Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Byrd died on the 4th of July 1623 and was recorded in the Chapel Royal Check Book with the unique title Father of Music. This designation acknowledged his role as the patriarch of English musical tradition during a century of profound upheaval.
In 1575 Queen Elizabeth I granted William Byrd and his teacher Thomas Tallis a royal patent that gave them the exclusive right to print music and ruled music paper in England for twenty-one years. This document created the first known music monopoly in the country and resulted in the publication of Cantiones sacrae containing thirty-four Latin motets.
By the 1590s William Byrd moved to the quiet village of Stondon Massey in Essex where he lived under the protection of the Catholic Petre family. The Petre household at Ingatestone Hall became a sanctuary for Catholic worship where Byrd provided elaborate polyphony to adorn clandestine Mass celebrations that were constantly under threat from Crown spies.
William Byrd developed what scholars call the affective-imitative style a method of setting texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques. This style allowed him to convey the pain of persecution and the hope for deliverance in his motets such as Domine praestolamur and Ne irascaris Domine.
In the 1580s William Byrd produced a collection of forty-two pieces known as My Ladye Nevells Boke which included pavans galliards fantasias and voluntaries. The collection featured programmatic pieces like The Battle inspired by an unidentified skirmish in Elizabeth's Irish wars and The Barley Break which followed the progress of a game of piggy in the middle.
The final stage of William Byrd's career was marked by the publication of the Gradualia two monumental collections of motets containing 109 items published in 1605 and 1607. These works were dedicated to Catholic nobility and represented a comprehensive cycle of liturgical music covering all the principal feasts of the Catholic Church calendar.