In addition to creating and producing this lovely Tudor Summit, Heather has the longest continuously running indie history podcast, the Renaissance English History Podcast, which she started in 2009. Even before then, though, she has been writing about history online since 1998 when she built her first history website, the Colonial American Gazette. But her passion for history didn’t start there – she was a student docent at a Revolutionary War home in Lancaster PA from the time she was 15, in 1991.
She is passionate about Tudor music, which was her gateway into the Tudor period (singing William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus as a choral nerd in high school) and she has a weekly radio program in the UK called the Tudor Music Hour. She has just launched the Tudor Radio Network, an internet radio station that is All Tudors All the Time.
She has written for The Tudor Society, and Medievalists.net, among other publications, as well as publishing several books. She has an online shop where she sells what she lovingly calls Tudor Swag (you can also get the very popular Tudor Planner there) and she created a monthly subscription box service, Treasures from Bess (named after Bess of Hardwick) – a monthly box filled with Tudor themed treats. All of that is at TudorFair.com.
Check out TudorRadioNetwork.com for info on the upcoming Tudor Radio station I talked about, as well as how you can support its launch through my crowdfunding campaign.
Video Transcript:
Heather Teysko
Renaissance English History Podcast
Hello everybody, welcome back to the second day of the Tudor Summit, I hope you’re having a really great time, isn’t it so great to connect with everybody and hear all of these amazing speakers? I’m so glad you’re here, and I really hope you’re getting a lot out of it. Thank you for spending your time with us. So, I’m the next speaker. Hi! It’s me, and if you don’t know who I am, I’ve been running the Renaissance English History Podcast since 2009, so that makes me just about 9 years old, which means I’m seven years away from driving! Hurrah!
And I also have a radio show in the UK, the Tudor Music Hour, I have a blog, I have a lot of different things you can catch the Tudor Minute on youtube which comes out today on Tudor History everyday.
So, today I’m going to talk about music, which is my preferred thing to talk about when I talk about the Tudors, it was my gigway into Tudor history. As a choral nerd in high school, I will raise my hand being a choral nerd, hands up if you were a choral nerd! That’s me. And we sang William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus and I tell this story a lot, so forgive me if you’ve already heard it, but I remember the choral director telling us that William Byrd was a catholic and he was writing under a protestant monarch.
And something about that stirred something in the inner rebelness of my teenage years, and I was just fascinated with the idea of this wrecking catholic writing under a protestant monarch and how did he square that with his soul, and it just fascinated me. And that became my gigway into Tudor history. So here we are… Oh gosh! Almost 30 years later. It’s crazy.
So, I’m going to talk today about music and I’m specifically going to talk about music as propaganda. So, a couple of years ago, I did a podcast of an episode on portraits as propaganda, Tudor portraits! It’s actually one of the most popular episodes I’ve done, still even now it gets downloaded a lot, you know, that’s interesting. But the thing about music is it was even more powerful as propaganda tool because. the portraits, you had to see them, right? It’s not like people could instagram them, right?
So, portraits, they were all inspiring for ambassadors and for people who were coming to the palace and for people to have it in their homes and things like that. But you still had to be able to see them, so for common people, they were never going to see those things, or very rarely. The thing about music is that every Sunday, particularly with religious music, every Sunday, the King had an opportunity to reach people through the music and through the liturgy that was sung.
Now, of course, that was dependant of how much the clergy were willing to go along with it, but that was an opportunity that the King had with the monarchs, because we’ll learn about Elizabeth doing something like that too.
So that’s one thing, and also, certainly, songs spread. So Henry VIII wrote Pastime with Good Company, which is a very famous tune that he wrote and it spread to, you know, pubs and drinking halls, and boats, lots of different places! Everyone was singing Pastime with Good Company in the 1510s, well I talked about actually that last time at last year’s Tudor Summit, so I’m not going to go back and revisit that.
But, you know, music was a way to reach the masses more so, sometimes than these portraits. And, while both were important tools in the arsinel of telling a story and having a “brand”, what we would call it today, or furthering the story of the Tudor family, music was definitely an important way to reach more people.
So, I’m going to give you three examples today of times when music was used as propaganda, and in between, we’re going to listen to the songs, to the pieces as well. Some of the pieces, they’re quite long, so we’re not going to listen to all of them. So, that’s what we’re going to do! Alright, I hope you enjoy it, I hope that you learn something new about some music.
So, the first one we’re going to talk about today is the Salve Radix, which is a manuscript that Henry VIII actually gave as a gift at Christmas time to Catherine of Aragon in 1516, so it was filled with regular religious music but actually, what made special was that it was filled with some different kinds of music.
