality, of course, things were different, and this article presents a particular professional group that confounded this model. Private music tutors enjoyed a booming business: there was an explosion of higher education in Tudor England, and musical skill in particular was newly and hugely fashionable. Resident music tutors were brought into great households to teach children (and sometimes parents) the skills necessary to impress. But there was an inherent danger in music education, both for tutors and their pupils. Isolated and intimate, the music room proved to be a place where power, intrigue and sometimes even love could intersect. As yet we know little about the tutors themselves. There is a remarkable dearth of historical records, and we cannot know the actual number of music tutors working in Tudor England, though there must have been an army of them, given the number of people who acquired musical skill. Historians have widely accepted with Peter Burke that such a subject ‘virtually escapes the historian of this period’.2 Even Walter Woodfill left tutors hidden behind the veil of time, concluding that ‘now that scholars have searched for a century for biographical detail it is unlikely that positive evidence will come to light’.3 But no one could have expected that a manuscript like Thomas Whythorne’s would emerge from a long-forgotten box. Wrapped in brown paper, it lay at the bottom of a wooden crate full of old legal papers that H. D. Foley brought from his family home in Hereford to Sotheby’s for auction in 1955. Foley knew nothing of the book or how it came to be in his home, noting only that his father was a collector.4 The literary scholar James Osborn purchased it, and published two edited versions before presenting the manuscript to the Bodleian Library. The first edition is in Whythorne’s own orthography (he intended to ‘wryte wurds as they be sownded in speech’); the second is in modern English.5 Thomas Whythorne (1528–96) was an English musician, tutor, composer and sometime secretary during a time when the music profession was dramatically changing (illus.1 and 2). His manuscript (now Bodleian Ms. Eng. misc.c.330) is an autobiography from an era when conventional wisdom suggests that such texts did not exist—indeed his text has been convincingly called the first autobiography in English. Rich in self-exploration and social commentary, Whythorne’s life story has been strangely neglected since its discovery in 1955, particularly by social historians. His narrative begins at childhood, and progresses chronologically through his life as he rubs shoulders with some of the most prominent people in England. Whythorne offers us a great number of vivid, richly detailed descriptions of life as an English music tutor. Working outwards from a careful examination of his text, it may now be possible to shed some light on the shadowy world of music tutors. Thomas Whythorne, woodcut based on earlier portrait, from 1590 Duos. Bassus partbook, front cover Thomas Whythorne, 1569. Oil on panel (Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) As a young music master, in the late 1540s, Whythorne was hired by a wealthy unnamed widow as domestic tutor, teaching both the children and her. A strong and complex woman, she interfered with his teaching, but was also a pupil herself—one he calls ‘negligent and heedless’. Whythorne was naturally reluctant to ‘use sharp words as with other scholars’, because although he was the schoolmaster, she was the mistress of the house. She also required that he wait on her cup (a task he hated so much that he shirked his duty and was reprimanded); still, she was known to heap portions of meat on her trencher and order him to remove it, hinting that she meant it as a gift to him.6 She was also flirtatious. She gave him gifts and money, told him how she wanted him to dress, and was intensely jealous, especially if he had ‘talked with any woman in her sight’. Whythorne eventually decided to pursue her in earnest. He did not love her, he admits, but he suspected that she did not truly love him either, and ‘to dissemble with a dissembler is no dissimulation’. To show that he was interested, he wrote and sang her a song that declared his intentions. There was safety in expressing such potentially dangerous sentiments through song: If she would take it to be written to herself, she might best do it … But if she would not take it to herself or in good part, but would scoff thereat … yet it is so made as neither she nor none other could make any great matter thereof, specially if I might have come to the answering thereof.7 She took it well, and, as their ‘relationship’ progressed, Whythorne said ‘she would sometimes give me both money to buy … things, and … stuff … to make … things. And so, by policy, I gat that at her hands the which otherwise I might peradventure have gone without’. But anticipating his readers’ inferences, Whythorne insisted on explaining the extent of their relationship: Whereas you and such other suspicious heads would think, peradventure, that so much friendship as I spake of in the foresaid song could not be, except a conjunction copulative had been made … to the which I must say, and say truly, that neither my hand, not any other part of mine did once touch that part of hers where the conjunction is made.8 thus much may I say, that I, being loath that she should withdraw her good will from me, was very serviceable to please her … After the which times, she would sometimes tell me in a scoffing manner that I … lacked audacity. But I [knew] those words … did proceed from one who did know her game…9 In the end, it was the outside world that finally ended the drawn-out affair. ‘Fortune’, in the form of the accession of Queen Mary in 1553, ‘changed my mistress’ estate from high to low, the which hindered me also’.11 ‘I fell out flatly with fortune’, he lamented, and as for romance, had ‘drowned in the lake of love’, determining to forever ‘swim and never sink’—that is, ‘ever be afeard to [love] again’.12 With Whythorne as our case study, we might conclude that music tutors lived in a state of liminality in a number of ways. Professionally, they occupied a nebulous space somewhere between the gentleman and the lowly ‘minstrel’—respectable enough for the household mistress to consider romantically, but still undeniably mere employees. Socially, they walked a delicate line between master and servant—being simultaneously one and the other, which created for Whythorne much anxiety about how he should treat the widow and vice versa. And in their (sometimes intimate) daily interactions with household females, tutors operated within the complex, gendered dynamics of sex, love and power. The household environment in which a music tutor worked could be crowded, even claustrophobic. Elite households were miniature societies, whose populations reached into the dozens and occasionally even hundreds.13 Service in a household could become part of one’s identity, as servants were not simply an adjunct to the household but part of it; a formal ‘household of family’ consisted of husband, wife, children and servants.14 The hierarchy of the household was based upon ‘the natural order, in exactly the same way as the hierarchy of the state’.15 But where in this hierarchy did music tutors belong? Whythorne certainly believed that he was ‘an ace above’ the other household servants, ‘by means of my teaching the young gentlefolks in the house’. This distinction was also recognized by others. A neighbouring gentleman ‘bid all the servingmen of our house’ to a feast, but Whythorne, seen as a superior individual who merited a personal invitation, was ‘solemnly bidden’.16 If servants could sometimes be, as Mary Abbot suggests, the master’s ‘surrogate children’, Whythorne was something quite different. He saw himself as more of an equal, sometimes even sitting at table with his master and mistress, even so bold as to argue with guests.17 Indeed since many of his posts involved some kind of romantic relationship with his mistress or pupil, we can be sure that Whythorne perceived himself as someone worthy of patrons’ respect. The well-known musician John Wilbye (bap.1574, d.1638) also seems to have enjoyed a relationship with his employers that was more familial than professional. He was given his own lavishly furnished chamber, and chose to remain in service with the family even though his wealth at death was £400, in addition to his land and other property. In his will he left £20 to his patron Countess Rivers, suggesting a close relationship.18 Whythorne was not so lucky financially. But rather than wealth or birth (neither of them impressive in his case), it was the ‘special importance of his craft’ that elevated his status in his own mind:19 And I, for my part, seeing that my profession hath been and is to teach one of the seven sciences liberal … and in the respect of the wonderful effects that hath been wrought by the sweet harmony thereof, it passeth all the other sciences; I do think that the teachers thereof (if they will) may esteem so much of themselves as to be free and not bound, much less to be made slave-like. And even so did I…20 Somewhere between the servants and the family, tutors resided in a state of liminality which could be reshaped and redefined in each individual household. In this way music tutors were similar to academic tutors, being treated with ‘widely varying degrees of respect and friendship’.22 In one household, a tutor might sit at table, as Whythorne did; in another he might be compelled to dine with all the other servants. And while Wilbye seems to have been regarded as a member of the family by his patrons, Elizabeth Baldwin has uncovered a quite different case. In 1607, Edward Clarke, ‘by profession a Musicioner’, left the house of the Legh family of Lyme after teaching their daughter for a year. He was later interrogated on suspicion of having stolen jewels from the family and seems to have been regarded as a dubious character. As Baldwin observes, ‘Clarke was not regarded as being of any higher status than any other former servant’.23 Was a music tutor’s career desirable, then? Meredith Skura postulated that Whythorne chose such a career out of desperation. It was his bout of ague early in life, she wrote, that ‘reduced him to seeking a job he hated as a private tutor in other people’s households’—he was, in essence, ‘doomed’, and suffered ‘an angry fury he could barely control’. Skura’s reading of Whythorne amplifies his occasional references to anger, and fashions an image of him as one whose ‘career in service began with suppressed rage’.24 But Whythorne’s ‘anger’ does not seem to be directed at his career choice. He expresses frustration and bafflement with women, anger at ‘busybody’ servants and near-despair at Lady Fortune, but of his musical pursuits he has only good things to say. Far from having a ‘job he hated’, Whythorne felt that in tutoring Lady Dudley (and serving as chief waiting-man), ‘fortune in this point was ever very favourable unto me’.25 Indeed, in a moment of profound reflection about ‘the whole … of all my former Whythorne that nothing was than ‘I had proved to many and could no such and in any way that I had proved as I did in the profession of the teaching of of the same in the of other music tutors. John Wilbye certainly had to the (he left his to the of but never the life of the household. like Thomas with the family for life in household service could as Whythorne and to have in a world where one life could be and was itself a Private music education was a booming and it could a because the tutor’s status was in the music tutor’s life could also be by had to themselves in household, so that their was and between master and This was by the that the was there to be a master to the master, or at to of the master’s As he a kind of social but that was was especially since were careful not to much musical for that would has the in a of them, their own social by their This of was by as tutors were most to teach the women and of the were to in the later were at home and Whythorne taught women in at seven of his the of his particular with in ways. In the of the music room much more than a music might between the tutor and his some like the music was and to the a tutor’s in the world was it had to be and in the music room and were