KING’SCOLLEGECHAPEL1515–2015

HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS

KING’SCOLLEGECHAPEL1515–2015

ART, MUSIC AND RELIGION IN CAMBRIDGE

Edited by Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman

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HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERSAn Imprint of Brepols PublishersLondon / Turnhout

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-909400-21-4D/2014/0095/176

© 2014 The Authors

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Design and production: BLACKER DESIGN, East Grinstead, SussexPrinted and bound in China by LATITUDE PRESS

FRONT COVER: Portcullis boss, vault ofKing’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Mike Dixon, photograph, 2011.

BACK COVER: Buttress sculptures, westend of the south elevation of King’sCollege Chapel, Cambridge. Mike Dixon, photograph, 2011.

Ill. 1. FRONTISPIECE: Henry Storer, TheGateway, Old King’s, 1828, watercolour,39.3 x 32.1 cm. Cambridge, King’sCollege.

Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 9JEAN MICHEL MASSING AND NICOLETTE ZEEMAN

Chronology 19

Fabric and Furnishings

I King’s College Chapel: Aesthetic and Architectural Responses 25JEREMY MUSSON

II The Structure and Construction of the Chapel 63JOHN OCHSENDORF AND MATTHEW DEJONG

III Glassy Temporalities: The Chapel Windows of King’s College, 79CambridgeJAMES SIMPSON

IV Provost Robert Hacumblen and his Chantry Chapel 97NICOLA PICKERING

V The Altarpieces in the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge 115JEAN MICHEL MASSING

VI The Great Glass Vista: A Condition Survey of the Stained Glass in King’s College Chapel 135STEPHEN CLARE

Life and Visiting

VII The College and the Chapel 161PETER MURRAY JONES

VIII A Spanish Choirbook and Some Elizabethan Book Thieves 181IAIN FENLON

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IX The Chapel Imagined, 1540–1830 199NICOLETTE ZEEMAN

X The Start and Stop of Simeon 221ROSS HARRISON

XI Drama in King’s College Chapel 241ABIGAIL ROKISON

Music and Performance

XII Chapel and Choir, Liturgy and Music, 1444–1644 259ROGER BOWERS

XIII The Chapel Organ – A Harmonious Anachronism? 287JOHN BUTT

XIV ‘As England knows it’: ‘Daddy’ Mann and King’s College Choir, 3031876–1929NICHOLAS MARSTON

XV ‘A Right Prelude To Christmas’: A History of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols 323NICHOLAS NASH

XVI ‘The Most Famous Choir in the World?’ 347The Choir since 1929TIMOTHY DAY

Epilogue: The Sound of the Chapel 364STEPHEN CLEOBURY AND NICOLETTE ZEEMAN

NOTES TO THE ESSAYS 368

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 404

CONTRIBUTORS 406

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 409

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 416

INDEX 417

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Acknowledgements

THERE IS PROBABLY NO CONTRIBUTOR who would not wish us to express our huge debt ofgratitude to Patricia McGuire, the King’s College Archivist, both for her great knowledge ofthe College Archive and for her tireless labour in searching out the documents, books and

images that have been essential in putting this volume together. With his deep and wide-rangingunderstanding not only of the Archive, but also of the history of the College, Peter Jones, the CollegeLibrarian, has been an invaluable source of information and advice; we also thank him for readingthrough almost every essay published here. Nicholas Marston too has read essays and providedcrucial advice on musical matters. We are also grateful to Ann Massing for her generosity with hertime and meticulous care in helping us prepare the text. Many of the marvelous photographicreproductions that appear in this volume are due to the extraordinary photographic skill andpatience of Adrian Boutel and Elizabeth Upper, and we thank them. We also acknowledge Elizabeth’sheroic work on the collation and documentation of the illustrations, the excellent work of JohannesWolf on the index, and the help of Peter Monteith in the Archive. The King’s College Director ofDevelopment, Julie Bressor, and the First Bursar, Keith Carne, have throughout been wonderfullysupportive of this project, for which we thank them. Finally, we have to say what a great pleasure ithas been working with Johan van der Beke, Elly Miller and Mike Blacker at Harvey Miller.

Editors’ note

The Notes to the Essays in this volume are all placed together at the end of the text on pp. 368 to403. The abbreviation KCA found in the notes refers to the Archive of King’s College, Cambridge.

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Ill. 2. Jan Stradtmann, Night Climbers of Cambridge, from the series Night Climbers of Cambridge, 2007,digital photograph.

