"For all its inconsequence it is," Brian Collins noted of The Bachelor, "like Captain Stratton, well written with some pleasant countermelodic touches in the piano part that assist the harmonic flow." Thus, the higher criticism writes off an undeniable trifle that is, nevertheless, capable of inducing wry merriment. Set to an anonymous late 15th century poem, it is another grace note, so to speak, to the allusive swagger of the Warlock persona: "In all this warld nis a meriar life Than is a yong man withouten a wife; For he may live withouten strife, In every place where so he go." As Cecil Gray observed, "The predominating mood of the Warlock songs is robust and jovial, attaining at times to irresponsible hilarity..." and The Bachelor furthers the project with a rollicking accompaniment confected from late Renaissance models, drawing upon the frolicsome spring from which many a catch, round, and the dancing tunes of Arbeau's Orchesography—spun off in Warlock's Capriol Suite—sprang. But for all its brief bright mirth, the sentiment may well have been more than tongue-in-cheek. As a 22 year-old in the winter of 1916, Philip Heseltine—well before he became Peter Warlock—married one Minnie Lucy Channing, whom he nicknamed Puma. Warlock's biographer, Barry Smith, described her, "With black hair and olive complexion she was of striking, almost classical Mediterranean beauty, a fact confirmed by surviving photographs... Hot-blooded, forthright, and vivacious, there was, none the less, an element of naïvety in her makeup." A contemporary, Paul Delany, described her as "a hanger-on of the bohemian set that frequented the Café Royal, a pretty and wayward opportunist who hoped to get some lasting advantage out of the floating world in which she lived." On July 3, 1916, Puma had given birth to Warlock's son, Nigel, whom both the composer and mother largely ignored, though through the ensuing years Warlock agonized over the on-again, off-again marriage, now declaring that he wanted nothing more than to be reunited with wife and child, then fleeing all possibility of it. Eventually, the divorce-less estrangement was complete and Warlock took refuge at Cefn Bryntalch, the family estate in Wales, in autumn 1921, where his mother had taken charge of Nigel, and where Warlock spent three relatively quiet, productive years during which some of his best-known songs were composed—including The Bachelor in 1922—and, in collaboration with Philip Wilson, nearly 300 Elizabethan songs were transcribed, and a biography of Delius completed.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi