Chapter 3 - ‘This Mistake of a Barbarous Age’: Spem in alium

Summary

In February 1878 the Rev. H. Fleetwood Shepherd wrote a letter to the editor of the Musical Times, which contained an account of the circumstances surrounding the composition and first performance of Tallis's ‘song of Forty Parts’, Spem in alium. He had uncovered the account some twenty years earlier in the Cambridge University Library, in the Commonplace Book of a Thomas Waterbridge, who had recorded the story as told to him by Ellis Swayne on 27 November 1611, almost thirty years after Tallis's death:

In Queen Elizabeth's time yere was a songe sen[t] into England in 30 parts (whence ye Italians obteyned ye name to be called ye Apices of ye world) wch beeinge songe mad[e] a heavenly Harmony. The Duke of — bearinge a great love to Musicke asked whether none of our Englishmen could sett as good a songe, and Tallice being very skilfull was felt to try whether he would undertake ye matter, wch he did and made one of 40 partes wch was songe in the longe gallery at Arundell house, wch so farre surpassed ye other that the Duke, hearinge yt songe, tooke his chayne of Gold from his necke & putt yt about Tallice his necke and gave yt him (wch songe was againe songe at ye Princes coronation).