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Introduction

JEAN MICHEL MASSING AND NICOLETTE ZEEMAN

THIS COLLABORATIVE VOLUME has been compiled in celebration of the five hundredth anniversaryof the completion of the stone fabric of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge (thought to haveoccurred in 1515, when College payments to the stone masons cease). The spectacular size and

form of the Chapel – far too grand even for Henry VI’s enlarged plan for a College of seventy Fellows –reveal that this was always a royal project whose horizons extended beyond the devotional servicing ofa single Cambridge college. The long history of the Chapel, to which this book is a contribution, revealsthe strikingly various individuals and social groups, both within the College and outside it, who haveparticipated in its ritual and performative life, left their mark on its fabric, or simply visited and enjoyedit. King’s College Chapel 1515–2015: Art, Music and Religion in Cambridge contains essays that focusrespectively on the changing function and furnishing of the Chapel (Fabric and Furnishings), activitieswithin the Chapel and external interest in it (Life and Visiting) and, finally, its musical scene (Music andPerformance). The aim of the volume is not to revisit well-worked areas of the Chapel’s early history, suchas the detail of the construction of the building or its stained glass, but to explore in a series of newstudies the ways that its religious, cultural and artistic history has developed and changed, often inradically different ways, over the last five hundred years.

One of the most notable features of the history that emerges from these essays is the sense thatthe Chapel has never been ‘finished’. It is clear that plans for the original medieval building alteredover the history of its construction (the seeming contradiction of the high walls that continue abovethe windows and a fan vaulting that springs from points much lower down on the walls, for example,has usually been seen as evidence that it was planned originally for the Chapel to have a beamedwooden roof attached to the walls above the windows). Other aspects of what is likely to have beenthe medieval scheme – saints in the internal niches, polychromy on some of the stonework – werealso never constructed. While other features, such as the sixteenth-century windows and rood (andlater organ) screen, did indeed complete other elements of what must have been the medievalscheme, they did so in forms that were entirely of the sixteenth century, and, as James Simpsonmakes clear in this volume, substantially in tension with emerging Reformation trends in ritualpractice and ideology. Similarly, in the context of the original Chapel, the organ that today dominatesthe building, a combination of elements that derive from many periods, can only be seen as whatJohn Butt calls ‘a harmonious anachronism’. The Chapel is home to a series of splendid altarpaintings of strikingly different historical moments and styles, while the function of its eighteen sidechapels (such as that of Provost Hacumblen, described here by Nicola Pickering) have also alteredover the years. Jeremy Musson documents the history of the many rearrangements and refurbishingsof the east end, showing how debates about the area oscillated between questions of ritual practiceand artistic aesthetics, and excited responses that ranged from the empassioned to the vituperative,

or to the downright jaded. While in the later nineteenth century Thomas Carter could lambastEssex’s elegant and decorative eighteenth-century-gothic panelling as ‘a masterpiece of extravaganceand bad taste’, the antiquarian and Provost M. R. James could describe, in a manner still recognisabletoday, the difficulty of securing agreement ‘on a question of taste’ among the Fellowship: ‘everybodyhas an opinion: they are “not experts”, they “know nothing about it”, they “only know what theylike”‘. Such history provides crucial contexts in which to understand the long-running andimmensely heated debates about the 1960s alterations to the east end, and the placement of Rubens’Adoration of the Magi behind the altar. We might note too that questions about the Chapel’s fabrichave also always been questions about restoration and preservation; John Ochsendorf, MatthewDeJong and Stephen Clare describe some of the new techniques available today for the analysis andcare of the stonework and windows, but they also reveal that, even in the Chapel, many suchprocedures have their own history of controversy.

The history of music in the Chapel has its own tale to tell of constantly altering religious practicesand musicological values. Roger Bowers documents the immense richness of the music sung in the firsthundred years of the Chapel’s existence, but he also charts by the 1630s and 1640s an apparent declinein the quality of the singing, symptomised in reduced levels of care and financial investment expendedon the Choir in the same period. His observation that by the mid-seventeenth century the singing menincluded ‘no gentlemen or graduates’, but several ‘scholars’ servants’ is suggestive about the socialstatus of the Choir from this period onwards. Bowers’ chapter also connects directly with the essays ofNicholas Marston and Nicholas Day, which chart a gradual reversal in this state of affairs in the laternineteenth century and first half of the twentieth; lay clerks were slowly replaced by students, whilechoristers, no longer the sons of College servants, came increasingly to be derived from more affluentsocial backgrounds and schools. A new, outwardly directed perspective, both in terms of ritual andperformance, is exemplified in Nicholas Nash’s history of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, a serviceestablished in the aftermath of national and collegiate losses in the First World War by Dean Eric Milner-White, who had spent the war at the front. The role of a series of twentieth-century musical directors inthe honing of the Choir’s distinctive ‘immaculate’ sound and, increasingly, in the commissioning of along line of new works for the Choir from contemporary composers continues to work in creativeengagement with the enormous popular outreach of the Choir, not least in the Nine Lessons and Carols,annually broadcast round the world.

