When the bride walks up the aisle to a bright, ceremonial tune on trumpet and organ, there is a good chance the order of service says “Trumpet Voluntary — Henry Purcell.” There is an equally good chance the organist will sigh quietly. The piece is by Jeremiah Clarke, and it has been known since the 1950s. The Purcell credit has proved impossible to kill.
The real composer
Jeremiah Clarke was about fifteen years younger than Purcell. He trained in the Chapel Royal under John Blow, the same teacher as Purcell, and became organist of St Paul’s Cathedral. Around 1700 he published a keyboard march in honour of Prince George of Denmark, the amiable, famously dull husband of the future Queen Anne. (Charles II supposedly said of him: “I have tried him drunk and I have tried him sober, and there is nothing in him.”) The march was popular and was played on the trumpet as well as the keyboard.
Clarke’s life ended badly. In 1707, reportedly heartbroken over an unrequited love affair, he shot himself. He was in his early thirties.
How Purcell got the credit
In the late nineteenth century, the organist William Spark published an arrangement of the march and credited it to Purcell. Then, in the early twentieth century, the conductor Henry Wood made a rousing orchestral version with trumpet and organ, also labelled Purcell. It was recorded and broadcast widely, and the name stuck. Purcell was famous, Clarke wasn’t, and the piece sounded the way people imagined Purcell ought to sound.
It took the patient work of scholars, among them Charles Cudworth, to trace the march back to Clarke’s published collection. By the end of the 1950s the correction was in the reference books. It has been fighting its way out of wedding programmes ever since.
Charles and Diana
On 29 July 1981, Lady Diana Spencer walked up the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral, the very church where Clarke had been organist, to the strains of his march. An estimated 750 million people watched on television. It was the best publicity a three-centuries-dead composer could hope for, and plenty of the coverage still credited Purcell.
Purcell’s own trumpet music
Purcell did write a great deal of trumpet music, and much of it is better than Clarke’s. The trumpet was the fashionable instrument of his court odes and semi-operas: think of Come if you dare in King Arthur, the Trumpet Overture from The Indian Queen, or the Te Deum in D he wrote for St Cecilia’s Day in 1694.
Watch out, though, for the other wedding favourite, the “Trumpet Tune in D.” It is printed under Purcell’s name in countless organ albums, but it comes from The Island Princess (1699), a stage show put together by Jeremiah Clarke and Henry’s younger brother Daniel Purcell, and most scholars now give it to Clarke. (The shared surname has not helped.) Clarke, it turns out, wrote both of the “Purcell” trumpet tunes most people know.
So, the short answer for your order of service: “Prince of Denmark’s March, Jeremiah Clarke.” The organist will be grateful.