English viol makers. John Rose (i) (fl 1552–61) was among the earliest known of English viol makers, and his son John Rose (ii) (bur. London, 29 July 1611) was certainly the most celebrated. Both worked in Bridewell, London.
John Rose (i) was first mentioned in the account books of Sir Thomas Chaloner, who ordered from him a viol ‘of the finest sort’ in 1552. In 1561 he was mentioned in the books of the Bridewell court, where he leased premises in the former state apartments of Henry VIII. The books refer to him as ‘virtuous and honest’, and as having ‘a most notable gift given of God in the making of instruments’ which has made his name known throughout ‘a great part of Christendom … [He is] as muche commended in Italy than in this his natural contery’. John Stow’s Annales, or a General Chronicle of England, 1631, p.869, credited him with the invention of the Bandora in 1562, and noted that his son excelled in making them. The elder Rose probably died about 1562; if so no extant instruments can be securely attributed to him. Those that are credited to ‘John Rose’ date mainly from the 17th century and are probably the work of the son.
The younger Rose was apparently less virtuous than his father, but no less talented. He appeared in court records in 1568, when he was ordered to desist from performing puppet shows, and by 1602 he was perpetually in and out of debt. He created a fine body of work, some of which survives as evidence of the greatest period of English viol making. This includes a large consort bass in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. A particularly fine bass viol (c1600) attributed to Rose is in the Hill collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Rose’s most famous instrument is the so-called Queen Elizabeth lute, a bandora (formerly thought to be an Orpharion) reputedly given to an ancestor of Lord Tollemache by Queen Elizabeth I. Its label reads: ‘IOANNES ROSA/LONDINI/FECIT/In Bridwell the 27 of July/1580’. A viol by ‘John. Rose in Brattwell 1599’ is mentioned in an auction catalogue published at The Hague in 1759. Thomas Mace (Musick’s Monument, 1676, p.245) regarded the younger Rose, along with Bolles, as the finest of all viol makers.
D. Gill: ‘An Orpharion by John Rose’, LSJ, ii (1960), 33–40
D.D. Boyden: The Hill Collection of Musical Instruments in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (Oxford, 1969)
D. Abbott and E. Segerman: ‘The Cittern in England before 1700’, LSJ, xvii (1975), 24–48
R. Hadaway: ‘An Instrument-Maker’s Report on the Repair and Restoration of an Orpharion’, GSJ, xxviii (1975), 37–42
J. Pringle: ‘John Rose, the Founder of English Viol-Making’, EMc, vi (1978), 501–11
I. Woodfield: The Early History of the Viol (Cambridge, 1984)
JOHN DILWORTH