Constant change, and also a variety of levels of engagement with the secular world, are manifest inmany other aspects of the life of the Chapel. Indeed, Ross Harrison’s study of the evangelical preacherand Fellow of King’s, Charles Simeon (1759–1836), provides striking evidence that religion aspractised in the Chapel around the turn of the nineteenth century did not meet the piety or intensitydemanded by a worshiper of Simeon’s intensity. And yet he, like a good number of other King’s Fellows,is buried here. Equally important, as Peter Jones documents, the Chapel has always been a place wherethe College has conducted central academic functions – in the early centuries royal visitations,university inspections and academic debates, throughout its history the election of the Provost, andmore recently the admission of College Fellows. Until the nineteenth century the Chapel also housed theCollege Library, including the Cadiz Choirbook, brought back by Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex,from his Cadiz expedition in 1596 – the implications of which are explored here by Iain Fenlon. Indeed,this was not the only moment that the Chapel was deemed a suitable site for the display of militarypropaganda: quite apart from its general plethora of aristocratic heraldry, in the eighteenth centurymilitary colours seized at Manila in 1763 were displayed on the altar rails. Essays collected here alsoreveal that, although the huge numbers of people who visit the Chapel today are unparalleled, the

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Chapel and its roof have long been a destination for British, European and royal visitors. It has also beena venue for all kinds of performative activities, not only academic, religious and musical but alsodramatic; however, as Abigail Rokison shows here, the echo that is part of the Chapel’s distinctiveaccoustic has always posed problems for theatre in the Chapel, just has it has done for readers andpreachers – and for the early radio broadcasts.

Although the Chapel is a building in a league of its own, its changing history nevertheless revealsit always to have been something of a barometer of contemporary religious and social, aesthetic andmusical practices and values. Today it is a place of worship famous for its celebrated Choir, a spaceused for concerts and a monument admired every year by a hundred thousand visitors. It is also stilla meeting place of the College Fellowship for crucial decisions such as the admission of Fellows andthe election of the Provost. The writing of the history of the Chapel is, of course, far from complete.We still await studies of the splendid woodwork of the screen and choir stalls, and the early graffitithat appears both in the choir and in the tower stairs and roof space; there is probably more to besaid about the politics of the Chapel’s foundation, the visit of Queen Elizabeth I, Chapel life and musicin the eighteenth century, and the Chapel’s appearance in the literature of later centuries. Webelieve, however, that the diverse history that emerges in this volume is more than a start.

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Ill. 3. Collegii regalis apud Cantabrigienses Sacellum/King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, c.1706-12, engraving with hand-colouring, 64.0 x 97.2 cm. Cambridge, King’s College, KCC/123 (KCAR/8/1/1/7).

In the first chapter, ‘King’s College Chapel: Aesthetic and Architectural Responses’, JeremyMusson ranges widely over the history of the aesthetic reception of the Chapel and its place in thehistorical understanding of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. He notes that from the start thisroyal foundation seems to have been considered a building of national importance; he charts itsimpact on the surrounding architectural landscape and shows that debates about the nature of theChapel continue in subsequent centuries to shape architects’ thought about how to build the rest ofthe College around it. Turning to the complex history of the Chapel’s interior refurbishments,Musson documents the degree to which arrangements at the east end were in the early centuries atthe mercy of constant changes in the theology and ritual practice of the Reformation and post-Reformation English Church. This is not to say that aesthetic categories did not also shape decisionsabout the Chapel furnishings even then – the employment of Flemish glassmakers on the windowsand woodcarvers from the Netherlands on the screen, both working in the latest styles, are sufficientevidence of this. However, recognisably art-historical concerns increasingly make their presence feltin later debates about the refurbishment of the Chapel, such as the eighteenth-century discussionabout whether to have a Gothic or Neoclassical altar. Although in 1775 the College chose to affirmthe Chapel’s gothicism by installing Essex’s reredos, whose pinacles echoed the external profile of theChapel, by the early twentieth century the tide had turned in favour of a Renaissance Chapel, andDetmar Blow’s replacement reredos was designed to speak to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centurywoodwork of the screen and stalls. As Musson shows, one anxiety that beset twentieth-centurydebates about the final important refurbishment of the Chapel in the 1960s was whether or notaesthetic considerations had overtaken religious ones; the result of these debates, of course, was amuch cleaner, sparer, modernist Chapel, but one substantially organised round the central altar, asthe Founder would have wished, and a major seventeenth-century painting.

