posed by him for the court seems to have begun in 1702–3 with a New-year's song. In the last years of his life these were the only compositions he undertook; he lived at Kingston in Surrey, and devoted himself to fishing. In 1710 he published a collection of his songs, and many of them are contained in the miscellaneous collections of the time. Some ground basses by him are in the ‘Division Violin.’ He died 12 Jan. 1735. His compositions have a certain ease and grace which is quite enough to account for their popularity at the time they were written; though infinitely inferior to Purcell in vigour and originality, Eccles possessed the knack of writing music that procured him public favour for many years. His airs would of course seem intolerably old-fashioned nowadays, while Purcell's compositions can never lose their power.
[Chamberlayne's Notitia, 1700 (in which the names of Solomon and John Eccles are given as Eagles, though that of Henry Eccles is rightly spelt); Grove's Dict. of Music, i. 481, ii. 185; Gent. Mag. v. 51; Brit. Mus. Add. MS. 12219; Joyful Cuckoldom, and other collections of songs containing compositions by Purcell, Eccles, &c.]
ECCLES, SOLOMON (1618–1683), musician and quaker, was born in 1618 in London, where his father was a professor of music. From about 1647 he was a musical composer, and taught the virginals and viols, and in ‘A Music Lector’ he states that he made 200l. a year by his profession. About 1660 he became a quaker, and, as music was considered objectionable by the Society of Friends, sold all his books and instruments for a considerable sum, but afterwards, fearing they might injure the morals of the purchasers, bought them back and publicly burnt them on Tower Hill. To support himself he became a shoemaker, choosing this as being a trade innocuous to morality. Eccles was much given to protesting against the vices and follies of the age, and did it with the enthusiasm of an exceptionally ill-regulated mind. In 1662, during the morning service at St. Mary, Aldermanbury, he attempted to mend some shoes in the pulpit to show his contempt for the place, and had to be ejected by the congregation. On the following Sunday he went again, and by jumping from one pew to another succeeded in reaching the pulpit and working for a few minutes until arrested by the constables and taken before the lord mayor, who committed him to Newgate (see Greenway, Alarm from the Holy Mountain). How long his imprisonment lasted is unknown, but from a broadside he published he was evidently at liberty in 1663. In 1665 he was arrested by order of the Duke of Albemarle for having attended an unlawful meeting and refusing to pay certain fines, and about the same time was committed to Bridewell for having gone through Smithfield naked with a pan of fire and brimstone on his head, and threatening the people with the fate of the Sodomites if they did not repent. During the progress of the plague Eccles frequently perambulated the streets stripped to the waist, and, with a brazier of burning brimstone on his head, announced the coming destruction, when he ‘suffered much by the coachmen whipping him grievously on his naked back, but that could not allay his fervent zeal’ (Sewel, Hist. Society of Friends, iii. 283). In 1667 he was committed to Gloucester gaol for refusing to take the oaths, and after his liberation made a preaching excursion into Scotland, and at Galloway, bearing his brazier and half naked, went into a ‘popish mass house,’ and so violently denounced the worshippers that he had to be removed by force, and was sent to prison. Not long after this he went to Ireland, and is said to have exhibited himself stark naked at Cork. Here he also was flogged through the town and expelled for having upbraided a preacher in the cathedral with being a turncoat. Eccles was one of the Friends who accompanied George Fox to the West Indies in 1671, and he appears to have been very useful in organising quakerism in Barbadoes and Jamaica. In 1672 he proceeded to New England, but being arrested at a meeting at Boston was banished by order of Governor Bellingham. He again visited Barbadoes in 1680, when he was prosecuted by order of the governor on a charge of having uttered seditious and blasphemous words, but he appears only to have objected to the use of the term ‘three persons in the Godhead’ as unscriptural. He was, however, committed to prison and subsequently banished from the colony. Eccles is said to have finished his life in tranquillity but without religion (Chalmers, Biog. Dict.), but there seems no foundation for the latter statement. There is, however, some reason to believe that towards the end of his life he returned to the study of music, and is stated to have contributed several ground basses to the ‘Division Violin,’ which appeared in 1693. Several vocal pieces of his composing are to be found in contemporary collections, and a specimen is given in Hawkins's ‘History of Music,’ ii. 936. Sewel, who knew him intimately, states that he ‘was an extraordinary zealous man, and what he judged evil he warmly opposed, even to the hazard of his own life,’ and by the primitive quakers he seems to have been esteemed a
