The story everyone tells comes from Sir John Hawkins, a lawyer and music historian writing eighty years after the event. Purcell, he reported, was in the habit of staying out late at the taverns and theatres. His wife, Frances, had given orders that if he was not home by midnight, the door was to stay locked. One night in November 1695 he came home late, found himself shut out in the cold, caught a chill, and died.
It is a wonderful anecdote. It has everything: the bohemian genius, the stern wife, the London winter, the moral. It is also, almost certainly, rubbish. Hawkins passed it on as a tradition rather than a fact, and nobody has found any earlier source for it. The one hard piece of evidence we have points the other way. On the day he died, Purcell signed a will leaving everything to “my loving wife Frances,” the woman he named as executor. People do not usually die of a chill caught in a single night. Nor do they usually leave everything to the person who locked them out.
What we actually know
The facts fit on an index card. Purcell died at his house in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, in the evening of 21 November 1695, the eve of St Cecilia’s Day, the musicians’ feast he had celebrated in his greatest odes. He was thirty-six. The will he signed that day describes him as “dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body.” He had been composing until recently: songs for the new season’s plays and the music for The Indian Queen, which his brother Daniel would have to finish.
He had probably been ill for some time. The likeliest explanation, and the one most historians favour, is tuberculosis, then called consumption, the great slow killer of seventeenth-century London. It fits a long illness in a man in his thirties. But it is a best guess, not a diagnosis.
Death by chocolate
The other popular story is even better. In the 1690s, drinking chocolate was the fashionable new luxury, served thick and spiced in the chocolate houses of St James’s. According to legend, Purcell died after drinking a cup of it, either poisoned or simply off. It would be hard to invent a more Restoration death.
There is no evidence for it at all. The story has the shape of a joke that got repeated until it became a fact, and it survives today largely as a search term (and a dessert). Nobody has ever named a poisoner, a motive or a source.
The funeral
He was buried in Westminster Abbey on 26 November 1695, below the organ he had played since he was twenty. The music he had written that March for the funeral of Queen Mary was, by long tradition, performed again for him: the bleak march for slide trumpets and the anthem Thou knowest, Lord.
The tablet nearby, probably composed by his widow or a friend, is the most beautiful epitaph any composer has been given: “Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq; Who left this Life and is gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be exceeded.”
Why it matters
Purcell died at about the age Mozart did, and for the same reason his death looms so large: everything he wrote had the feel of a beginning. He had mastered church music, court odes, chamber music and the stage, and seemed poised to create a real English opera tradition. When he died, it died with him. Within twenty years London had handed its stage to Handel and to Italian opera.
John Dryden caught the mood in his ode on Purcell’s death. In it the larks and linnets compete to sing, but fall silent when they hear him. The poem was set to music by John Blow, Purcell’s old teacher, who had outlived his pupil and was left to write his elegy. It is the saddest detail in the whole story, and unlike the locked door, it is true.