‘The Structure and Construction of King’s College Chapel’, is the only essay centered on the stonefabric of the building. Here, John Ochsendorf and Matthew DeJong study the construction of the fanvaulting (built between 1512 and 1515), with its complex geometry and daring thinness, beforeanalysing the structural design and the stability of the vault. They revisit previous studies, includingthat of William Bland (1839) and those of Jacques Heyman (ranging over many decades), but usecontemporary engineering analysis methods and three-dimensional laser scanning to review thestructural action of the vaults. Despite the still very real challenges involved in this project even today,they conclude that the fundamental structure of the Chapel is impressively resilient.

James Simpson, ‘Glassy Temporalities: The Chapel Windows of King’s College, Cambridge’,explores the stained glass in its historical moment. He argues for the conceptual and visualdynamism of its particular version of traditional medieval ‘typology’, whereby the two scenes fromthe lives of the Virgin Mary, Christ and the apostles in the lower part of each window are ‘prefigured’by two Old Testament scenes above. He then explores the paradoxical fact that these windows werecreated and completed in the decades running up to the English Reformation, decades in whichthinkers such as Luther and Tyndale were formulating attacks on almost everything that thewindows represented – not only their allegorical schemes but also any kind of Church imagery at all.As many have acknowledged, the arrival of iconoclasm in England between 1536 and 1559, and itsrecurrence over the next hundred years, make the survival of these windows truly amazing.

In ‘Provost Robert Hacumblen and his Chantry Chapel’, Nicola Pickering looks at the work ofRobert Hacumblen, Provost from 1509 to 1528. Not only a scholar and composer, Hacumblen wasalso closely involved in the completion and the glazing of the Chapel, probably advising Richard Foxeon the iconography of the large windows and overseeing the actual glazing. He is best known for the

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gift of the Chapel’s monumental Netherlandish lectern that proudly carries his name (‘RobertusHacumblen’), but the best testimony of his faith is the side chapel that still contains his tomb, as wellas quite a bit of the glazing and woodwork that he commissioned. The rich iconography of thesurviving work undoubtedly reflects the traditional and intensely affective nature of his religion,including his devotion to the saints, the Virgin Mary and the passion of Christ – this lastemblematised by a pervasive emphasis on the wounds of Christ. His side chapel offers distinctiveevidence for devotion and patronage at the cusp of the late medieval and early renaissance periods.

In ‘The Altarpieces in the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge’, Jean Michel Massing traces thereligious, liturgical and artistic changes that have transformed the Chapel over the last five hundredyears as expressed in the Chapel’s altarpieces. The earliest altar, completed by Master Mason JohnWastell in 1515, was succeeded in 1544–45 by a monumental sculpted altar attributed to a ‘MasterAntonio’, complete with a column and four reliefs for the canopy; if Reformation concerns arereflected in the installation of a table of the Ten Commandments at the altar in 1561–62, they areless in evidence in 1564 when Queen Elizabeth visited the Chapel and the altar was hung about withtapestries. In line with the new interest in painted altarpieces that emerged in the later eighteenth-century Anglican Church, Thomas Orde, 1st Lord of Bolton, commissioned a Mater dolorosa fromGeorge Romney, but the commission was superseded when Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle,gave the College a grand Italian altarpiece, Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta’s Deposition of Christ(1568–72). This was displayed within James Essex’s neo-Gothic panelling until 1907, when thepanelling was replaced by an inferior scheme, that of Detmar Blow and Fernand Billerey – itselffinally removed for the present unpanelled arrangement. In 1961, Major Allnatt gave the CollegeRubens’s great Adoration of the Magi (1633) and two years later A. C. H. Parker-Smith gave theCollege a Virgin and Child with the Young John the Baptist by Carlo Maratta (1625–1713) and studio.

