Sacred Music: Psalms and Anthems

Abstract LAWE s’s metier may have been as a composer of secular love songs, yet he had been brought up against a background of cathedral music, and since 1626 had been a countertenor in the Chapel Royal. His appointment as ‘pistoler’ —the most junior position—dated from 1 January, and it would have been in that capacity that he sang at the coronation of Charles I on 2 February. Later the same year, on 3 November, he was advanced to Gentleman, for which the pay was £40 a year. The Master of the Chapel was then Nathaniel Giles, and the organists were Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Warwick, the latter in place of the recently deceased Orlando Gibbons. At the time the repertoire of the Chapel was rather conservative, consisting mainly of works by Byrd, Gibbons, Giles, and Tomkins, though by 1635 it included works by modernistically inclined composers such as Richard Portman and Walter Porter, as well as four verse anthems by Henry Lawes and two by his brother William. He was one of those who travelled north to Edinburgh in the summer of 1633 to assist the Scottish Chapel Royal at the Coronation of King Charles, and it seems likely that when the court went to Oxford soon after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he too went there with the Chapel.