Baron of Delvin, newly identified as an unknown Irish harp/lute composer of c.1585

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Delvin Castle

To keep it simple I will just relate this story as it unfolds over the centuries:

1580 This is in some ways the seminal date in the Counter Reformation struggle in Ireland because its the date in which the English government really sought to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland in favour of the Protestant state they were creating. In this year the Lord Deputy massacred a number of Italian soldiers sent to aid the Catholics in Kerry, he was laying waste Munster, killing a huge number of the ordinary citizens in a deliberate Famine, and then he came back to Leinster and Meath and in time executed many prominent Pale Catholics, and imprisoned or fined, for huge sums of money, many more there. In particular he arrested the Earl of Kildare and his son-in-law the Baron of Delvin who were then brought to the Tower of London and had to stay there for quite a while.

1590 William Ballet compiled a manuscript book of musical notation for the lute, it is thought in this year. It includes for example “Callino casturame (or Cailín ó chois tSiúire mé – I am a girl from the Suirside), the earliest known notation of an Irish song” and mentioned by Shakespeare. Its in Trinity College in Dublin, Ms 408, and among this music we have a piece known as “Lost is my Liberty”.

c.1588-1595 Mathew Holmes, who worked at music mostly in Oxford, also compiled a book of sheet music for the lute, it is thought in these years, which is now Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11 and in that there is a tune which has been read as “My Lord of Dehim’s Lamentation”.

1667 Fr John Lynch is a famous Irish historian of the mid 17th century and wrote a number of books particularly while in exile in Brittany, from one of which we get in this year:

“Kildariae Comes mortuus, gener in carcere diu moratus filium natu maximum & alios liberos ex Maria coniunge suscepit, qui, ut taedium, quod diuturno carceris incolatu percepit, paululum leniret, musica se sic excoluit, ut summam in ea peritiam attigerit. Celebrem eius de amissa Iibertate cantilenam lyra, fidibus, & clauicordio saepe cani audiuimus.”
(John Lynch, Supplementum Alithinologiae (St Malo, 1667), p.185.)

This could be translated as:

“The Earl of Kildare died, the son-in-law [Baron of Delvin] staying behind in prison for a long time, his first son was born there, and other children with his wife Maria, who supported him. Who [the Baron], perceiving the tedium of his long residence in prison, mitigated it a little by developing music, and attained the highest skill in it. His celebrated song on lost liberty for the lute, harp and clavichord, I often times heard sung.”

1810 Rev Charles O’Conor, working in Stowe which is now a famous school in England, translated that passage by Lynch and added:

“I can offer nothing, at this distance of time, but vain regret, for not having felt the necessity in my younger years, of committing to paper this melancholy air, which I have often heard played by Arthur O’Donnel, and Arthur O’Nial, the best harpers of Ireland. – Such exquisite touches of nature, ought not to be abandoned to the faithless uncertainty of tradition. – The Poetical vein seems to have been hereditary in the Nugent family.”
(Rev Charles O’Conor, Columbanus ad Hibernos (London, 1810) no i-v, p.150.)

1991 A record was brought out by Virgin music in London in this year called Rosa. It was a collection of old tunes of Elizabethan Flute Music and compiled by Christopher Wilson. It features the old tunes mentioned above from Trinity and Cambridge, but crucially he points out that these two tunes are musically the same song:

“One of the earliest pieces is called My Lord of Deliem’s Lamentation...which bears the title Lost is my Liberty in another manuscript.”

So we have Lost is my Liberty as another title for a song that elsewhere is described in a phrase that looks a lot like incorporating the Lord of Delvin. We can put two and two together then and clearly we have discovered our old and otherwise anonymous composer!

That Baron of Delvin is now quite a famous figure, with for example a phrase book he compiled in Latin, English and Irish in 1585 often mentioned and shown to Queen Elizabeth IInd on her visit to Ireland. Anyway his family had many connections to music (and poetry) as you can see in this video at about the 59:08 mark:

You can also read more about that Baron here if anybody is interested: https://www.sarsfieldsvirtualpub.com/threads/the-battle-of-multyfarnham.843/ .

Incidentally certainly the most famous lute player of the age in these islands was John Dowland. He is described as an ‘intrinsic friend’ to Shakespeare, and whose mysterious traditions of a connection to Dalkey Co. Dublin are commemorated in this mosaic in Sorrento Park there:

The Baron’s tune must sound a lot like Dowland’s because when Dominique Visse was compiling his record on “Dowland: Tunes of Sad Despaire” in 2012, he includes our song here.

In any case this identification should be easy enough for any historical researcher to make of course but in this writer’s experience, English historians are not always that well acquainted with Ireland and therefore miss the Irish connections when they are researching Shakespeare’s time and works.

by Brian Nugent, http://www.orwellianireland.com

 

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You can listen to a bit of the tune here: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/8025938--dowland-tunes-of-sad-despaire .