Children of the Chapel
Children sang in church because their high voices were considered closest to the angels and Queen Elizabeth's need for entertainment and care for her “spiritual well being”.
Boy groups from grammar and choir school, ages 7–14, were royally patronized to perform songs for the Queen and her court.
[2] The Choir's, now just ten, boys are traditionally known as the Children of the Chapel Royal, and wear the distinctive State uniform introduced at the Restoration.
The Choir's duties remain to sing the regular services in the chapel of the Monarch's home and to otherwise attend as commanded.
The Queen was insistent on making sure the children mastered other skills, such as art, theatre, and various musical instruments to enhance their talent and develop the quality of the performances as time went on.
By the accession of James I in 1603, the Chapels Royal was staffed by a dean, a sub-dean, and 32 gentlemen (both priests and laymen); it also had a choir of 12 boys.
William Cornysh, who was Master of the Children from 1509 to 1523, first began the practice of having the boys' choir perform dramatic interludes at Court.
Hunnis's deputy Richard Farrant rented space in the old Blackfriars priory, and began public performances by the boys.
Nathaniel Giles, their Master from 1597 to 1634, became one of the lessees (with Henry Evans) of the Blackfriars Theatre that James Burbage built in 1596, and brought the Children to play there.
Even in the early years of this period, the Children of the Chapel were mired in controversy: Giles drafted, and sometimes nearly kidnapped, boys that he wanted in his troupe.
Solomon Pavy, the young actor eulogized by Ben Jonson upon his premature death in 1603, was one boy "pressed" into service in this high-handed way.
Yet they also experienced the downside of this brand of drama: when the play Eastward Hoe (1605) won official censure and landed two of its authors, Jonson and Chapman, in jail, the actors earned a share of the disapproval.
They managed to offend the King a third time, in 1608, in regard to their production of George Chapman's two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron.
A warrant, granted in 1626 to Nathaniel Giles to take up singing boys for the service of the Chapel Royal, contained a proviso that the children so to be taken should not be employed as comedians or stage-players, or act in stage plays, interludes, comedies, or tragedies, "for that it is not fitt or decent that such as sing the praises of God Almighty should be trained or imployed on such lascivious and prophane exercises."