power, money, sex, music and even love were all and for Whythorne much by ‘the best and so who could teach such skills the of as as the of being in high Whythorne felt this should have him But this did not as in the case with the he was in the of his pupil, she And this was all in the of to and the and most There was no job that has called the of more than tutoring It is, of course, possible that Whythorne’s was even and that he us little of tutors as a There one as Edward can be from seeing texts were to can be from seeing texts they to of the music of tutors has its not the that light full of and to be nothing more than a of to and Tudor seem to much more about than they do about the or that the they seem so as to they from the life But we should not give so Whythorne’s his music would seem to be no different, yet he has us the of that such Indeed, Meredith Skura has that Whythorne’s while were by a if suggesting that is in texts like his for of even when at first it seems there that Whythorne’s text should scholars in a detailed of the texts of other to they were the of the music in early modern England, as has and is something and private about a manuscript music This was especially for the Tudor when had not yet to tutors, so we know the and were created in an With Whythorne as our first it is if not that a life and his to to a from Thomas Whythorne, for and to other tutors whose music we might be to Whythorne was a John for the and that he lived in similar to His is to daughter of of he must have for he that all the were for The in it that the within love were very private and that he only to them with his in manuscript he was someone would them by of the in his to a musical between the and his is to to any she can I can more in the of her any to John even He was tutor to the two of the of and his music which he was in the is full of A like that life, now both and And in a It it it And when I my in I in And when I have the I in like one in a in a out the of his And But in the of a private and music where an and his young pupil can be seen as Indeed, the of music may have been quite As Whythorne and in a love song a safety that was in a as as a He his to that were dangerous to be He could that it was not meant to be of such and was a in those Whythorne was not simply the He was, such as a His and, we might the music of some other tutors was in the very of service and of music published by known to have been in household service in this not is full of with such hidden or Thomas was an book to Thomas of and not but all quite they and But a at the of a for the was to Sir and himself was when he published the book was to Sir John in whose house he had enjoyed and was tutor to the two of Edward were where of and love would have been most not all tutors were in that romantic But for those whose were teaching music the to a love with one’s pupil that could potentially an tutor for It was an its not to have gone or by in household by in household This in to treat music tutors with even more Indeed, even the most prominent people in early modern England we evidence of this The musician was as a to The of a the social he could by to that with the was bold an to above his his to the this made him an upon suspicion might be The of Mary Queen of the was also perceived as in the of could say was on the music room each It was, to a music tutor, or him in some kind of given his and to his the anxiety about in early modern England, the of an who also the of and sang of was a worse than the of a tutor had his to and his was the of it was one if a tutor one’s wife, but if he one’s A tutor could the accepted of and for her and her This was with in of the on the status of tutors, and Whythorne in this was he once the very same his pupil, a He and when this in his life, to his as ‘the and a and it was an to be with and a of he knew that he was not her and should have been and he told himself that his musical gifts were and never he the of a great many that I did know had as great as enough that Whythorne himself could know a who had the and of women above social romantic with (and especially servants. It was an social But this very to us that it was enough to social more in made his to by his of the of followed in her her master of the But were not the only as Whythorne And the same time he the of the another tutor the same with the daughter of Sir Cholmley ‘the great of the Cholmley had his to a all with the when she to her before him and declared ‘she might rather be to her to that she could never The was that she had been having a love with her music tutor, known only as Cholmley to their though he was Indeed a to it being late to the may that she was The his and daughter was of which he gave good … at his death when he left her … the of or a in land and The to have lived and on their Cholmley Whythorne was never so nor was he ever in his Whythorne’s romantic frustration in his of thus But though some tutors that Whythorne’s of a music tutors. Indeed Hugh Cholmley was careful to with his a to his may be a good to to be how they of that profession and or if they not to their to have much or to be at any time with them, for my own time I have heard [that] diverse young women of quality have suffered in their reputation and had such or worse mischa[nce] by those who taught [them] to sing and all one cannot but more than the conventional in the music tutors sang to and with their pupils. John tutor to two must have been a with his when he sang I tell I tell I tell you I a while to me, And if such a As I now or I love and love of hierarchy and like the Great Chain of Being but the household the music tutor operated was not so a There was no place for so he his own place in the Whythorne has us that music tutors were something quite from a than that which was the world were and were with of the but the music tutor was his own in a household that did not quite know where to place In Whythorne’s to show his and that music was a and and that he was master of many he to have himself it was But the was that in the music power, and sometimes love with to to the for a that could in or

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