William Byrd: An Essential English Composer for Four Centuries

It was not a conventional chapel, Johnstone noted, but a semiautonomous corporation of musicians in service of the monarch. The Chapel Royal also brought Byrd into contact with its then-organist, Thomas Tallis, who became his teacher and mentor and later a collaborator.

After studying with Tallis, in 1563, Byrd left to take up the post of organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. The city of Lincoln “would have been a happy, healthy place to be a Catholic at the time,” Johnstone said, given the population’s relatively high concentration of Catholics. But the cathedral’s governing chapter disapproved of Byrd’s organ playing and suspended his salary was suspended in 1569.

“The complaint,” Phillips said, “was that he would play much too much when it wasn’t wanted, and he wouldn’t play at all when it was wanted.” Others have pointed to Byrd’s protracted organ playing, which was described as “popish.”

In 1572, Byrd returned as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (an adult male singer), earning a generous stipend that was his main source of income until his death.

Byrd was, for the majority of his working life, a Catholic living under the Protestant rule of Queen Elizabeth I, but the situation was more fluid and complicated than that. Unlike his Catholic contemporaries John Dowland, John Bull and Richard Dering, Byrd didn’t flee the country, opting instead to stay and, in part, abide by the new, state-enforced Protestantism. And support for Byrd’s burgeoning career came from both England’s extant Catholic establishment and the queen herself.

The quote “I have no desire to make windows into men’s souls” is regularly attributed to Elizabeth, during the early moments of her reign. “It was clear,” Johnstone said, “that she was making it possible for the Catholics among her subjects to continue to have this indemnity of conscience when it came to the essential religious matter of making your Communion,” the primary difference between the two religions at the time.