William Byrd

• 1. Introduction

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  William Byrd died on the 4th of July 1623, and the Chapel Royal marked his passing with an entry unlike any other in its record books. He was called "a Father of Musick." That phrase carries weight. Byrd had spent decades navigating an England where religion could get you imprisoned or worse, and he had done it while composing music in virtually every form available to him, for Anglicans and Catholics alike, for courts and country houses, for solo keyboard and for full choirs singing in eight parts. The listener who knows nothing about English Renaissance music might wonder how one man could hold all of that together. The answer involves a monopoly on music printing, a hidden faith, a noblewoman's manuscript book, and a motet exchange with a composer in Prague. What sort of career produces a death notice like that?

• 2. London Roots, Lincoln Years

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  Thomas Byrd, William's father, belonged to a family of London gentlemen whose roots reached back at least to a Richard Byrd of Ingatestone, Essex. William himself was born in London as the third surviving son of Thomas and his wife Margery, though no birth record survives. A document William himself wrote on the 2nd of October 1598 puts his age at "58 yeares or ther abouts," pointing to 1539 or 1540 as his birth year.

  His two older brothers, Symond and John, became London merchants. One of his four sisters, Barbara, married a maker of musical instruments. William's own path went differently. According to the scholar Anthony Wood, he was "bred up to musick under Tho. Tallis," and a prefatory reference in the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 lends weight to this claim. If Byrd was indeed a pupil of Thomas Tallis at the Chapel Royal, he may have stayed on as Tallis's assistant once his voice broke.

  His first documented professional post came in 1563, when he was appointed organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. He lived at what is now 6 Minster Yard Lincoln, and held the position until 1572. The Lincoln years were not smooth throughout. On the 19th of November 1569 the Dean and Chapter cited him for "certain matters alleged against him" and suspended his salary. Given that Puritanism carried considerable influence at Lincoln, the complaint may well have been directed at his fondness for elaborate polyphony. A second directive, dated the 29th of November, told him specifically how to use the organ in the liturgy.

  On the 14th of September 1568, Byrd married Juliana, from the Birley family of Lincolnshire, in the church of St Margaret-in-the-Close in Lincoln. The marriage produced at least seven children, two of whom, Christopher and Elizabeth, appear in baptism records. Their son Thomas later appeared as the godson of Thomas Tallis in Tallis's will, a connection that speaks to how closely the two composers' lives were intertwined.

• 3. The Printing Monopoly

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  In 1572, following the drowning of the composer Robert Parsons in the Trent near Newark on the 25th of January of that year, Byrd joined the Chapel Royal as a Gentleman, the largest choir of its kind in England. The appointment was for life and carried a good salary. Almost immediately he was serving as organist, though that was not a formally designated post.

  Three years later, in 1575, Byrd and Tallis received a joint monopoly from the Crown for printing music and ruled music paper, valid for 21 years. It was the first known issuing of letters patent for music printing. They used the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had previously produced a collection of Lassus chansons in London in 1570.

  The two men put the monopoly to immediate use. Their joint publication, the Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, collected 34 Latin motets, 17 by each composer, with the number chosen to match the years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The collection was dedicated to the Queen herself and included prefatory poems by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster and the young courtier Ferdinand Heybourne.

  It was a financial disaster. By 1577, Byrd and Tallis were petitioning Queen Elizabeth directly, writing that the publication had "fallen oute to oure greate losse" and noting that Tallis was now "verie aged." The Crown responded by granting them leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for 21 years. When Tallis died in 1585, his son Thomas inherited his half of the monopoly, though it appears that William Byrd ultimately managed or took ownership of it to continue publishing.

• 4. A Hidden Faith

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  From the early 1570s onward, Byrd moved steadily deeper into the Catholic community. His family background may have been Protestant, though whether by genuine conviction or practical conformism is not clear. A fragment of a setting of Martin Luther's hymn "Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort," attributed to "Birde," includes the line "From Turk and Pope defend us Lord," which hints at Protestant sympathies in his youth.

  By the 1570s the picture had reversed. Byrd was associating with known Catholics, including Lord Thomas Paget, to whom he wrote a letter around 1573 on behalf of an unnamed friend. Paget's household was a musical centre where "songes of Mr Byrdes and Mr Tallys were sung." Byrd's wife Juliana was first cited for recusancy, meaning refusal to attend Anglican services, at Harlington in Middlesex in 1577. Byrd himself appeared in the recusancy lists from 1584.

  The stakes rose sharply in the 1580s. Following Pope Pius V's papal bull Regnans in Excelsis in 1570, Catholicism had become increasingly identified with sedition in Tudor eyes. The influx of missionary priests trained at the English College in Douai made relations worse. In 1583, Byrd got into serious trouble because of his association with Paget, who was suspected of involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, and because he had sent money to Catholics abroad. His membership of the Chapel Royal was apparently suspended for a time, his movements were restricted, and his house was placed on a search list. In 1586 he attended a gathering at a country house in the company of Father Henry Garnett, later executed for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, and the Catholic poet Robert Southwell.

