John Wilbye (1574-1683)(1574 -- 1638), who never married, writes of nothing but love. Born in Norfolk, his father, a well-to-do tanner, left the boy his lute; when the Cornwallis daughter of neighboring Brome Hall married Sir Thomas Kitson of Hengrave, she took young Wilbye with her to provide music and he spent the rest of his life doing so. Up to our own destructive time Hengrave still possessed the collections of the Kitsons, portraits, manuscripts, inventories, which tell us what a part music played in their lives: payments for kersey for the musicians, seven cornets, a treble viol, a pair of virginals, for 'stringing, tuning and fretting my mistress' lute', for 'the musicians of Swan Alley for many times playing with their instruments before my master and mistress.' A few miles away across the fields was Rushbrooke of the Jermyns--a fine Elizabethan house pulled down by Lord Rothschild after the war. There resided George Kirby, another composer and friend of Wilbye: they both set the words 'Alas, what hope of speeding' in friendly rivalry.
The steward thought that Wilbye 'had enough and would marry'; this annoyed Lady Rivers, a dominating female who had separated from her husband. Wilbye knew better, and followed Lady Rivers to Colchester, where he had a room of his own in the 'great brick house'--still there--opposite the west end of Holy Trinity church. Here Wilbye ended his successful, well-conducted life a rich bachelor.
Wilbye published no more than these two volumes, but they contained sixty-four madrigals. He was a perfectionist: it was impossible for the genre to go further in style, in delicacy of imagination and unerring touch--and in fact its vogue was passing. Wilbye has never failed to evoke response, and such masterpieces as 'Sweet honey-sucking bees' and 'Flora gave me fairest flowers'--he seems to have written or adapted his own words--have never been forgotten. When one hears the lovely 'Draw on, sweet night', it still evokes those green spaces under the cedars of Hengrave, summer or autumn night drawing down over the distances of the park, the shadows growing round the house while the vanished voices murmur those cadences of evocation and longing.
