Thomas Tallis wrote church music for four Tudor monarchs who disagreed about God
Henry VIII broke with Rome, Edward VI pushed Protestant reform, Mary I restored Catholicism and Elizabeth I reversed course again. Thomas Tallis served them all at court, reshaping his style for each, while quietly remaining, in one historian's phrase, an unreformed Roman Catholic.
Almost nothing is known of his early years. He was probably born between 1500 and 1520, likely in Kent, where his only known relative, a cousin named John Sayer, had family roots. The first firm record dates from 1531, when a Thomas Tales was paid £2 a year as organist at Dover Priory and directed six choirboys. The dissolution of the monasteries then kept him moving. Waltham Abbey in Essex closed in March 1540, and because he was a recent hire he got no pension, only a one-off 40 shillings, though he left with a volume of music theory bearing his name. That summer he headed the singers in Canterbury Cathedral's enlarged choir.
At Canterbury he was caught between Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, who wanted one note per syllable so words could be heard, and conservative clergy. His writing grew plainer as a result. Joining the Chapel Royal around 1543, he probably taught keyboard and composition to its choirboys and later mentored William Byrd, becoming godfather to Byrd's second son. Mary I commissioned a Mass from him and granted him a manor lease in Kent, and a Requiem he wrote for her funeral in 1558 has been lost.
In 1575 Elizabeth gave Tallis and Byrd a 21-year monopoly on printing part-music, one of England's first such patents. Their only joint publication in his lifetime, the Cantiones of that year, sold poorly, partly because both men were Catholics, and they had to petition the queen for help. No compositions survive from his final decade, and his last works hint at links to persecuted recusant families.
He died at his Greenwich home in November 1585, leaving money for a feast for his fellow chapel singers. Byrd marked the loss with the elegy Ye Sacred Muses. His remains may have been lost when St Alfege Church was rebuilt in the 1710s.
Source: Thomas Tallis
