Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Music in an English Catholic House in 1605

Summary

IN 1605, a few months before the Gunpowder Plot, Dona Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza arrived in England to work in support of the Catholic community and cause. Dona Luisa was a Spanish aristocrat, fervently religious (living a life of strict discipline, although not a nun), and closely associated with the Jesuits (her confessors and spiritual advisors were, for the most part, members of the Society, and she funded the creation of a Jesuit novitiate in Louvain) and with Spanish royalty and high nobility. Her labours in London, offering succour to Catholics and aiming for the reconversion of the country, continued until her death in January 1614. She was twice imprisoned, and survived partly through the protection of the Spanish ambassadors. The remarkable story of her life and her activities in England is revealed through a substantial collection of her memoirs and letters (correspondents included the Cardinal of Toledo and the Duke of Lerma) as well as through early biographies; her life and writings (prose and poetry) have – unsurprisingly – attracted the attention of a number of authors and scholars from the nineteenth century to the present day. The current study concerns her accounts of what happened when she first arrived in England: from Dover, we are told, she traveled to a Catholic house in the country, where during a stay of a more than a month she enjoyed the performance of sacred music both in the chapel and elsewhere. My purposes here are to draw musicologists’ attention to Luisa's description and to subject it to detailed scrutiny, considering existing suppositions concerning the location of the country house where she stayed and offering some fresh thoughts in this regard. Finally, while the accounts do not name any of the musicians or specify the music involved, the material provided by Luisa is placed within the context of other accounts of music within the recusant community. I offer this study as another small glimpse of music-making in recusant safe houses at this time, the kinds of occasion in which William Byrd was involved, such as that in the same year, 1605, described by the Frenchman Charles de Ligny.