The two other paintings given in recent times were more of a period with the original Chapel. In1931, C. R. Ashby donated The Madonna in the Rosary (1512–1520) by a Westphalian painter, Gertvan Lon, which he hoped to make the centre of a proposed remodelling of Provost Roger Goad’s sidechapel into a Founder’s Chapel. Today, as Massing details, things are different again. Today, theSiciolante is on the west wall of this chapel. Above the altar is a splendid Antwerp altarpiece, with theAdoration of the Magi on the central panel, the Nativity with the Shepherds and the Flight to Egypt onthe wings, by the so-called Master of the Von Groote Adoration. This was given by P. K. (Sunny) Pal(King’s College 1955) and his family in 2010.

Stephen Clare’s ‘The Great Glass Vista: A Condition Survey of the Stained Glass in King’s CollegeChapel’ is based on Clare’s 2010 survey of the state of the glass and its supporting metal andstonework, as well as his recommendations for the long-term conservation of the glass. The chapterdetails the techniques by which the windows were originally made and by which they are nowconserved. It includes archival research on previous recorded restoration campaigns, as well asinformation bearing on the state of the glass, such as the heating systems formerly used in theChapel (four large Gurney stoves installed in 1875–76), and the storage of the glass during WorldWar II – dispelling the myth that the glass was sent to slate mines in Wales. Although Clarerecommends careful monitoring, his conclusions about the state of this five-hundred-year-old glassare remarkably encouraging, not least in comparison to other glass of the same period.

Peter Murray Jones’ ‘The College and the Chapel’ investigates several centuries of interactionsand tensions between the College and Chapel. Tensions may have been fewer in the past, given thatuntil 1861 all King’s Fellows were also in orders (though Ross Harrison reveals that for anevangelical such as Charles Simeon even being in orders did not necessarily obviate discomfort with

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the Chapel); it was only in the early twentieth century, however, that the College acquired areputation for secularism. Going back to the earliest years of the Chapel, Jones explores the evidencethat several Fellows established personal chantries (dedicated to prayer for the deceased) in the sidechapels; the Chapel itself was regularly used for the funerals and burial of Provosts, Fellows, somestudents, and even the family members of Provosts. Nevertheless, a public dimension to the Chapel isalso revealed in the number of Cambridge townspeople who were married here. The Chapel was alsofor many centuries central to the intellectual functioning of the College, not only used for academicdisputations (possibly right up until 1830), but also containing in its side chapels the College Libraryand Muniment Room, which held the College’s books, documents and treasures. Jones’ history of thefluctuating requirements on College members to attend Chapel provides some index of the history ofreligiosity and secularism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The election of theProvost, however, has always taken place in the Chapel, even if it does not usually involve taking upresidence in the Chapel for two days, as occurred in 1743.

Iain Fenlon’s ‘A Spanish Choirbook and Some Elizabethan Book Thieves’ deals with the history andorigin of the Cadiz Choirbook, MS 41, long held in the College Library in the Chapel. This is firstmentioned in 1600 in the diary of a Moravian visitor, Baron Waldstein, as a ‘Book of Psalms five spansin height that the Earl of Essex brought back from Cadiz near the Straits of Gibraltar’; Waldstein furtherquotes a Latin poem on the flyleaf – long since gone – in which the book ‘speaks’ to associate itself withthe Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux. Fenlon narrates the 1596 Cadiz expedition – in which Essex failed toreturn with sufficient booty of value to his Queen but did bring back a substantial number of books –and then discusses the political significance of the volume at King’s in the context of the personalpropaganda campaign waged by Essex as his political career waned. Given Essex’s execution in 1601,the chapter raises a number of intriguing questions about the presence of the choirbook, and its excisedpro-Essex poem, just a year previously in the Chapel and Library of King’s College.

Nicolette Zeeman’s chapter is a pendant to Jeremy Musson’s narrative of the dominant forms of theChapel’s aesthetic reception. In ‘The Chapel Imagined, 1540–1830’ she uses texts, images and maps toidentify a number of alternative responses to the Chapel. From an early period the Chapel had asignificant public dimension as a major destination for visitors, travellers, monarchs and musicians;many ascended to its roof, not least for the spectacular view. A number of commentators also seem toliken the Chapel to earlier ‘temples’, such as the Temple of Jerusalem, in a tradition that may owesomething to Protestant thought and its reformist ‘return to origins’, but also to seventeenth- andeighteenth-century antiquarianism. Maps, images and visual similes (the ‘cradle’) also provide evidenceof early reactions to the distinctive gothic shape and rhythmic linearity of the Chapel; it is also wellknown that many generations of devotees and patrons have marked their identity on the Chapel in theform of heraldry – and Zeeman finds one more popular form of visitor self-inscription in the roof leads.

