Jeremiah Clarke (1674–1707) was an English baroque composer and organist, best known for this piece. Clarke was a pupil of John Blows at St Paul's Cathedral and a chorister at the Chapel Royal. Between 1692 and 1695 he was an organist at Winchester College, then between 1699 and 1704 at St Paul's Cathedral. A hopeless passion for a very beautiful lady of a rank superior to his own caused Clarke to commit suicide. Apparently, he fell madly in love with one of his female students, a young, beautiful woman, of much higher social rank than he. But the woman was out of his league in every way and he couldn't bear it. He then decided that life wasn't worth living and shot himself in the head with a pistol. This account of his death has also been debated in many sources.
