Francis Tregian the Younger

Francis Tregian the Younger (1574–1619)[1] was the son of the Catholic exile Francis Tregian the Elder (1548–1608).

He was educated in France, and in 1592 obtained a position in Rome as chamberlain to Cardinal William Allen. On Allen's death in 1594 he returned to England to reclaim his father's estates in Cornwall, but in 1609 he was accused of recusancy with a debt of £200; his lands were seized and he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison in London, where he remained up to his death in 1619. It has been noted that with Tregian's family connections to the houses of Arundel, Baron Stourton, Stanley and Grey it would be unlikely that he would have been under continual imprisonment.[2]

Francis Tregian the Younger is widely believed to have been the main copyist of three vast musical anthologies, of which the most renowned is the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book,[3] although the attribution, confirmed by comparisons with autograph mss known to be by Tregian,[4] has lately been disputed. One of the other Tregian Manuscripts (British Library, British Library MS Egerton 3665) has been published in facsimile.[5] A third, the Sambroke Manuscript formerly in the Joseph William Drexel collection, is conserved in the New York Public Library.[6]

References

  1. ^ These dates are disputed, Lynda Sayce in the liner notes to The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Transcriptions for a Mixed Consort, 1999; Signum Records Ltd. SIGD009 gives the dates as "1574?-1618.
  2. ^ Kah-Ming Ng, liner notes to The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: Transcriptions for a Mixed Consort, 1999; Signum Records Ltd. SIGD009.
  3. ^ edited in 1899 by Fuller-Maitland and Barclay Squire, who suggested that the manuscript was compiled by the younger Francis Tregian; see Jonathan Wainwright, Musical Patronage in Seventeenth-century England: Christopher, first Baron Hatton , 1997:190.
  4. ^ John Caldwell, English Keyboard Music Before the Nineteenth Century 1985:129.
  5. ^ The Tregian Manuscript, with introduction by Frank A. D'Accone ('Renaissance Music in Facsimile', viia), New York & London, 1988.
  6. ^ NYPL Drexel 4302; the three Ms anthologies are noted in John Caldwell, ed., The Oxford History of English Music: vol. I From the beginnings to c. 1715, s.v. "Secular vocal music, 1575-1625", p. 390 note 1.

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