In ‘The Start and Stop of Simeon’ Ross Harrison explores the relationship of Charles Simeon, King’smost famous religious preacher and teacher, with the Chapel. This is a paradoxical relationship in thatfor Simeon, an extremely influential member of the evangelical wing of the Anglican church in theearly decades of the nineteenth century, the Chapel seems to have represented much that was wrongwith institutional religion – Chapel attendence having become largely a marker of religious and socialorthodoxy. Simeon taught constantly, but from his rooms in the Gibbs Building; he preached widely, but

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Ill. 4. Augustus Pugin, View of the Antechapel of King’sCollege, with Choristers, 1815, watercolour, 28 x 20 cm. Cambridge, King’s College.

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not in the Chapel. And yet, as Harrison documents, his first conversion experiences were in the Chapel,and his extraordinary funeral and burial – attended by huge crowds from the College, University, City ofCambridge and elsewhere – were once again in the Chapel.

In ‘Drama in King’s College Chapel’ Abigail Rokison documents the various theatricalproductions that have taken place in the Chapel: first, most politically, and certainly most elaborately,during the visit of Queen Elizabeth I in 1654; then, equally startlingly, in 1924 with a production ofthe late medieval morality play Everyman, directed by Lilian Baylis; and subsequently many times inthe twentieth and twenty-first centuries with performances mainly by members of King’s College andSchool. Despite the allure of the overwhelmingly dramatic space of the Chapel and the manyproductions that have occurred here, Rokison’s evidence repeatedly illustrates the very realchallenges of harnessing the space and its acoustics for purposes of actual theatre.

Roger Bowers, in ‘Chapel and Choir, Liturgy and Music, 1444–1644’, documents the musicalculture of the first two hundred years of ritual worship, both in the Chapel that exists today and in itspredecessor, a smaller Chapel that once lay to the north of the present building. He provides evidencefor the rich range of late medieval sung polyphony (as well as organ music) that would have beenpart of late-medieval Catholic ritual, noting that in the early sixteenth century music at King’s musthave ‘attained an all-time peak of enterprise and splendour’ not reached again before the twentiethcentury. Bowers comments on the challenge of moving into the enormous (and internallyunfinished) edifice of the new Chapel when the first one collapsed in 1537. However, from this pointon Bowers is also obliged to chart how the Chapel’s musical culture came to be at the mercy of theswiftly changing politics of the Reformation church: all sung service ceased under Edward VI; it wasreinstated under Mary, and also under Elizabeth, but this time in ways that were shaped by thecentral role of the Book of Common Prayer, with its emphasis on the spoken, not sung, word.Although the early seventeenth century is again characterised by two periods of musical ‘revival’,Bowers’ narrative concludes in the 1640s, with the melancholy vision of declining enthusiasm forchurch music and the spectre of the puritan Interregnum.

In ‘The Chapel Organ – A Harmonius Anachronism?’ John Butt investigates the organ whichappears to grow ‘seamlessly’ from the Tudor screen. In fact, although the larger organ case hastraditionally been thought to survive from the Thomas Dallam organ of 1605–6, Butt shows that atmost only certain decorative components can come from that time; the current form of the organ ismore likely to be contemporary with – or even later than – the 1661 smaller ‘chaire organ’ case,which hangs down over the entrance to the choir on the eastern side. However, telling a history thatbegins with the earliest, small organ (moved from the old chapel in 1537), Butt describes the baroqueorgan of Renatus Harris (1686–89), the three-manual organ installed by John Avery in 1802–4 andvariously upgraded over the nineteenth century, and finally the reconstructed organ of ArthurHarrison, built in 1933–34. Musically, this is substantially the organ that is heard today. Its ‘brilliantgentlemanliness’ owes much to the musical aesthetic of the organist of the day, Boris Ord, and it ischaracterised by a series of distinctive sounds such as that of the dulciana pipes that give the organ‘that range of bell-like “tinkle” sounds that have become so familiar in Christmas carol arrangementsfrom the 1960s onwards’.

