ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the rich skein of relationships between the Sword of State and the mass settings L'homme armé and Dum sacrum mysterium made by cleric Robert Carver whose sumptuous works were composed for the virtuoso singers of Scotland's Chapel Royal. People have no record of what glorious music was sung at the solemn high mass in Holyrood Abbey on Easter Sunday 1507, when King James IV of Scotland was invested with what they know today as Scotland's Sword of State. The tune of the fifteenth-century Burgundian song L'homme armé was used as the basis of some forty extant polyphonic mass-settings. The official website of the British Monarchy rather inadequately describes Scotland's Sword of State as: a generous papal gift, presented to James IV in 1507, from Julius II. Divinely-sanctioned royal authority, as recognised by Julius II when he awarded the sword and hat to James IV, is a concept increasingly alien to the twenty-first-century Western mind.
