In fact, we have very little music by Purcell that is likely to have been used on these occasions—the well-known Chacony in G minor is virtually the only example—so it looks as if he was given the job to write symphony anthems for the Chapel Royal. Starting with My beloved spake, he wrote a stream of fine anthems in the style favoured by the king, with lots of dance-like triple time and an emphasis on writing for solo voices rather than the choir. Famous examples are Rejoice in the Lord alway, with its opening symphony based on a descending octave peal of bells in the bass (hence its nickname, the ‘Bell Anthem’), and They that go down to the sea in ships, with its spectacular solo written for Charles II’s favourite, the bass John Gostling. This work was supposedly written in the winter of 1684-5 to commemorate an occasion when the king, his brother James, Duke of York (the future James II) and Gostling narrowly escaped shipwreck in the royal yacht off the Kent coast. After Charles’s death in 1685 James kept on the Chapel Royal mainly for the benefit of Princess Anne, for the new king did little to disguise his Catholic sympathies and attended the court Catholic chapels. Purcell wrote a few anthems at this period, including O sing unto the Lord of 1688, but after William and Mary banned violins from the Chapel Royal the next year he virtually stopped writing church music.

Instrumental Music

Purcell was heir to a rich and distinctive tradition of contrapuntal consort music that went back to Tudor times. At the Restoration it went into a decline, partly because composers went back to writing vocal music and partly because Charles II had a notorious aversion to counterpoint, preferring dance music in the French style played by the Twenty-Four Violins. Much of the repertory of the group in the 1660s and 70s was written by Matthew Locke, and therefore it is not surprising that Purcell’s earliest surviving consort piece, the recently discovered Staircase Overture (so called because of the rushing scales in the opening section), is an imitation of several passages in Locke’s orchestral music, notably in his famous incidental music for the 1674 adaptation of The Tempest by Shakespeare. Purcell was not taught by Locke, as is sometimes said, though he was strongly influenced by him in the middle of the 1670s, and wrote a touching elegy in his memory in 1677.