Nicholas Marston’s ‘“As England knows it”: “Daddy” Mann and King’s College Choir, 1876–1929’ revisits the long musical life and work of the Organist and Choir Director, ‘Daddy’ Mann.Himself ‘only’ an organist and not even a Fellow till late in his career, Mann presided over substantialtransformations both in the demographic of the Choir and in the College’s valuation of and supportfor it – no doubt partly under pressure from Mann himself. This is a crucial era in the evolution of

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King’s College Choir. This chapter documents the new standards that Mann set for the Choir, and hiscultivation of a choral sound so richly dramatic that, as an obituarist put it, ‘the very building itselfseemed to speak, with all its abundant echoes and lingering sweetness’. Marston reveals something ofMann’s feisty and intense character, but also of the affection he inspired, not least as illustrated by acontemporary cartoon and squib. Mann was still directing the Choir well into the twentieth century,when it performed its first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

Nicholas Nash’s ‘“A Right Prelude To Christmas”: A History of A Festival of Nine Lessons andCarols’ explores the origins and history of this service, for which King’s is today known world-wide.Intriguingly, the ultimate origins of this service lie in a Christmas Eve ‘Festal Service’ in the Cathedralof Truro in 1878. However, the Dean who brought the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols to King’sand gave it the shape it still has today was Eric Milner-White, a Kingsman whose egalitarian sense ofreligious mission was radically shaped by his experiences in World War I. In many ways Milner-White’s service anticipates something about the many ways that the College as a whole was to turnits face outward to the world over the twentieth century. Drawing on his own experience in NorthAmerican public radio, Nash charts the role of recording, broadcasting and digital technology inmaking this service the international phenomenon that it is today.

In ‘“The Most Famous Choir in the World?” The Choir since 1929’ Timothy Day argues that thesocial history of King’s College Choir in the twentieth century is closely entwined with the history ofits sound. He shows how, under Boris Ord (1929–57) the Choir emancipated itself from the lushVictorian sound cultivated by ‘Daddy’ Mann; he suggests that the shared values of a certain kind ofEnglish public school ethos can be seen reflected in an aesthetic that favours the unity of the singinggroup over the virtuosity of the individual voice. Day links the development of the Choir’s verydistinctively precise and restrained mid-twentieth-century sound to particular strands ofcontemporary musical history, in particular the conjoined effects of modernism and the rediscoveryof baroque – and even earlier – music. Noting the continual evolution of the Choir’s distinctivelybrilliant sound even today, Day also documents its increasingly public face: not only its extensive andwide-ranging activities in performing, recording and broadcasting, but also the work of its currentDirector of Music, Stephen Cleobury, in commissioning new music.

The volume concludes with the reflections of some contemporary performers and composers onthe sound of the space that is King’s College Chapel.

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Ill. 5. King’s College. Detail of facsimile of John Hamond, Cantebrigia, engraving on nine sheets, engraved by Augustine Ryther and Petrus Muser, 22 February 1592, full map 118 x 88 cm, in J. Willis Clark,Old Plans of Cambridge, 2 parts (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1921), part 2.

Chronology

1441 Henry VI lays the foundation stone of King’s College.

1446 Foundation stone of the ‘new’ King’s College Chapel laid.

1461 Henry VI captured and imprisoned; building work on the Chapel halts.

1483 Richard III ascends the throne; work on the Chapel resumes under his patronage.

1485 Death of Richard III; work on the Chapel halts, only sporadically to be taken up in thefollowing years.

1506 Henry VII celebrates the Order of the Knights of the Garter on the eve of St George’sDay in the partly-completed Chapel.

1508 Work resumes on the Chapel, under the patronage of Henry VII and his mother, LadyMargaret Beaufort.

1509 Henry VIII ascends the throne; Robert Hacumblen becomes Provost.

1515 Payments to the stone masons cease, indicating the completion of the stone structureof the Chapel; on 29 November a contract for the glazing of the windows is signedwith Bernard Flower, the King’s Glazier.

c.1530–36 The choir screen built.

1536 First injunctions to bishops in England against the misuse of ‘images, relics, ormiracles’.

1537 The first King’s College Chapel collapses, necessitating a move into the recentlycompleted ‘new temple’.

1544–45 The new high altar delivered.

1547 Death of Henry VIII and accession of Edward VI, initiating further reform in ritualpractice; all windows now complete, apart from the west window.

1553 Accession of Mary I, reversing all liturgical change.

1558 Accession of Elizabeth I, reintroducing reformed liturgical practices.

1564 Visit of Elizabeth I; drama performed in the Chapel for the Queen.

1570 College Library established in the south side chapels.

1596 The expedition to Cadiz of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex.

1598 The future composer Orlando Gibbons admitted as a student at King’s College.

1600 Zdenkonius Brtnicensis, Baron Waldstein, visits the Chapel and sees the CadizChoirbook

1605–6 Thomas Dallam’s organ installed.

