Short answers, pulled from the story.
Historians estimate that Thomas Tallis was born between 1500 and 1520 near the end of Henry VII's reign. His origins lie within Kent, as both his surname and his cousin John Sayer connect strongly to that county.
Thomas Tallis served four monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. He maintained an unreformed Roman Catholic faith while avoiding religious controversies throughout these reigns.
In 1575, Queen Elizabeth granted Thomas Tallis and William Byrd a twenty-one-year monopoly on polyphonic music. This patent gave them exclusive rights to print any music in English, Latin, French, or Italian along with sole use of paper for printing music.
The earliest surviving works by Thomas Tallis include Alleluia: Ora pro nobis and Magnificat for four voices. Three devotional antiphons to the Virgin Mary date to the 1520s and manuscripts are held at London's British Library.
Thomas Tallis remained largely forgotten until the Victorian revival of early music when Spem in alium was rediscovered. Ralph Vaughan Williams composed Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in 1910 using one of Tallis's nine psalm chant tunes from Matthew Parker's Psalter published in 1567.