‘A Welshman […] in Rome’: an incomplete life of Richard Morris, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal
Oscar Davies Patton is currently a DPhil student at Merton College, Oxford, where his studies are funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
He is researching the Chapel Royal under the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I and VI. In examining this under-explored aspect of the late-Tudor and early-Stuart court, Oscar’s particular focus is on royal ritual, liturgy, architecture, music, and sermons. He completed his BA in History at the University of York in 2020, and his MSt in Early Modern History at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2021.
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On 24 March 1583, Richard Morris arrived at the gates of the Venerable English College (VEC), Rome, where he would eat, drink, sleep, pray, and attend Mass with his Catholic co-religionists for the following nine days. Just a year earlier, Morris had been singing the liturgy of the Elizabethan Church in the court chapels of the Protestant English Queen, as he had for the previous three years, and even earlier as a child of the Chapel Royal.
How then, could a man brought up in the Calvinist theology of the Elizabethan Church, and in the personal employ of the governor of the Church of England, be radicalized into exile, and adopt a faith officially banned in England since 1559?
The answer is a complex one, though elements of it will already be familiar to students of Elizabethan Catholicism. However defined, English Catholics were, at least theoretically, forced to choose between damnation for their continued obedience to a heretical and (after 1570) excommunicated Queen on the one hand, and risking the financial and spiritual consequences of disobeying ‘Caesar’, their temporal master, on the other.
The launching of the Jesuit mission to England in June 1580 saw an intensification of this spiritual Scylla and Charybdis. William Allen (1532–1594), leader of the English and Welsh secular clergy, who was made a cardinal in 1587, and the Jesuit, Edmund Campion (1540–1581), believed that ‘recusancy’, or refusal to attend the services of the Church of England, was the only conscionable course of action available to committed Catholics.
The martyrdom of Campion in December 1581, subsequent intensification of recusancy fines, and legal prejudice against active Catholics pushed a greater number into non-conformism, and even conversion. That Richard Morris should have left England at the same time as his colleague, Nicholas Morgan, another Catholic, suggests that the walls of royal chapels did little to protect one from these spiritual pressures.
Four unknown Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal of Elizabeth I, from William Camden’s sketches in Elizabeth’s Funeral Roll, 1603
British Library, Add MS 35324, f.31.v
Perhaps the most famous aspect of the Elizabethan Chapel Royal, both today and in the late-sixteenth century, was its ceremonialism. It was this visual and aural beauty that attracted many talented composers of the sixteenth century, including the famous Catholic conformist, William Byrd (1539/40 or 1543–1623).
It was here that, alongside the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, an English courtly congregation heard sumptuous polyphony, and beheld a controversial silver crucifix and gilt candlesticks on a communion table covered with embroidered tapestries, set altar-wise. It was also here that Elizabeth displayed the shape of her Protestant church which, while assuming a distinctly more austere form in the parishes, upheld the same Reformed theologies.
Like all employees of the Royal Household, Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal swore a modified form of the oath of supremacy on entry to their posts. Whether this meant that Morris was a committed Protestant or a conforming Catholic in 1579 is impossible to tell. However, by 1582, on his arrival at the English College in Rheims (where the staff and students of the English College of Douai, founded by William Allen in 1568 as the first English seminary, were then in temporary exile, owing to war in the Low Countries), he was, in the words of contemporaries, a ‘runagate’ (a fugitive runaway), and a committed Catholic.
Dr William Allen (1532–1594), founder of the English College, Douai (1568), and, with Pope Gregory XIII, co-founder of the Venerable English College, Rome (1579)
William Allen is the source of much of our information on Richard Morris: his letters to Father Alfonso Agazzari (c.1546–1602), the first Jesuit rector of the VEC, note the arrival of ‘Morrice’ at Rheims in 1582. Morris had been meant to arrive there with his colleague, Nicholas Morgan, both ‘married men’ (presumably leaving their families behind in England): they were ‘said to be going to Rome to exercise their art [singing] and gain their living by it’.[1]
Morris was already known to one of Allen’s colleagues, Richard Ingham, ‘with whom [Morris] he [Ingham] says he was educated’.[2] Ingham’s name first appears in a 1580 list of Catholics ‘abroad sent by an agent or spy to the English Government’ as ‘Eniame’, formerly ‘a boye of her majesties chapel, that nowe is prieste in the English seminery in Rome’.[3] The Liber Ruber records that Richard Ingham entered the VEC aged 24 in 1579 with his brother, who received the first tonsure: and, in 1582, Richard Ingham was involved in the establishment of the new English Jesuit preparatory school founded by Robert Persons, SJ (1546–1610) at Eu, close to the coast in Normandy.
As Children of the Chapel Royal, Ingham and Morris would have been granted education in both music and the liberal sciences under William Hunnis (the staunchly Protestant Master of the Children of the Chapel). Given Hunnis’s faith, it is striking that both Ingham and Morris (who would have ‘graduated’ from the Children of the Chapel around the same time, aged 16 to 18), both became exiles for their Catholic faith within a three-year period. Such phenomena confirm the more fluid interpretations of early modern religious identity proposed by scholars such as Alexandra Walsham and Michael Questier: a Protestant education was by no means an impenetrable bulwark against conversion.
