How fares thee? I thankest thou for vistiting mine website. I am an English composer flourishing during this stormy sixteenth century. I was born around 1505, toward the end of the reign of Henry VII. I have composed music for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, and the most illustrious Queen Elizabeth (God savest Thou the Queen). I have also remained a faithful Catholic while composing Latin motets along with some of the first anthems set to English words for the Anglican Church. Because of our Lord's most gracious mercy, Queen Elizabeth has granted mine-self and William Byrd a patent to print and publish music.
- According the the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
Although no record of his childhood has been found, Tallis must have been born in the first decade of the 16th century probably in Kent, the county with which he had lifelong professional and family connections. His earliest known documented appearance is in the accounts for 1530–31 of the modest Benedictine priory of Dover, which record that a ‘Thomas Tales’, the ‘joculator organorum’ (organist), had received an annual salary of £2.
Dover Priory was dissolved in 1535 and there is no record of Tallis’s departure; we next encounter him in London, where his name appears on the 1537 and 1538 payrolls of the church of St Mary-at-Hill, noted for its music. Whether he was a singer or the organist is not stated. Tallis undoubtedly came into contact with some of England’s foremost musicians during his time at St Mary-at-Hill; he may also have come to the attention of the abbot of Holy Cross, Waltham, whose London residence stood nearby, for towards the end of 1538 he moved to Waltham Abbey in Essex, becoming one of the most senior members of the extensive musical foundation there. Unfortunately for Tallis the abbey was dissolved on 23 March 1540 (it was the last monastic foundation to fall); as a relative newcomer he was not granted a pension, instead being paid off with 20s. in outstanding wages and 20s. ‘reward’. He seems to have taken with him a volume of musical treatises copied by John Wylde, a former preceptor of the abbey; the book has the autograph ‘Thomas Tallys’ on its last page (GB-Lbl Lansdowne 763).
Tallis returned to East Kent, finding employment at Canterbury Cathedral, which was being refounded as a secular establishment with a much expanded choir of ten boys and twelve men. An undated list of staff recruited to the new establishment (Canterbury, Dean and Chapter Library, MS D.E.164; probably from summer 1540) lists Tallis first among the singing men. He appears in the cathedral records of 1541 and 1542 but not in 1543, the year in which he probably began to serve full-time at the court as a member of the Chapel Royal (he may have been helped in securing the position by Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury). Although there is no record of his enrolment at court, Tallis’s name appears on a lay subsidy roll of 1544, and in a document of about 1545 (Lbl Stowe 571) his name is 16th in a list of 32. In a petition of 1577 Tallis claimed to have ‘served yo[u]r Ma[jes]tie and yo[u]r Royall ancestors these fortie yeres’, implying that his association with the court may have begun even during his employment at St Mary-at-Hill.
Tallis remained in the royal household until his death, serving under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and finally for more than half of the reign of Elizabeth I. He undoubtedly acted as an organist throughout this period, but was not so designated until after 1570. As an organist his duties would have included the rehearsal of the singing-men. Harley has speculated that Tallis shared with the Master of the Children, Richard Bower, responsibility for training the boys, probably at this time including William Byrd, with Bower teaching singing and Tallis keyboard and composition. However, he had always been active as a composer as well, and in the middle decades of the century the provision of new vocal polyphony for the royal chapels must have occupied much of his time and earned him great prestige. In 1557 Queen Mary granted to Tallis and Bower jointly a 21-year lease of the Kentish manor of Minster in Thanet, with the considerable annual income of £91 12s.
Rapid inflation had evidently changed that situation by the time Byrd joined the Chapel Royal in 1572, for in 1573 the two men petitioned the queen for some source of additional income. On 22 January 1575, she responded by granting them an exclusive licence to print and publish music, the letters-patent issued for this purpose being among the first of their kind in the country. Later that year there duly appeared the Cantiones sacrae, an anthology of Latin motets to which Tallis and Byrd each contributed 17 compositions, perhaps in reference to the 17th year of Elizabeth’s reign. Financially the undertaking was a failure, for a second petition followed in 1577 resulting in the grant of a joint lease to the two composers of crown lands with annual rents totalling £30.
In or around 1552 Tallis married a woman named Joan, who survived him by nearly four years. There is no evidence that they had any children. During later life, like many of the Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal, Tallis lived in Greenwich, probably in a rented house close to the royal palace (tradition holds that he lived in Stockwell Street). Whether Tallis ever owned his house in Greenwich is uncertain (Joan’s will of 1587 describes her home as ‘lately purchased’). The Bodleian Register and the Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal disagree as to the date of Tallis’s death, the former giving 20 November 1585 and the latter 23 November. He was buried in the chancel of the parish church of St Alfege; his epitaph, lost in the subsequent rebuilding of the church, was recorded by Strype in his Continuation of Stowe’s Survey of London. (The texts of the epitaph, and of both wills, are printed in TCM, vi, 1928, pp.xv ff; the wills are also printed in Harley, Appx C.)
Musicologists have disagreed about Tallis’s religious convictions: he has been variously claimed as a Protestant, a Catholic and (most usually) a pragmatist who avoided religious controversy. However, Bennett’s speculations, taken with other evidence such as Tallis’s long and fruitful association with the ardently recusant Byrd (and indeed Byrd’s choice of Tallis as godfather to his son), and the heartfelt expressivity of late works such as In jejunio et fletu and the Lamentations, may shift the balance of plausibility towards a view of Tallis as a committed Catholic who never relinquished his faith, however equably he served his successive regal and ecclesiastical paymasters.
(Grove citation from: Paul Doe and David Allinson)I edited my profile with Thomas' Myspace Editor V4.4
