'More divine than human': the ritual life of the English Chapel Royal, 1558-1625

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The Elizabethan and Jacobean Chapel Royal was central to both the devotional life of the English court and to the political direction of the English Church. The services, rituals, and sermons of the Chapel Royal provided a valuable stage from which a potent Reformed royal supremacy could be articulated. Despite this, no detailed study has yet been made of the Chapel Royal. Though recent research into royal sermons has been invaluable, it has remained largely divorced from the liturgical and political context of the Chapel Royal. My DPhil research will thus emphasise the Chapel Royal as a crucial component in the Elizabethan and Jacobean articulation of spiritual and temporal authority over court, church, and nation. This project has developed from research conducted on the Elizabethan Chapel Royal in my undergraduate and masters' theses. This research, though limited to considerations of the structure of the Chapel in a general context, and the individual political lives of its members, acted as a primer for this broader and more detailed proposed study of the Chapel Royal between Elizabeth and James's 4 reigns. My DPhil project will build on these foundations to track the liturgical and political continuity of the Chapel Royal between 1558 and 1625. This will allow for a fresh courtly perspective on historiographical debates over the formative years of the Church of England, such as the Elizabethan Religious 'Settlement', and the Jacobean balancing of proto-Laudianism and Calvinism both at court and on progress. The political and ecclesiastical nature of the Chapel Royal between 1558 and 1625 will be traced through its institutional structure, liturgy and ritual, music, and sermons. By an interdisciplinary assessment of these four components, both the political and courtly nature of the Chapel Royal and the personal predilections of both Elizabeth and James will be explored. By a comparison of Tudor and Stuart regimes, the boundaries of 'Elizabethan' and 'Jacobean' will be broached to illustrate the development of Elizabeth's 'Henrician' Protestantism, and James's Presbyterian-influenced Calvinism. This will shed fresh light on the key tensions between monarch, nobility, and church in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-centuries.Existing studies have largely limited themselves to the consideration of three sources relating to the Elizabethan and Jacobean Chapel Royal: the 'Old Cheque Book'; its copied version 'Bodleian MS Rawl D 138'; and la Fontaine's transcription of the 'King's Musick' held in the Bodleian Library. Though musicologists John Harley and Andrew Ashbee have provided a sense of the Chapel structure and some biographical information of its members, the political nature of chapel documents is frequently neglected. The under-assessed Chapel oath of supremacy and accounts of decanal authority and discipline point to conflict and coalition in Chapel administration between the influence of the monarch, Lord Chamberlain, and individual courtiers. These currents are not limited to the internal politics of the Chapel but are intimately related to the ecclesiastical and political tensions of the Church of England. The ritualism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean liturgy will also be explored, extending the research of Fiona Kisby into the Henrician Chapel Royal to explore the expression of monarchical power in Reformed ritual. This will be explored through sources including the Calendar of State Papers, court diaries, and inventories of liturgical items in the Jewel House and at court. By an investigation of these sources to provide a clearer picture of Chapel services, Diarmaid MacCulloch and others' figuration of the Chapel Royal as uniquely conservative in Reformation England will be complicated and extended to interrogate the precise nature of this 'conservatism', and its importance in the tensions of the English court and church. Given the gulf between musicological and historical studies, my research