The kind that was the most high-cultured at the period, the Franco-Flemish style, so there were composers, Josquin, these famous composers who were out of the Franco-Flemish school, now you don’t need to know about that, you do need to remember, this was the very high-cultured type of music, much more so than English traditional music would’ve been, or even English choral music like at the time this music was cutting-edge.
So Henry prepares a manuscript for Catherine of Aragon, this was very common, this was how people shared music with each other, was with a manuscript, of course there printing-press existed but they weren’t yet to the point when they were making copies of music so all of this had to be handwritten and they made beautiful gifts for people. So, there’s this choirbook, this manuscript that Henry gives Catherine of Aragon, the Salve Radix and it showcases, it was very very expensive, very very expensive to make, and it showcases all of this brand new music, brand new, cutting-edge, super super cultured, high cultured!
Now the thing about this is very interesting is, this was in 1516, this was right as the relationships with Spain were starting to go sour, because Spain was beginning to negotiate a peace with France, they had agreed to make war on France together, Spain and England had, and right around then, Spain was negotiating their own peace with France, and leaving Henry out in the cold, as it were.
So, Henry was ticked off about this because he was all excited, “We’re going to go invade France, I’m going to get my land back for 100 years more, blah blah blah” and then Spain goes and does this, this individual peace with France. Also, right around this time was when Cardinal Wolsey was negotiating a treaty of perpetual peace and this is what eventually led to the Field of Cloth of Gold, but this was the initial treaty that Cardinal Wolsey had that would’ve made almost a UN style body, where all of the European countries would come together and sign on and agreed that if any of them had issues with each other, that Henry and England would be the ones to arbitrate it.
So this was actually the treaty that Cardinal Wolsey was working on, eventually turned into the treaty of London and the Field of Cloth of Gold came from that a couple of years later, but the initial plan had been for all of the european countries to sign on to this, he had people support, he was working towards this, and England would be the person who was in charge of arbitrating disputes between european countries. So this was a big, big deal for Henry, for this little back-water country that, you know, 50 years ago was fighting all the nobilities fighting each other, so to be able to suddenly say “we’re going to be THE place in Europe”, well, they had to prove themselves, and show that they were actually the kind of place that could handle that.
So, a lot of scholars believe that the Salve Radix was kind of a signal that Henry in giving this gift to Catherine of Aragon, in a public way, in front of all the ambassadors, and having this music at his court, and showing that this was important to him, and not only that, but that he had access to leading composers.
This kind of music was just as much part at their court as to any other european court, and they were just as prominent, just as cultured as any other European court. So by showing that, it would increase their chances to have this treaty of perpetual peace go through and also to show Ferdinand, to show Spain, like “look, don’t mess with us, don’t go negotiate your own peace, like we had a deal, and you might not think we are all of that but look! Look at the kind of culture we have at our court, we are just as cultured as you are”, so this Salve Radix manuscript was a very important piece, people were talking about it, and it was at a very public event that he gave this manuscript to Catherine of Aragon. So we’re going to listen to a little bit of that, and then, on the other side, we’re going to talk about a time when Catherine got involved with foreign policies using music to further some Tudor propaganda.
So, first, the Salve Radix, 1516, Tudor propaganda showing exactly how cultured they were, how they should not be messed with, and that they should be accepted to have this treaty of universal peace, here we go: [music starts]
Wasn’t that beautiful? That was really beautiful, wasn’t it? So, now let’s jump forward to 1544, we’re going to jump to the middle of the century, and Henry is married to Katherine Parr, and he’s got war, in 1544, he’d been married to her for about a year and he’s got a war going on on two fronts. First, he’s got the Rough Wooing in Scotland, this is where they were trying to force Mary, Queen of Scots, to marry Edward, his son Edward, so that was going on.
And then, in the South, they had a war with France, Henry was going to France, and this was his final campaign when he went to Boulogne and was there. So, what was going on? Henry needed a way to convey to the people how this cause was just, people were getting really tired of the taxes and of the wars, and the breakaway of the church and people were just kind of sick of it, right?
And Henry needed a way to kind of rally people to his cause, so, right around this time, in 1544, Katherine Parr was the regent while he was away in France, so I wanna set the stage of what was going on the summer of 1544 with the players involved, so we have Katherine Parr, she’s his regent and she’s writing her book called Psalms or Prayers, this was a set of meditations in English inspired by Bishop Fisher. So they were kind of translations of meditations on the Psalms.
We also have Archbishop of Canterbury, he is translating the Litany into English, we also then have Thomas Tallis, Thomas Tallis was the granddaddy of English choral music and English music in general. He served under four monarchs, and he lived through it all, some people I’ve heard call him Teflon Tallis because he managed to write music for four monarchs and didn’t get himself killed. So, Thomas Tallis, he became the chief composer in the Chapel Royal in 1543, so he was very involved with creating music for the services, that were held at the Chapel Royal, and, indeed, kinda disseminating information out and disseminating the music out and kind of setting what the services were going to be. So, again remember, people have to go to church, it’s legal, or it’s the Law that you have to go to church, so if you wanted to reach people, church would be a really great way of doing that.
