The music of William Lawes, King Charles I’s favourite composer, killed by a musket ball at Rowton Moor in 1645, is strange, sumptuous and bewitching, yet it was almost lost

The music of William Lawes, King Charles I’s favourite composer, killed by a musket ball at Rowton Moor in 1645, is strange, sumptuous and bewitching, yet it was almost lost

William Lawes, the great Cavalier composer at the court of King Charles I, was killed by Parliamentarians at the Siege of Chester on 24 September 1645. Charles I, devastated, afterwards declared Lawes the “Father of Musicke” and put on “blacks” (mourning) in his memory. Lawes was 43, two years younger than the king. The king’s stand-off with Parliament had plunged the British Isles into civil war. Lawes did not live to see the beheading of Charles I at Whitehall in 1649, but his music communicates the melancholy sense of a court that was coming apart at its lacy seams.

By the time civil war broke out in 1642, the court had withdrawn to Oxford and Lawes went to join it there. He had already written some of the most adventurous and exquisitely plangent chamber music in the English repertoire. The languid stateliness of his consorts for harp and the broody intensity of his pavans and sarabands make him the greatest English composer of the seventeenth century after Henry Purcell. Beneath the music’s atmosphere of masque and pageantry lurk strange angular melodies and anguished chromatic passages that strike one as peculiarly modern. The poet, Geoffrey Hill, went so far as to imagine Lawes auditioning at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club.

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