Anthony Poole (c.1629-1692), the viol and exiled English Catholics

The bass violist and composer Anthony Poole was educated in the network of Catholic Colleges that the English Jesuits kept in Europe. He went on to be ordained a Jesuit priest and to make an outstanding contribution to the musical life of the institutions he lived and taught in, notably the English College at Saint-Omer, in Spanish Flanders. Poole’s output will be shown to be of importance in the history of seventeenth-century instrumental music, especially in the context of the development of the sonata in England and division-viol music in Europe. His music has not been collected, catalogued or studied before, and this thesis presents it against the backdrop of several generations of English musicians who spent all or part of their working lives abroad. The significance of migrant musicians is often neglected by comparison with that of native musicians, perhaps because the latter fit our perceptions of national styles better, and this thesis goes some way towards appraising that contribution. The bass viol, or the ‘Brittanica Chelys’ in the words of the expatriate Latin poet Dr John Alban Gibbes, was an instrument with strong Catholic and Royalist resonances in England, and extemporising divisions on it became in post-Thirty-Years-War Europe a quintessentially English art, as will be shown in chapter one. Chapter two presents as full a biographical account as is possible at present, and chapter three considers all extant sources of Poole’s music, exploring how his works made their way to the exiled court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the library of Phillip Falle, the viol-playing circle of William Noble in Oxford, and elsewhere in England. This thesis contains therefore a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of English Jesuit music, the court of James II, and the circulation of Continental music in Restoration England. Chapter four is a stylistic discussion of the music, its influences and reception, and the appendix consists of a thematic index of Poole’s works.