1612 New altar installed, 29 feet from the east wall.

1615 New wooden doors made for the west entrance; the antechapel partially paved, inanticipation of the visit of James I this year.

1631 Visit of Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria to the Chapel.

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1633 New high altar and reredos screen installed, under the influence of Laudian reforms;stall panels donated by Thomas Weaver, Fellow, and carved by William Fells.

1636 Doors in the organ screen installed, carved, like the reredos screen, by the joinerWoodroffe.

1640 Henry Loosemore appointed Master of the Choristers.

1643 Visit of iconoclasts to Cambridge under William Dowsing; organ removed.

c.1643–5 Roundhead soldiers billetted in the Chapel

1661 Organ replaced.

1671, 1681 Visits of Charles II to the Chapel.

1675–9 Stall canopies carved and wainscotting installed between the stalls and the altar screenby Cornelius Austin.

1689 Visit of King William to the Chapel.

1702 New marble floor laid in the choir.

1705 Visit of Queen Anne.

1717 Visit of George I.

1728 Visit of George II.

1735 Horace Walpole admitted as a student at King’s College.

1736 William Cole, the future antiquary, admitted as a student at King’s College, keepingrooms there till 1753.

1763 Military colours seized at Manila displayed on the Chapel altar rails.

1775–6 James Essex’s Gothic reredos screen and a new stone floor installed in the choir.

1779 Charles Simeon admitted as a student at King’s College.

1780 Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta’s Deposition presented to the College and erected atthe high altar.

1827 Unfinished stonework extensions on the exterior of the south-east corner of the Chapel(part of a planned building range) removed, lower lights opened up in the eastmostwindow on the south side, and the corner finished off.

1828 College Library removed from the Chapel to the new Wilkins Library.

1836 Funeral of Charles Simeon.

1843 Visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to the Chapel.

1841–5 Sixteenth-century glass in the upper lights of the eastmost window on the south sidetransferred to the lower lights and new glass installed above.

1871 Compulsory daily Chapel attendance for undergraduates ends.

1874–9 Fountain in the main court commissioned and constructed.

1875 Choristerships opened up to non-local boys, and the Choir School established.

1876 Arthur Henry (‘Daddy’) Mann elected Organist of the Chapel.

1878 Bishop Edward White Benson’s first carol service at Truro Cathedral.

1879 West window of the Chapel completed.

1882 M. R. James admitted as a student at King’s College.

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K ING ’ S COLLEGE CHAPEL 1515–2015

1886 First Choral Scholarship awarded. Funeral of Henry Bradshaw, Fellow andUniversity Librarian.

1905 M. R. James becomes Provost.

1911 Detmar Blow’s neo-renaissance reredos screen and panelling installed; the SiciolanteDeposition inserted in the north panelling.

1912 Eric Milner-White becomes Chaplain at King’s College.

1918 Eric Milner White becomes Dean; the first Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

1924 Everyman performed by the Lilian Baylis Company in the Chapel.

1926 The first BBC radio broadcast of the Choir.

1928 The first BBC radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.The last lay clerk dies.

1929 Appointment of Bernhard (Boris) Ord as Organist.

1930 The first year that the Choir contains a full complement of choristers andChoral Scholars.

1931 Gert van Lon’s Madonna in the Rosary presented to the College.

1933–34 Rebuilding of the organ by Arthur Harrison in collaboration with Boris Ord.

1941–1945 Choir directed by Harold Darke (while Boris Ord is at the front during World War II).

1950 The Chapel stained glass, removed during the war, is finally back in place.

1951 Visit of George VI and Queen Elizabeth for the Service of Thanksgiving for thePreservation of the Chapel.

1954 The first long-playing disc issued by King’s College Choir.

1957 Appointment of David Willcocks as Organist, and later Director of Music.

1961 Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi presented to the College.

1962 Visit of Elizabeth II.

1964 Detmar Blow’s reredos screen removed.

1969 Chapel reopened after complete cleaning, laying of new floor and erection ofRubens’ Adoration of the Magi behind the high altar.

1974 Appointment of Philip Ledger as Director of Music.

1982 Appointment of Stephen Cleobury as Director of Music.

1991 Visit of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to mark the 550th Anniversary of theFounding of the College.

2010 Triptych of the Adoration of the Magi by the Master of the Von Groote Adorationpresented to the College.

CHRONOLOGY

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Ill. 6. OVERLEAF: The east end of the Chapel seen from thescreen. Mike Dixon, photograph, 2011.

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