In 1781 the young organist and composer R.J.S. Stevens was given a breakfast interview by the Lord Chancellor, Edward Thurlow, whose daughter he was teaching. After questioning him about his background and musical education, Lord Thurlow asked him if he knew Mr Stanley.

Cathedral organists and masters of choristers taught Purcell's female mad songs Mad Bess (‘From silent shades’) and ‘From rosy bowers’ to their most talented boy choristers as excellent vocal exercises that served also as splendid party pieces when they were taken to perform at concerts and music clubs. Stevens had been a chorister at St Paul's under William Savage and became his articled pupil, while Stanley had studied at St Paul's with Maurice Greene. Thomas Norris, a boy chorister at Salisbury Cathedral, sang ‘From rosy bowers’ as Master Norris at the Three Choirs Festival in 1761, and as a tenor performed it in the London oratorio season directed by Stanley in 1779. One ex-Chapel Royal chorister who performed these pieces in the theatre was Handel's leading English tenor, John Beard. On 10 March 1737, when he was twenty-one, he sang Mad Bess at Covent Garden as an entr’acte in Richard Steele's The Funeral, and four days later he performed ‘From rosy bowers’ between the acts of Othello. In April 1748 Beard sang Mad Bess, not as an entr’acte but ‘in Character’ in a madhouse scene in Act 4 of Vanbrugh's adaptation of Fletcher's play The Pilgrim.