Image Not Available

Thomas Sternhold

Gloucester or Hampshire, 1549, Westminster

BiographyLC name authority rec nn84077629
LC Heading: Sternhold, Thomas, -1549

Biography:

Sternhold [Sternall], Thomas (d. 1549), author of metrical psalm paraphrases, belonged to a family who probably had their origins in Gloucestershire, since Sternhold is an unusual name appearing mainly in that county, and Sternhold himself had a number of Gloucester connections later in life. However, John Bale (in 1557) assumed that Sternhold was born in Hampshire.

Anthony Wood asserted that Sternhold matriculated at Christ Church (formerly Cardinal College), Oxford, and such a connection might explain Sternhold's route into the service of Thomas Cromwell, who was receiver-general of Cardinal College. The earliest evidence for Sternhold's career is Cromwell's list of 1538, naming him one of the gentlemen ‘most mete to be daily waiters’ upon Henry VIII (LP Henry VIII, 13, pt 2, p. 497). Cromwell's accounts list a payment of 40s. to ‘Sternholde’ in September 1539. By December 1540 he appears to have entered the king's household since he signed a receipt for 3 yards of kersey for the king's surgeons. From this period until his death Sternhold served Henry VIII and then Edward VI as a groom of the robes. His court position provides the context for all his other known activities and acquaintances.

Sternhold's protestant beliefs and sympathies were manifested in 1543 when ‘Sternall’, Philip Hoby, and Thomas Weldon (all of the royal household) were sent to the Fleet prison in London by order of the privy council (17–18 March) upholding the six articles. It is not clear how long Sternhold was imprisoned, but Hoby was released on 24 March. In September they were pardoned (with others and several of their wives) of all heresies committed at New Windsor when they ‘abetted, aided, favoured, counselled and consented’ with one Anthony Parson, clerk, there, ‘lately condemned and burnt for heresies against the Sacrament of the Altar’ (LP Henry VIII, 18, pt 2, p. 140).

Sternhold appears to have married Agnes (or Anne) Horswell (d. 1559?) by 1543. In January 1545 he succeeded James Horswell as a member of parliament for Plymouth; a letter dated 20 October 1542, from Horswell (at Exeter) to Sternhold (at court), indicates their close friendship. Sternhold and George Ferrers (poet, lawyer, and member of the royal household) represented Plymouth until this parliament was dissolved at Henry VIII's death, in January 1547.

This rise in social status reflects that of many other minor Tudor courtiers who accumulated fees and property dispersed from church and monastic institutions. On 5 March 1541 Sternhold was granted a twenty-one year lease of Bodmin Priory, Cornwall. In 1544 he was listed as one of those required to go in person to France with the king and to supply two demi-hakes on foot. This modest requirement reflects the relatively low value of his property before 1545 when he was listed among those receiving fees as chamberlains and receivers of the court of general surveyors and became receiver-general of landed property in Yorkshire forfeited by the abbot of Jervaulx, the prior of Bridlington, and Thomas, Lord Darcy, among others. Some time after 30 June 1547 he bought the manor of Slackstead, Hampshire (formerly belonging to Hyde Abbey, Winchester), from Sir Ralph Sadler, to whom it had been granted by the crown. On 26 May 1547 he was listed among Gloucester commissions for the peace and on 21 September 1547 he was granted the lucrative office of master, custos, and governor of St Bartholomew's Hospital, Gloucester, where a Walter Sternold had been named one of the proctors of the infirm, in leases of 1508 and 1510. In February 1548 Sternold was listed among commissioners for colleges and chantries which had come to the crown in Gloucestershire and Bristol. Henry VIII's will made Sternhold (with other councillors and servants) a bequest ‘in token of special love and favour’; he received 100 marks by warrant dated 12 February 1549.

