well have supplied them with plays, both in Westcott's time and also in that of his predecessor John Redford. Several of Heywood's verses are preserved in a manuscript, which also contains Redford's Wyt and Science and fragments of other interludes, not improbably intended for performance by the boys under his charge.[1] A play 'of childerne sett owte by Mr. Haywood' at Court during the spring of 1553 may also belong to the Paul's boys.[2] Certain performances ascribed to them at Hatfield, during the Princess Elizabeth's residence there in her sister's reign, have of late fallen under suspicion of being apocryphal.[3]
From the beginning of Elizabeth's reign Westcott's theatrical enterprise stands out clearly enough. On 7 August 1559 the Queen was entertained by the Earl of Arundel at Nonsuch with 'a play of the chylderyn of Powlles and ther Master Se[bastian], Master Phelypes, and Master Haywod'.[4] If 'Master Phelypes' was the John Philip or Phillips who wrote Patient Grissell (c. 1566), this play may also belong
- [Footnote: boys, but the boys taken up by Philip Van Wilder for the musical establishment
of the Household; cf. p. 31. But I think it is more likely that Heywood wrote for the Paul's boys throughout, as he almost certainly did in 1559. There is another hint of his connexion with them in the fact that at the coronation of Mary in 1553 he sat under a vine against the grammar school and made speeches (Holinshed (1808), iv. 6). A. W. Reed (1917, 3 Library, viii. 247) adds facts, and thinks the Yeoman was distinct.]
- ↑ Addl. MS. 15233; cf. Mediaeval Stage, ii. 454. Thomas Tusser, in
the Autobiography printed with the 1573 edition of his Points of Good
Husbandry, is the authority for placing Redford at Paul's:
But mark the chance, myself to 'vance,
By friendship's lot, to Paul's I got.
So found I grace a certain space
Still to remain
With Redford there, the like nowhere
For cunning such and virtue much
By whom some part of musicke art
So did I gain.From Paul's Tusser passed to Eton, before he matriculated at Cambridge in 1543. In other manuscripts compositions by Redford and Thomas Mulliner are associated, and one of these, Addl. MS. 30513, is inscribed 'Sum liber Thomae Mullineri, Johanne Heywoode teste'. Stafford Smith, on what authority is unknown, stated (cf. D. N. B.) that Mulliner was Master of St. Paul's School. If so, he may have come between Redford and Westcott. On 3 March 1564 he was admitted as organist in Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Fowler, Hist. of C.C.C. 426).
- ↑ Feuillerat, E. and M. 145; Wallace, i. 84. The mention of 'xij cottes for the boyes in Heywoodes play' does not justify the assumption that the players were the Chapel. The ten established boys of the St. Paul's choir could be supplemented by probationers or the grammar school.
- ↑ Mediaeval Stage, ii. 196.
- ↑ Machyn, 206. 'M^r Philip' was organist of Paul's in 1557 (Nichols, Illustrations, iii). Fleay, 57, guesses that the play was Nice Wanton, which is not likely, if Heywood had a hand in it.