  Around 1594 Byrd moved his family from Harlington to Stondon Massey, a small village near Chipping Ongar in Essex. The main draw was proximity to his patron Sir John Petre, a wealthy local landowner and discreet Catholic who maintained two manor houses, Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Petre held clandestine Mass celebrations with music provided by his servants, watched over by Crown spies and paid informers. Byrd had known the Petre family since at least 1581, and had spent two weeks with them over Christmas in 1589. He stayed at Stondon Massey for the rest of his life, though his ownership of Stondon Place was contested by a Joanna Shelley in a legal dispute that lasted roughly fifteen years.

• 5. Music as Coded Lament

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  Scholars from Joseph Kerman onward have read a persistent layer of meaning beneath the texts Byrd chose for his motets of the 1580s. Themes of persecution, captivity, and long-awaited deliverance run through compositions such as Domine praestolamur, Domine tu iurasti, and Laetentur caeli. The Catholic community appears to have adopted Byrd as a kind of "house" composer, and his choice of texts like Vigilate, nescitis enim, which can be read as a warning against spies, fits that role.

  Byrd's setting of the first four verses of Psalm 78, Deus venerunt gentes, is widely believed to refer to the brutal execution of Father Edmund Campion in 1581, an event that caused widespread revulsion across the Continent as well as in England.

  Perhaps the most remarkable instance of motet-as-correspondence is Quomodo cantabimus. In 1583, Philippe de Monte, director of music to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, in Prague, sent Byrd a setting of Vulgate Psalm 136, including the pointed question "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Byrd replied the following year with a setting of the defiant continuation, also in eight parts and incorporating a three-part canon by inversion. Two composers in different corners of Europe, writing for Catholic ears, spoke to each other through the liturgy.

  The Masses reinforced this hidden language in material form. Three Mass Ordinary cycles, published by Thomas East between 1592 and 1595, were issued without dates, without naming the printer, and in editions consisting of only one bifolium per partbook to aid concealment. Possessing heterodox books was still genuinely dangerous. The Gradualia, two cycles of motets totaling 109 items published in 1605 and 1607, continued the programme. Byrd described their contents to his patron Sir John Petre as "blooms collected in your own garden and rightfully due to you as tithes." A contemporary account records the arrest of a young Frenchman named Charles de Ligny, who was followed from a country house by spies, searched, and found to be carrying a copy of the 1605 set.

• 6. My Ladye Nevells Booke

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  On the 11th of September 1591, a tenor lay-clerk at St George's Chapel, Windsor, named John Baldwin completed the copying of My Ladye Nevells Booke, a collection of 42 of Byrd's keyboard pieces. It was probably produced under Byrd's direct supervision, and the corrections entered into the manuscript are thought to be in the composer's own hand.

  The dedicatee was long a mystery. The historian John Harley traced her through heraldic evidence on the fly-leaf and identified her as Lady Elizabeth Neville, the third wife of Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear House, Berkshire. Under her later married name Lady Periam, she also received the dedication of Thomas Morley's two-part canzonets of 1595.

  The collection shows Byrd's command of a wide range of keyboard forms. A series of ten pavans and galliards each uses the standard three-strain form with embellished repeats. The First Pavan is labelled "the first that ever hee made" in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The Tenth Pavan was dedicated to William Petre, son of Byrd's patron Sir John Petre, who was only 15 years old in 1591. Two famous pieces of programme music also appear. The Battle, inspired by an unidentified skirmish in Elizabeth's Irish wars, moves through titled sections including "The marche to fight," "The battells be joyned," and "The Galliarde for the victorie." It is followed by The Barley Break, a light-hearted piece tracking the progress of a game then known to players as "barley-break," a version of what is now called "piggy in the middle," played by three couples with a ball.

  The keyboard variations in Nevell range from an enormous set on Walsingham to popular settings of Sellinger's Round and Carman's Whistle. These pieces sat alongside the monumental consort work the Browning, a set of 20 variations on a popular melody also known as "The leaves be green," which apparently originated as a celebration of the ripening of nuts in autumn.

• 7. Legacy and Reputation

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  In The Compleat Gentleman, published in 1622, Henry Peacham praised Byrd in terms almost without parallel in contemporary writing about English composers. He called him "our Phoenix Master William Byrd" and wrote that for motets and sacred music, he knew "not whether any may equall, I am sure none excel, even by the judgement of France and Italy." The scribe Baldwin had already placed Byrd at the head of the musicians of his day in a doggerel poem inserted into his Commonplace Book: "An Englishman, by name, William BIRDE for his skill ... whose greater skill and knowledge dothe excelle all at this time."

  Byrd's pupils included Thomas Morley, Peter Philips, Thomas Tomkins, and probably Thomas Weelkes. Morley dedicated his 1597 treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke to Byrd in flattering terms. The influence spread outward: Elizabethan scribes including the Oxford academic Robert Dow and a school of scribes working for Sir Edward Paston of Norfolk copied his music widely.

  Byrd died at Stondon Massey on the 4th of July 1623 of heart failure, a rich man, with rooms at the time of his death at the London home of the Earl of Worcester. He had composed around 470 works and had continued to be cited and fined for recusancy right to the end. The native tradition of Latin music he had done so much to sustain more or less died with him. The English Civil War and the cultural rupture of the Stuart Restoration pushed Tudor music further into the margins. It took the work of twentieth-century scholars, from E. H. Fellowes onward, to reverse that neglect. As recently as 2010, The Cardinall's Musick under Andrew Carwood completed the first recorded survey of all of Byrd's Latin church music across thirteen discs, more than four centuries after the composer watched his first printed collection fail to sell.