Sternhold's chief claim to fame and historical significance is literary. His first collection of nineteen psalm paraphrases in English ballad metres, printed by Edward Whitchurch, a royal printer of English bibles and a personal friend of Sternhold's—Certayne Psalmes Chosen out of the Psalter of David, and Drawen into Englishe Metre (1549?)—suggests that he may have selected texts for specific reasons. Psalms 1–5 emphasize instruction and divine support for the godly man facing persecution. These tendencies are reinforced by the further selection of Psalms 20, 25, 28–9, 32, 34, 41, 49, 73, 78, 103, 120, 123, and 128. In the last years of Henry VIII's reign such themes would have seemed important to any convinced protestants; in 1549 they might be most appropriate to supporters of Edward Seymour, the king's uncle. The peace and confidence for the future voiced in Psalm 128 are a fitting conclusion for the early collections dedicated to the boy king. In 1549 William Baldwin described how Sternhold brought the psalms into ‘fine englysh meter’, which the king caused ‘to be song openly before [him] in the hearyng of all’ (W. Baldwin, Canticles or Balades of Salomon, dedication dated 1 June, sig. A3v).

Sternhold died on 23 August 1549, probably at his house in Westminster. His will (dated the previous day) made his wife, Agnes, his sole executor, principal heir to his property for life and to all his goods and chattels. His infant daughters are named in the will as Judith and ‘Philipp[a]’. The witnesses included Robert Huyick, the king's physician, and Edward Whitchurche. His widow seems to have married William Hoby, if she is the ‘Sternholds wife’ and ‘hobbies make’, Anne (sic) Horswell, commemorated in verse on a monumental brass (dated 1559), in Hursley church, Hampshire.

After Sternhold's death Whitchurch published an enlarged edition of thirty-seven metrical psalms by Sternhold, including Psalms 6–17, 19, 21, 43–4, 63, and 68 (Al such Psalmes ... as Sterneholde ... Didde ... Draw into English Metre, 1549). Added, in a separate sequence, are seven psalms by I[ohn] H[opkins]. The immense popularity of Sternhold's psalms is indicated by the fact that at least twelve editions survive from between 1549 and 1553. Sternhold's dedication indicates that he sang his psalms to Edward VI as a form of pious recreation; it never denigrates secular lyrics. However, later writers who adapted his texts in different contexts frequently deplored secular songs for encouraging immorality and promoted metrical psalms as devotional antidotes.

During the reign of Mary Tudor English protestant exiles in Geneva revised the forty-four texts of the Whitchurch collection and under the direction of William Whittingham made them the basis for the Anglo-Genevan metrical psalter used in English churches from 1562 until 1696. (Attributions of versions of Psalms 18, 22, 23, and 66 to Sternhold in John Day's 1562 edition of The Whole Booke of Psalmes are unsafe.) Thus Sternhold's English psalm paraphrases not only reflect the literary and religious sensibilities of the late Henrician and Edwardian court but also became the models for metrical psalms in Elizabethan and seventeenth-century English liturgies. Thereafter, the Sternhold psalm type influenced a wider range of English hymns.

Rivkah Zim
Sources STC, 1475–1640 · Emden, Oxf., 4.539 · I. Gray, ‘The Sternhold mystery’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 87 (1968), 209–12 · R. Zim, English metrical psalms: poetry as praise and prayer, 1535–1601 (1987) · will, TNA: PRO, PROB 11/32, sig. 37 · LP Henry VIII, 13/2.497; 14/2.343; 16.203, 728; 18/1.164; 18/2.140; 19/1.164; 20/1.57, 369; 20/2.555; 21/2.322; addenda, 1/2.532 · APC, 1542–7, 97; 1547–50, 244 · CPR, 1547–8, 84, 193; 1548–9, 136, 245 · W. H. Stevenson, Calendar of the records of the corporation of Gloucester (1893), nos. 1191–2 · VCH Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 4.444 · HoP, Commons, 1509–58, 1.71–2; 3.383 · Bale, Cat., 1.728
© Oxford University Press 2004–15
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Rivkah Zim, ‘Sternhold , Thomas (d. 1549)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/26414, accessed 17 Nov 2015]

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

Terms