William Byrd (; c. 1540 – 4 July 1623) was an English Renaissance composer. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native country and on the Continent. He is often considered along with John Dunstaple and Henry Purcell as one of England's most important composers of early music.
Byrd wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school), and consort music. He produced sacred music for Anglican services, but during the 1570s became a Roman Catholic, and wrote Catholic sacred music later in his life.
Richard Byrd of Ingatestone, Essex, the paternal grandfather of Thomas Byrd, most likely moved to London in the 15th century. Thereafter succeeding generations of the Byrd family are described as gentlemen.
William Byrd was born in London, the third surviving son of Thomas Byrd and his wife, Margery. No record of his birth has survived, and the year of his birth is not known for certain, but a document dated 2 October 1598, and written by William Byrd, states that he is "58 yeares or ther abouts", making the year he was born to be 1539 or 1540. Byrd's will of November 1622 provides a later date for his birth, as in it Byrd states that he was then in the "80th year of mine age". The historian Kerry McCarthy has suggested that discrepancy over these dates may have been due to the will not being kept up to date over a period of several years.
Byrd was born into a musical and relatively wealthy family. He had two older brothers, Symond and John, who became London merchants and active members of their respective livery companies. One of his four sisters, Barbara, was married to a maker of musical instruments who kept a shop; his three other sisters, Martha, Mary and Alice, were probably also married to merchants.
Details of Byrd's childhood are speculative. There is no documentary evidence concerning Byrd's education or early musical training. His two brothers were choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral, and Byrd may have been a chorister there as well, although it is possible that he was a chorister with the Chapel Royal. According to Anthony Wood, Byrd was "bred up to musick under Tho. Tallis", and a reference in the Cantiones sacrae, published by Byrd and Thomas Tallis in 1575, tends to confirm that Byrd was a pupil of Tallis in the Chapel Royal. If he was—and conclusive evidence has not emerged to verify it—it seems likely that once Byrd's voice broke, the boy stayed on at the Chapel Royal as Tallis's assistant.
Byrd produced student compositions, including Sermone Blando for consort, and a "Miserere". Church music for the Catholic rite reintroduced by Mary would have been composed before her death in 1558, which occurred when Byrd was eighteen. His early compositions suggest he was taught polyphony when a student.
Byrd's first known professional employment was his appointment in 1563 as organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. Residing at what is now 6 Minster Yard Lincoln, he remained in post until 1572. His period at Lincoln was not entirely trouble-free, for on 19 November 1569 the Dean and Chapter cited him for 'certain matters alleged against him' as the result of which his salary was suspended. Since Puritanism was influential at Lincoln, it is possible that the allegations were connected with over-elaborate choral polyphony or organ playing. A second directive, dated 29 November, issued detailed instructions regarding Byrd's use of the organ in the liturgy.
On 14 September 1568, Byrd was married in the church of St Margaret-in-the-Close, Lincoln. His wife, Juliana, came from the Birley family of Lincolnshire. The baptism records mention two of their children, Christopher and Elizabeth, but the marriage produced at least seven children. Thomas Byrd, likely the second son of William Byrd, appears as the godson of Thomas Tallis in Tallis' will.
In 1572, following the death of the composer Robert Parsons, who drowned in the Trent near Newark on 25 January of that year, Byrd obtained the post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, the largest choir of its kind in England. The appointment, which was for life, came with a good salary. Almost from the outset Byrd is named as 'organist', which however was not a designated post but an occupation for any Chapel Royal member capable of filling it.
In 1575 Byrd and Tallis were jointly granted a monopoly for the printing of music and ruled music paper for 21 years, one of a number of patents issued by the Crown for the printing of books, which was the first known issuing of letters patent. The two musicians used the services of the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had settled in England and previously produced an edition of a collection of Lassus chansons in London (Receuil du mellange, 1570).
The two monopolists took advantage of the patent to produce a grandiose joint publication under the title Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur. It was a collection of 34 Latin motets dedicated to the Queen herself, accompanied by elaborate prefatory matter including poems in Latin elegiacs by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster and the young courtier Ferdinand Heybourne (aka Richardson) who was also a pupil of Tallis. There are 17 motets each by Tallis and Byrd, one for each year of the Queen's reign.
The Cantiones were a financial failure. In 1577 Byrd and Tallis were forced to petition Queen Elizabeth for financial help, pleading that the publication had "fallen oute to oure greate losse" and that Tallis was now "verie aged". They were subsequently granted the leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for a period of 21 years. Thomas Byrd inherited his half of the monopoly from his godfather, Tallis in 1585: although it is assumed that it was William Byrd who eventually managed it or was given ownership to continue the production of vast publications.
From the early 1570s onwards Byrd became increasingly involved with Catholicism, which, as the scholarship of the last half-century has demonstrated, became a major factor in his personal and creative life. As John Harley has shown, it is probable that Byrd's parental family were Protestants, though whether by deeply felt conviction or nominal conformism is not clear. Byrd himself may have held Protestant beliefs in his youth, for a recently discovered fragment of a setting of an English translation of Martin Luther's hymn "Erhalt uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort", which bears an attribution to "Birde" includes the line "From Turk and Pope defend us Lord". However, from the 1570s onwards he is found associating with known Catholics, including Lord Thomas Paget, to whom he wrote a petitionary letter on behalf of an unnamed friend in about 1573. Paget's household itself was a musical centre where "songes of Mr Byrdes and Mr Tallys were sung", implying that both composers were involved there in some way to permit the use of their music. Byrd's wife Julian was first cited for recusancy (refusing to attend Anglican services) at Harlington in Middlesex, where the family then lived, in 1577. Byrd himself appears in the recusancy lists from 1584.
His involvement with Catholicism took on a new dimension in the 1580s. Following Pope Pius V's papal bull Regnans in Excelsis, in 1570, which absolved Elizabeth's subjects from allegiance to her and effectively made her an outlaw in the eyes of the Catholic Church, Catholicism became increasingly identified with sedition in the eyes of the Tudor authorities. With the influx of missionary priests trained at the English College, Douai (now in France but then part of the Spanish Netherlands), and in Rome from the 1570s onwards, relations between the authorities and the Catholic community took a further turn for the worse. Byrd himself is found in the company of prominent Catholics. In 1583 he got into serious trouble because of his association with Paget, who was suspected of involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, and for sending money to Catholics abroad. As a result of this, Byrd's membership of the Chapel Royal was apparently suspended for a time, restrictions were placed on his movements, and his house was placed on the 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.