In the small, dark chapel of a 16th-century country house a priest is saying Mass, using the Latin Rite that in a few years’ time will be a capital offence. His footsteps echo as he purifies the altar. Thurible chains clank. And choirboys sing elaborate polyphony appropriate to a royal occasion – because high above them in a “closet” gallery sits a king, Henry VIII; and in a separate closet to his right, a queen (although she won’t be for much longer), Anne Boleyn.
The date is mid October, 1535. The mansion is The Vyne in Hampshire, seat of William Sandys, Henry’s Lord Chamberlain. And to be truthful, none of this is actually happening – except in sound and the imagination of the National Trust, which owns The Vyne and has created what it calls an “immersive experience”, designed to give some sense of how it might have been to witness pre-Reformation liturgy on the cusp of sweeping change.
Done with pre-recorded music, sound effects and speakers concealed around the chapel, it’s effectively a ghost performance: heard but not seen, and the result of research carried out by Professor John Harper, a musicologist specialising in liturgical reconstructions, and Dr Lucy Kaufman, a historian from Keble College, Oxford.
That they have pinned this project to October 1535 is because Henry and Anne would certainly have been here, in this chapel at that time, attending Mass. Henry was on a Royal Progress, conceived to cement his religious reforms in the south of England. It was a huge undertaking, as the king dragged with him a court of several hundred people, including the choir and clergy from the Chapel Royal.
According to contemporary accounts, Henry and Anne were “merry” on this Progress – though in reality the atmosphere between them would have been charged. Only a few weeks earlier Henry had been to Wolf Hall and met Jane Seymour. Three months later Anne would be a prisoner in the Tower – escorted there by the same William Sandys who was her host at The Vyne and whose relationship with the royal household was fascinatingly equivocal.
By 1535 Henry had broken from Rome, been excommunicated by the pope and was busily dispatching anyone who refused to recognise his supremacy as head of a national church. One of his last acts before leaving London on this Progress was to sign Thomas More’s death warrant. And in coming to stay with Sandys at The Vyne, he was ostensibly on retreat from all that, with a friend and supporter.
But Sandys wasn’t sympathetic to religious change. His response to the break with Rome was to obtain a special licence from the pope to validate the liturgy in his chapel. And he’d been making strenuous efforts to absent himself from court business, presumably to keep his head down (and still attached to his shoulders). So there must have been some tension in Henry’s visit, particularly when it came to Mass – which, in accordance with the practice of the Chapel Royal on tour, would have been a Lady Mass, sung daily.
At The Vyne it would have been conducted in the old way: Henry still considered himself Catholic, despite his excommunication, and the new austerities of Protestant reform didn’t kick in until his death brought Edward to the throne. The Mass would have been in Latin.
The sole communicant would have been the priest – although the chapel inventory for the time records a box for a “holy loaf ”: something quite separate from the consecrated Host, which may well have been distributed after the Mass to members of the Sandys household. And it was all observed from above by Henry in his closet.
What music would have been performed by the six boys and six gentlemen from the Chapel Royal who accompanied the Progress is guesswork. But for the purposes of this sound reconstruction, the guess is a Mass setting by Nicholas Ludford that pitches virtuosic three-part polyphony for upper voices against a more straightforward chant for lower ones.
Ludford was the organist at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, which made him part of the royal household; and we can assume that Henry knew this setting of the Mass because the only surviving copy exists in the Royal Library bearing Henry’s seal.
The National Trust’s soundscape recording uses boys from the well-known choir of Trinity School, Croydon. And it only features the first half of the Mass, because the second half would have been largely silent prayer. So visitors will hear the opening Introit through to the Offertory. And as Harper says, “One thing that might surprise people is the way everything seems to happen at once, with texts, chants and actions overlaid and the prayers barely audible”.
The end result? Well, it’s a fantasy, of course, that recreates events whose details are uncertain. But the sense of stepping back in time, enveloped by the sort of sounds that filled this chapel at a crucial moment in its history, is unnerving. As a sensory package all it lacks is the sweet smell of incense. “But the National Trust,” says Harper, “don’t like naked flames, so burning charcoal isn’t possible.” Even historic truth answers to Health and Safety.
For more information on the Tudor Mass experience, visit nationaltrust.org.uk/the-vyne
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