So, in 1978 they were doing it… So, this is four hundred and thirty-odd years later. They’re doing construction at Corpus Christi College and construction workers peeled back a piece of plaster and they found 3 musical fragments behind this plasterwork at Corpus Christi in Oxford and they identified at Thomas Tallis’ Gaude Gloriosa dei Mater, which is a very famous piece of Thomas Tallis. But the text was different, it wasn’t in Latin. The traditional way the people knew of this piece of music was in Latin, this music was in English. And the original piece that people had known was very devotional, and kind of meditational and devotional to the church.
The piece of music that they found behind this plaster was really really harsh. It had quotes like “Cast them down headlong for they are traitors and rebels against me! Let the wicked sinners return to hell” and what musicologists put together was that this lyrics, these words, were actually Katherine Parr’s from her songs and prayers. They come from the ninth psalm, which is, she called, against enemies, so musicologists were able to reconstruct the music and they had enough to work with, they had enough to begin with, they were able to reconstruct all of this and confidently say that this was Thomas Tallis’s music with Katherine Parr’s words in English.
So, this is music that would’ve been sung not just in the Chapel Royal– definitely in the Chapel Royal, but it could’ve also been sent around to other places, other leading homes, other places, other leading chapels, where other people were going to hear it. And it rallied people to the cause of Henry in France and in Scotland, so this is a great great example. And there’s a new album of Alamire Consort. Plug: I interviewed their director, the musicologist, David Skinner back in 2015, so if you want to learn more about music in this time period there’s that.
But the Alamire Consort released this album a year and a half ago or so of this music that is the Tallis’ music with Katherine Parr’s lyrics, isn’t that amazing? So, we got Katherine Parr as regent creating this propaganda for the wars in Scotland and France and disseminating it around in English, with the English Litany, the English words around through Thomas Tallis’s music, amazing! So let’s listen to a little bit of that, alright? Here we go.
[music starts]
Amazing, right? Really cool, uh? So, that was my second example, and I’ve got one more official one and then I’m going to throw in an extra one too cause we have the time. So the next one I’m going to talk about is the Parker Psalter. So Matthew Parker was the archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth. He is the same Matthew Parker that when Anne Boleyn sensed that she was not longed for in this world, she went and asked him to protect Elizabeth, you know, when Elizabeth was only two or whatever.
So Matthew Parker is the archbishop of Canterbury, we’re jumping forward to the late 1560s now and he is translating the Psalter into English you can actually still get his original translation of the Psalter on the internet archive. and what he did, because he wanted to figure out a way to get this music to people in English, or to get this words to people— see? I just gave it away.
Get this words to people in English in a way that would make it accessible for them. So he decided to work with the granddaddy Thomas Tallis. Thomas Tallis composed nine tunes, composed by Thomas Tallis that accompanied the English Psalter so that this songs could be sung rather than simply spoken this is almost like an early form of this protestant hymnals, where you sing these songs and it makes it accessible.
In the past, people hadn’t so much– well, they hadn’t sung at all in church because everything was in Latin So they didn’t understand it. So here’s an opportunity for people to experience the words either just through listening to the music and being moved by the music or singing it themselves if they could sing along and sing it themselves. So, the tunes were very famous, they were a big hit, and it really helped to disseminate this English Psalter that they were working on.
This was just after the Elizabethan settlement, this is just as the English church, as we know it now, started to be formed after turmoil of the 15150s and the uncertainty of when Elizabeth first became Queen, this was just after the settlement and we got dissemination of all of this information unifying the church of English and one way to do that was through music. So we are going to listen to one of the Parker Psalter tunes — The Tallis tunes for the Parker Psalter. This is a tune that also then later inspired Vaughan Williams— If you listen to classical music at all, it’s a very very famous tune. One of Vaughan William’s version of it is very very popular and he was inspired by the Tallis version. So I’m going to play the Tallis version and then just a little bit of the Vaughan William so you can hear. So here we go, the tune from the Parker Psalter, by Thomas Tallis
[Music starts]
[Music starts]
Wasn’t that great? Wasn’t that awesome? I hope you enjoyed that!
So then the final one I’m going to talk about, this isn’t necessarily propaganda but it is a musical event that I find quite interesting, in 1527 Wolsey was just opening up Cardinal College, became Christ Church, in Oxford and it was his institution that a lot of people at the time who didn’t like Wolsey said that he had taken money inappropriately to build his foundation and build his college.
