GOD FIRST:

The Queen’s Servant But God’s First (Matthew G. Alexander, June 2, 2003, The American Conservative)

Along with his teacher Thomas Tallis, [William Byrd (1543-1623)] dominated the musical landscape of Renaissance and Reformation England. While a virtuoso organist in his day and the first in his country to write in the Italian genre of madrigals, Byrd earned his place in the pantheon as a composer of sacred choral music. Religion is therefore central to any understanding of Byrd and his oeuvre, for in a way not true of certain other English sacred-music composers, Byrd’s spiritual convictions—and the broader religious climate in which he had to maintain them—are essential to appreciating his character and genius.

William Byrd was a Catholic, but he lived at the height of the Elizabethan and Jacobean persecutions. The Mass was illegal in England, and a priest, if caught, could expect the death penalty. Babies had to be christened in the established Protestant church, couples had to be married there, and everyone had to attend Protestant Sunday services on pain of heavy fines or imprisonment. Queen Elizabeth I, however, famously wished not to “make a window into men’s souls”—provided they acted outwardly in accord with the law. It was thanks to this scrap of toleration, and his great talent, that Byrd prospered when so many of his co-religionists did not.

Byrd, like many Elizabethan Catholics, became a Church Papist, which British historian Antonia Fraser describes as a Catholic who, to protect his family or advance in government, would attend Anglican services but retain his allegiance to the old religion internally. These would hope to attend a secret Mass when possible or be reconciled with the Catholic Church before death. Church Papism would seem a convenient arrangement, except that Elizabethan Catholics were heirs to the faith of the early martyrs, who preferred death to offering even a pinch of incense to the emperor. Many of Byrd’s contemporaries therefore would not compromise and became recusants, or religious outlaws.

As a Church Papist, William Byrd advanced quite far. He became Organist of the Chapel Royal in 1575, and together with Tallis, a fellow Catholic, received from the queen a monopoly on music printing. For the Established Church, he wrote a setting of the Anglican Great Service and many beautiful English-language anthems. Torn between the official circles of Protestantism and the subterranean world of forbidden Catholicism, however, Byrd suffered acute anguish of soul, and it was this pain and sense of exile that defined his musical compositions.