‘A FINE SONG ON OCCASION OF THE DAY WAS SUNG’

Abstract

THE TIME and place of the performance of the English Court odes must be gleaned chiefly from the seventeenthand eighteenthcentury journalists whose task it was to write the Court column. Unfortunately not all these commentators deemed the celebrations to be of great interest. Those of the seventeenth century, particularly during Charles II's reign, only occasionally gave an account of what happened and then a mere line or two; those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on the other hand, were considerably more explicit, particularly those writing around the turn of the century. Their reports are like those of their twentieth-century counterparts who fill the Court page with descriptions of processional order and the other events of the day when a foreign dignitary is paying a State visit. Often these Georgian journalists described not only who was in which carriage but exactly what the monarch, his consort, other members of the royal family and other important personages were wearing down to the smallest detail, and who sang which part of the ode, what the text and music were like, and how well it was performed. From the accounts, unequal as they are in the fullness of their description, it appears first of all that at all times the ode was but one among the numerous expressions of 'dutiful affections' (a common expression) which were manifested to the monarch at the New Year and on his birthday. Although the sequence of events apparently varied, and although there is no way of knowing whether all these events took place on every one of the biannual occasions for which there was a celebration,1 the following account probably represents with a fair amount of accuracy what happened most consistently. The shops were shut and the was usher'd in with Ringing of Bells; the Flags were displayed on the Tower, and St. Martin's Church.2 Sometimes the morning was ushered in with a fine Ode and a Performance of Musick,s though