So, we’ve got Wolsey. He invited Henry, and Catherine was still his wife then, he invited them to the opening and one of the things about choral music is that there was great competition to have the best choir, so, to have best choir voices. And they were actually followed the way you might follow, fight over Footballers or something, you want to have the best people and between the Chapel Royal and the Cardinal’s– Wolsey’s Chapel, there was a lot of back and forth over who had the best choir. The thing about this period, the date would ring a bell or you kind of know what’s going to happen: because this is the period that Wolsey is failing to get an annulment from Catherine of Aragon and Henry is becoming increasingly disillusioned with Cardinal Wolsey.
So Cardinal Wosley invites them to the opening or some kind of celebration at Cardinal College and to celebrate that he wanted to compose or he wanted to have a really special piece of music. The way you’d have a very special piece of music for something like that. And so he commissioned John Taverner to write the Missa Corona Spinea, the Mass of the Crown of Thorns.
And the thing about the Missa Corona Spinea is that it was very technically difficult even now choirs struggle with this piece of music, it was really really difficult, and it showed off the virtuosity of Wolsey’s Choir. So the thing is, rumor has it that Henry was not too pleased with the level of virtuosity of Cardinal Wolsey’s Choir, it actually backfired on him pretty severely because Henry was like, “How do you have– How do YOU, a Cardinal, have the money to have this amazing choir that can sing this amazing piece? And I’m the King and my Choir couldn’t sing that.”
Right? And so Henry was really ticked off about this, he wasn’t too impressed. So we are going to listen to some of this Missa Corona Spinea and you can hear for yourself the virtuosity involved in this piece of music and you can kind of imagine Henry and Catherine sitting there on their chairs and Wolsey saying like “Ohh, they’re going to be so impressed.” You know? And then realizing “Oh, they’re not.” Henry is not. And I always think that’s kind of funny to think about So this is part of the music the Missa Corona Spinea, the Mass of the Crown of Thorns by John Taverner from the 1527 to impress Henry but not really.
[music starts]
So what did you think about that, huh? It was pretty amazing. So I hope that you’ve had enjoyed these pieces of music and these times-stories when music was used to trying to further a narrative, either about the Tudor dynasty being this hub of culture deserving the treaty of universal peace and kinda telling Spain “Look, we are a big deal.” Also when Katherine Parr used music to further the message of her husbands wars, and then when Matthew Parker used music to share the liturgy in English, to share the Psalter in English, and then Wolsey failed miserably at trying to impress his boss and it didn’t work at all.
So I hope you have enjoyed these pieces of music, I do have a spotify playlist, I’ll stick in on the links right there. Then you can listen to learn more, oh and to learn more about me! If you want, you can go to the Renaissance English History Podcast, episodes come out twice a month pretty much, I haven’t done one in August because I’ve been busy getting this ready but starting back in September, twice a month those episodes come out. I also have tudorfair.com which is my online shop where you can get tudor swag, I lovingly call it Tudor Swag. Stuff like this mug which has Elizabeth I’s quotes, it was for Valentine’s Day but they are Elizabeth I’s quotes about being single, you know the famous “I will have but one mistress and no master,” all the different quotes she had about being single [shows a mug].
And I have t-shirts and I should’ve worn a t-shirt to do this thing but anyways, I’ve got a collection of kickass Tudor women with some of their famous quotes over there. So, TudorFair.com. I’m also running a special for this summit so there should be a coupon code down there somewhere that you can check out to get a discount there. Then I also do the Tudor planner which is this beautiful thing [shows planner]. Right? This is the Tudor planner, the 2019, thank you so much if you are one of my Indiegogo supporters, I just had a very successful Indiegogo campaign to fund the printing cost for the 2019 version which will be available in late november.
But this is the 2018 one, so it’s a planner, it’s like a monthly, weekly diary. There’s the monthly, weekly [shows pages], it’s a habit tracker. And stuff filled with like stuff in Tudor history, everything like that. And the monthly has playlist of music and facts and quotes, all that kind of stuff. So, Tudor planner will be available on my shop in late November, I think, yeah!
And I’m also very excited, I’m going to put it out there because that will make it official if I put it out there. I’m starting a Tudor radio network, which is going to be an internet radio station, I’m going to be launching it in the fall, probably mid-October, and it’s going to be 24 a day of Tudor podcast and talk shows, book shows as well as music, because of course music! It’s basically going to be all Tudor all the time, transporting you to the 16 century wherever you are; so stay tune for more information on that. I do have a basic website up at TudorRadioNetwork.com, I’m doing a fundraiser right now to raise the funds for the initial cost of setting up the Radio license and everything but I’m taking care of that and it’s going to launch, I think, fingers crossed, mid-October. It’s going to be so cool! I’m so so excited about it, it’s going to be so cool! So, that’s me. And thank you, thank you so much for coming to this Summit for being part of it, for sharing the weekend with me and all the other people, I really hope you’re getting value out of it. We’re going to go now to the next talk.