Born: Cir­ca 1659.

Died: December 1, 1707, London, England.

Buried: St. Greg­o­ry’s by St. Paul’s, Lon­don, Eng­land.

Clark stu­died mu­sic un­der a Dr. Blow, or­gan­ist of West­min­ster Ab­bey and the Cha­pel Roy­al (Wil­liam Croft was a fel­low pu­pil). Clark com­posed a good deal of church mu­sic, and at least one pop­u­lar an­them, “Praise the Lord.” He al­so wrote some op­er­as and a can­ta­ta.

But at last a time came when poor Clark de­sert­ed the plea­sant paths of mu­sic for the thorny by-ways of ma­tri­mo­ny. Some say that his love was not re­turned, others that the la­dy on whom he set his af­fect­ions was con­sid­ered by her friends to be far too high in the so­cial scale to marry a poor mu­si­cian; but what­ev­er the rea­son, as he was re­turn­ing one day in 1707 from a friend’s house a fit of mel­an­cho­ly seized him, and, alight­ing from his horse, he went in­to a field to con­sid­er the most suit­a­ble way of put­ting a per­i­od to his trou­bles. The toss of a coin failed to de­cide him, as it came down on its edge and stuck in the clay, so he rode back home, and short­ly af­ter ‘shot him­self in the head with a screw pis­tol in St. Paul’s Church­yard.’

Sources

Music

1. Bishopthorpe
2. Brockham
3. Bromley
4. King’s Nor­ton
5. St. Luke
6. St. Magnus
7. Tunbridge
8. Uffingham