grime's Solace '-a title suggestive of life as a wandering exile-published in 1612, Dowlande writes: 'I have lien long obscured from your sight, because I received a kingly entertainment in a forraine climate, which could not attaine to any (though never so meane) place at home,' and though Dr. Rimbault suggested of this complaint that it does not accord with the statements handed down to us by Anthony Wood or by Fuller, who tell us that he was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal to Queen Elizabeth and King James,' the fact is that, while Dowlande's words are true, there is no opposition between the statements. Dowlande, who must have been sensitive-though Fuller wrote of him as a chearful person . . . passing his days in lawful merriment,' and Ralph Sadler, son of the famous Sir Ralph, made him an anagram:

Johannes Doulandus;
Annos ludendo hausi-

was, in effect, an outcast, who left Elizabeth's Court and stayed abroad because of the suspicion into which be had fallen by reason of his religion, his outspokenness, and the company he had not been careful to avoid.

Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense,

wrote Richard Barnefield, but the touch could not charm Elizabeth or the younger Cecil to bestow favours upon its possessor. From the time when he went over-sea on account of religion until Cecil died, in 1612, there was no Court appointment for him. In this year he describes himself as 'lutenist to the Lord Walden.' He does not seem to have been forbidden the country. In the Hatfield letter, to which we are now coming, he appeals for leave to return, as one afraid of seizure and imprisonment at any English port, and the letter is written from Nürnberg in 1595; in the following year he appears to have been still abroad, for some of his lute pieces were then printed in Barley's 'New Book of Tabliture;' and in 1597, in the preface to his 'First Book of Songs,' Dowlande refers to divers lute lessons of mine, lately printed without my knowledge, false and imperfect.' Lutenist to the King of Denmark by the year 1600, probably he did not settle permanently in London till near 1609, when he dedicated to Lord Salisbury his translation of the Micrologus' of Andreas Ornithoparcus. This dedication did not help him to a place at Court at a time when newer men were favoured; and Henry Peacham writes of this

period when, likening the great lutenist to a nightingale sitting on a briar in winter, he adds:

So since (old friend), thy yeares have made thee white,
And thou for others hast consumed thy spring,
How few regard thee, whome thou didst delight,

And farre and neare, came once to heare thee sing.

Dowlande's letter to Cecil-the whole of which is here reproduced is dated from Nurnberge,' November 10, 1595. The editors have indexed it, 'Doulande, John, a lute-player,' and in their introduction they say that his may be noted as an early instance of an Englishman going to Rome to study under a famous musician.' Evidently they did not recognise the man as himself at the height of fame, nor do they appear to have known that Luca Marenzio had written to him in the July of this year as an equal. He did not go to Rome; homesickness and the fear of incurring further suspicion prevented this. He begs Cecil to send him word, by my poor wife,' who had remained in England with her children, and whose address Cecil is supposed to know, if he may return. The style of the letter needed little the apology with which it closes. If it strays here and there-being less condensed than Dowlande, as a sonnet-writer, could desire-the meaning is always clear, and though deferential, even humble in certain passages, the writer is for the most part sufficiently independent in the expression of opinion. He cannot, indeed, adopt the tone of Oxford, Burleigh's son-in-law, who tells Cecil, in respect to a certain grant of forest rights, that he has written to the Queen, hoping that, after so often bestowing it upon others, she will 'deign it to the rightful owner.' He was not asking as of right, but of favour, and begins in good petitioner form:

'Right honourable,-As I have been most bound unto your honour, so I most humbly desire your honour to pardon my boldness and make my choice of your honour to let you understand my bounden duty and desire of God's preservation of my most dear Sovereign Queen and country, whom I beseech God ever to bless, and to confound all their enemies what and whomsoever.'

Cecil was an old acquaintance, so far as a great man can be with one politically little. What immediately follows shows that Sir George Grove and others have mixed up two visits to the Continent, and that, on the first occasion, Dowlande did not get farther than Paris.

'Fifteen years since I was in France, servant to Sir Henry

Cobham-the practice of retaining musicians in livery, or wearing a badge, continued down to about 1700-Sir Henry Cobham, who was ambassador for the Queen's Majesty, and lay in Paris, where I fell acquainted with one Smith, a priest, and one Morgan, sometimes of Her Majesty's Chapel, one Verstigan, who brake out of England, being apprehended, and one Moris, a Welshman, that was our porter, who is at Rome.'

When one inquires what these men were-and Cecil must have known-it appears that Dowlande had been lamentably indiscreet in the choice of friends. Verstigan may well have been the Richard of that name who, in this year, 1595, lived 'at Antwerp near the bridge of the tapestry-makers,' and-according to the confession of George Herbert, a Catholic arrested in Zealand, possessing a false passport for England, said confession being then among Cecil's papers-had a pension from the King of Spain and acted as a forwarding agent of refugees and Jesuits. His name often occurs in these Hatfield Papers, vol. v., and always as that of a man on whom Cecil would be delighted to lay hands. As to Morgan, there was in Paris one Thomas Morgan, practically the head of the conspiring refugees there, and corresponding with Mary Stuart over the Babington business. The mad zealot, William Parry, consulted him when first he felt the great mission to kill Elizabeth. 'Smith, a priest,' is not a good clue; but one Gilbert Smith, who had travelled much, and spoke or read four or five languages, was under examination at Dartmouth in 1594; the authorities wishful to know where he had been and whither going, and how it chanced that he corresponded with Cardinal Allen's busy 'servant,' Nicholas Fitzherbert. For a musician who must rise, if at all, by Court recognition of his talent, Dowlande-then, be it remembered, but some seventeen or eighteen years of age-was singularly rash in touching pitch.

