As It Fell On A Holie Eve: Music for an Elizabethan Christmas

Queen Elizabeth I of England spent much of her reign juggling to maintain her power and position and to keep England peaceful, prosperous and independent. Realizing that marriage to anyone at all would make the crown subject either to a foreign power or to a domestic faction, she skillfully warded off all suits, whether they were tendered as peace offerings or as passionate proposals (in some cases both happened at once). She had to balance, too, the antipathies between Catholics and Protestants in her realm: as the daughter of Henry VIII she was herself a Protestant and recoiled at the idea of bowing to papal authority, but she also knew from experience that the persecution of Catholics could lead to bloody insurgency. Happily, in the field of music especially music for Christmas, a treasured tradition for hundreds of years a truce seemed to hold.