Children of the Chapel Royal of Elizabeth I, from William Camden’s sketches in Elizabeth’s Funeral Roll, 1603
British Library, Add MS 35324, f.31.v
We know that Morris’s training as a Child of the Chapel Royal was excellent, or at least good enough to impress William Allen, whose ears had been tuned in Rome by some of Palestrina’s finest Masses and motets: Allen remarked that Richard Morris ‘far exceeded the musicians of this place [Rheims]’, and he recommended him for employment in Rome either at the Pope’s Chapel, or at the Church of the Most Holy Trinity and St Thomas of Canterbury attached to the VEC.[4]
In the light of the Council of Trent’s stress on musical training, Jesuit colleges of the period, including the new English College founded by Robert Persons at Saint-Omer in Flanders in 1593, as well as colleges under the administration of the Jesuits, like the VEC, became centres of musical excellence. It is therefore all the more significant that, in such a musical context, Morris’s skill and talent was recognised and applauded.
At the end of August 1582, Morris left Rheims in the company of a young Yorkshire gentleman and lawyer, John Dolman (c.1561–c.1586). Dolman is best known for his account of the execution of St Edmund Campion, whose martyrdom he had witnessed: he had collected a rib as a relic, carried it to Rheims, and intended to take it onwards to Rome. Plans changed, however, and Dolman ended up at the newly founded Jesuit university of 1572 at Pont-à-Musson in Lorraine, where he presumably died.
Morris is next recorded at the VEC, visiting for nine days in 1583, arriving with one Robert Bradshaw, about whom little information survives, and visiting again for eight days in 1585.[5] Where was he in the interim, and why did he not stay for any longer? One hopes that further documentary evidence will emerge to help answer these questions.
The first entry of Richard Morris’s name in the Venerable English College Pilgrim Book, 24 March 1583, recording a nine-day stay
Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Liber 282, 8.
More positively, the discovery of Morris’s visits to the VEC contextualizes another previously undated chapter in his life: this is recorded in a letter by John Dowland (1563– 1626), the famous lutenist and composer, written in 1595, in which he appeals to Robert Cecil for re-admittance to the Elizabethan court, and in which he repents for his own Catholic associations. Dowland reported to Cecil that in Paris he had met with ‘one Morgan [Nicholas Morgan, sometime of Her Majesty’s Chapel], one Verstigan [Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640), an agent of Allen and a prolific Catholic author] who brake out of England, & one Morris a Welshman that was our porter, who is at Rome’.[6] These men, Dowland alleged, had earlier convinced him that ‘the papistes [religion] was truth and ours in England false’.[7] By this point, Morris was clearly well established within Allen’s network of English Catholic priests and informants.
Dowland’s description of Morris as a ‘Welshman’ is a curious one, and might explain Richard Morris’s employment at ‘Glocester’, close to the border with Wales, as recorded in his entry to the Chapel Royal in 1579 (a living presumably secured after his graduation from the Children of the Chapel).
John Dowland (1563–1626), lutenist and composer
He had presumably become part of the musical establishment at Gloucester Cathedral, and it is interesting to note that both of his entries in the VEC Pilgrim Book, in 1583 and 1585, describe him as ‘Richardus Mauritius Glostrens[is] or ‘Glocestrens[is] [8]
The second entry of Richard Morris’s name in the Venerable English College Pilgrim Book, 30 June 1585, recording an eight-day stay.
Details of the life of his travelling companion, John Cowden of Hertfordshire, are not yet known.
Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Liber 282, 14.
Although details of Morris’s life are, for the moment at least, incomplete, the surviving sources reveal something of the rich variety of a life in exile. Did he secure musical positions in Rome? Only detailed further research will reveal the answer.
Not all English Catholics who left England during Elizabeth’s reign were to follow the same path as Campion and other martyrs for the English and Welsh mission. Social networks were vital to Morris’s survival in continent Europe; his apparent friendship with William Allen provided an avenue towards potential employment when his intended plans fell through, perhaps secured by the coincidence of his acquaintance with Richard Ingham.
Music too, was clearly important. Morris’s key skill was clearly his musical ability, which he used to win Allen’s favour, and this would appear to have sustained him in exile. Although we do not know whether or not Morris composed his own music, his experiences and success both in Elizabeth’s Protestant England and Catholic circles on the continent speaks to the cross-confessional power of music in the early modern period.
This biographical sketch, informed largely by the archives of the Venerable English College, diaries from other English colleges in continental Europe, and the Calendar of State Papers, indicates the value of examining the lives of individuals further to examine the spectrum of exile that Elizabethan Catholics experienced.
[1] W.B.S., ‘Occasional Notes’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 38, No. 648 (Feb. 1, 1897), 93.
[2] W.B.S., ‘Occasional Notes’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 38, No. 648 (Feb. 1, 1897), 93.
[3] The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay, ed. Thomas Francis Knox (London: David Nutt, 1878), 302.
[4] W.B.S., ‘Occasional Notes’, The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular, Vol. 38, No. 648 (Feb. 1, 1897), 93.
[5] Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Liber 282, 8; 14.
[6] Marquess of Salisbury, Cecil Papers, Vol. 172, no. 91.r.
[7] Ibid.
[8] The Old Cheque-Book, or Book of Remembrance of The Chapel Royal, from 1561 to 1744, ed. Edward F. Rimbault (New York: Da Capo, 1966), 3.
Bibliography
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