Queen Mary II died of smallpox at Kensington Palace on 28 December 1694. She was thirty-two. Her husband, William III, a hard and unsentimental soldier, was said to have collapsed with grief. The nation, which had embraced her as the English half of a Dutch-English double act, went into an outpouring of mourning that lasted months. Parliament voted the money for the most lavish royal funeral anyone could remember.
It took place on 5 March 1695. The procession to Westminster Abbey was enormous; because Parliament was sitting, both Houses walked behind the coffin, something without precedent at a royal funeral. Inside the Abbey, the queen’s organist had something unusual waiting.
The sound of the march
Henry Purcell scored the procession music not for strings or organ but for four “flat trumpets,” a short-lived English slide trumpet that could manage minor-key notes beyond the reach of an ordinary trumpet, with muffled drums. The March is barely a minute long: a slow, bare, almost brutal tread in C minor, all block chords, no ornament. The Canzona that followed is a short polyphonic piece for the same brass. Against the stone and the cold, the sound must have been overwhelming.
The voices sang the sentences from the Book of Common Prayer burial service. Man that is born of a woman, In the midst of life we are in death, and finally a new setting of Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts, written for the day and kept deliberately simple, almost chordal, so every word carried.
Thomas Tudway, a musician who was there, wrote years later that the anthem, accompanied only by the flat trumpets, moved everyone present to tears. He said he had never heard anything so solemn and so heavenly. In a century of extravagant royal music, its power lay in stripping things back.
A second funeral
Eight months later the music was needed again. Purcell died on 21 November 1695, and on 26 November he was carried into the same Abbey. The music he had written for the queen was, by long-standing account, played again for him. It is one of the strangest coincidences in music history, and also somehow fitting. The music had been written by a man who must have known he was ill, and sounded as if he was writing for himself.
The odd details
Some of the music is older than the funeral. Purcell had set some of the sentences, in more elaborate versions, years earlier, perhaps in the late 1670s or early 1680s, and scholars still argue about which settings were actually sung in 1695. The name “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” is a modern label for a bundle of pieces that sit together in performance.
The pieces that are certain, the March, the Canzona and the new Thou knowest, Lord, are the most famous.
Clockwork Orange and after
In 1971 Stanley Kubrick opened A Clockwork Orange with a close-up of Malcolm McDowell’s leering face and the March from Purcell’s funeral music, rearranged for Moog synthesiser by Wendy Carlos. It is a brilliant, chilling choice: royal mourning music turned into the theme for a gang of thugs. A whole generation first heard Purcell as electronic menace.
The original remains the better listen, ideally on period brass, where the slide trumpets give the March a rough, raw edge. It is about twelve minutes of music in all. Put it on in a quiet room.