The pitch defiled, stuck to his nimble lute-twanging fingers, hampering them most uncomfortably, and however he protest that it is all rubbed away, a Cecil, full of care for the Queen, may hesitate to believe, even though a verse-writing lutenist-recollecting one Mercutio,' of whose advent three or four years ago, if he had not witnessed it himself, travelling players must have told him-exclaims in effect, ' A plague o' both your religions!' For in Paris, as he tells Cecil,

'These men thrust many idle toys into my head of religion, saying that the Papists' was the truth, and ours in England all

false; and I being but young, their fair words overreached me and I believed with them.'

That was fifteen years ago, and the 'idle toys' are but now cast aside when one is homesick and despairing of fortune, possibly, in a foreign land. Hatred and contempt of them may be shown in writing to Cecil for leave to return home.

The heresies that men refuse

Are hated most by them they did abuse.

Shakespeare must have had many living illustrations of his lines; and likely enough the boy Dowlande, attracted by the pomp of the old religion and filled with generous sympathy for those persecuted because of religion, had been recklessly outspoken. There had been no hesitancy, it would seem, through fear that a Catholic might not prosper at Elizabeth's Court; and this fact goes to the credit both of Dowlande and of the English Government. Moreover, there was no concealment; men spoke pretty freely in spite of occasional arrests under administrative orders. Cannot one be a Catholic and yet Lord High Admiral, or Lord Chamberlain, if Elizabeth and the Cecils and Essex are convinced of one's loyalty? Even now, Dowlande, though re-converted, does not recant offensive opinions. He proceeds:

'Within two years after, I came into England, where I saw many of that faction condemned and executed, which I thought was great injustice, taking religion for the only cause, and when my best friends would persuade me I would not believe them.'

Since then hostages to fortune' and experience have taught discreetness, so that one can avoid a useless and possibly irritating statement of what one now thinks of persecution, and whether the executions were for treason or for religion; if, indeed, the two can be properly distinguished by a lute-player who cares rather to enjoy good society and good music than to puzzle out complex questions. A Court musician was not likely to carry his Catholicism so far as to break the law by refusing to attend church; he might also take the oath of supremacy in the sense recommended by Burleigh in 1583. For in this year Elizabeth's great statesman wrote his memorial recommending that, as the oath of supremacy when proffered to Catholics forced them to become technically guilty of treason, which before some hurt done seemeth hard,' there should be made an important modification. It would be well, he urged, 'to leave the oath in this sense, that whosoever would not bear arms against all foreign princes, and namely the pope, that should

anyway invade your majesty's dominions, he should be a traitor. For hereof this commodity will ensue, that these papists, as I think most papists would, that should take this oath, would be divided from the great mutual confidence which is now between pope and them, by reason of their afflictions for him; and such priests as would refuse that oath, then no tongue could say for shame that they suffer for religion, if they did suffer.' Persecution, as Burleigh could see plainly, failed to convert people worthy of respect for strength of conviction. 'I account,' he submits, 'that putting to death does no ways lessen them; since we find by experience that it worketh no such effect, but, like hydra's heads, upon cutting off one, seven grow up, persecution being accounted as the badge of the church'-compare Shylock's 'For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.' Dowlande's appeal for leave to return home is opposed to the supposition of active disloyalty. Nor had he suffered actual persecution; but it will be seen that, according to this letter, 'her Majesty, being spoke to for me, said I was a man to serve any prince in the world, but I was an obstinate papist.' This occurs further on and will be repeated in its place; but it seems to apply to the incident which Dowlande recalls to Cecil's mind.

'Then, in time passing, one Mr. Johnson died, and I became an humble suitor for his place (thinking myself most worthiest) wherein I found many good and honourable friends that spake for me, but I saw that I was like to go without it, and that any might have preferment but I. Whereby I began to sound the cause, and guessed that my religion was my hindrance; whereupon, my mind being troubled, I desired to get beyond the seas, which I durst not attempt without licence from some of the Privy Council, for fear of being taken, and so have extreme punishment.' It was perilous to attempt to run away from the country, though many did so rather than conform, incurring risk of long imprisonment and strict examination under suspicion of complicity in plots.

Three musical Johnsons lived in or near the year to which Dowlande refers, and which I take to be 1592 or 1593. After his return from Paris Dowlande had married, and children came into his home. This letter, dated 1595, may reasonably be regarded as showing that he took but one long tour, and that at the date of writing he had been abroad many months. In 1588 Oxford conferred a degree upon him, and in 1592 was published Thomas Este's harmonised psalmody, to which he was a contributor. The